No one even tries to answer for Reid. Thomas turns his teacup one-quarter, a tiny clink breaking the silence.

“My math skills are better than my people skills,” Reid finally says. “I wasn’t very successful as a TA.”

“Weren’t you”—I pause, because my counting skills aren’t any quicker from being in this house for a single afternoon—“nineteen when you started graduate school?”

“Eighteen,” Thomas says, his voice clipped.

“I finished college in three years,” Reid clarifies for me.

“So . . . probably about the same age as the students you were teaching?”

Reid shrugs. “I moved into research positions later. It was a better fit.”

My eyes drift back down to the photo album in my lap, to little boy Reid and his too-big backpack and too-big smile. That bubble-lettered chalkboard clutched in his tiny hands.

“I thought he should have kept trying,” says Thomas, and I look up again, noticing the stiff tension between the two of them.

“I thought I should make money,” Reid replies.

“You’ve been there for six years,” Thomas says. I think I catch something, some brief movement of his eyes down to Reid’s arms, to the skin there. “You’ve made enough money.”

I look back and forth between them, some distant awareness that I’m too invested in this to be uncomfortable about it, to feel my usual apprehension over this kind of simmering conflict. Instead I’m thinking about how odd it is—to see Reid be so stalwart about his work, about making money. In the city, with me, his disdain for both has been so pointed, so consistent. And how odd it is that Thomas seems to know nothing about what Reid has been telling me since the very first day we got reacquainted: that his time in New York—because of his disdain for both of these things—is nearly up.

Reid clears his throat again, and for a split second our gazes tangle, and I get that sense again. This is for you, his eyes tell me. This is because I trust you, the way you trusted me.

Maybe it’s not a smiling moment, with all this tense energy in the air, but I send him a soft smile anyway. I don’t bother trying to ignore the or what it stands for.

“Not this again,” says Cady, exasperated.

“Gosh, really,” adds Cynthia, her voice all at once annoyed and amused.