I tried not to read it—Ros didn’t like when people read their work without permission—but their handwriting was big and loopy, and I was able to make out certain words even as I tried to avert my eyes: desert. Gills. Lush.

Unfortunately, those certain words only made me want to read it more.

I covered my eyes with my hand and cheated through my fingers.

Desert. Gills. Love song.

Ros had written… a love poem?

For someone.

Maybe…

Just maybe…

They’d written a love poem…

For me? thought some tiny, pathetic voice inside me—like a desperate little mouse who lived in the back of my head.

Of course it’s not for you, I told myself.

(For me? that voice thought again.)

It had been written on the chore wheel.…

At that moment, right when I was telling myself not to believe in impossibilities, I heard someone stirring from our room. For a brief second, I theorized we were being robbed, before Ros emerged from our bedroom, rubbing sleep from their eyes. They’d been there the whole time.

They’d barely been at their new job—they’d just finished their first few days—but already, the way they looked was changing. Their freckles were emerging with more time in the sunlight, and their shoes were always coated in mud, which they tracked into our bedroom and left on the ground for someone else to deal with. One day I came home to find their upper arm scraped up—they’d gotten into a fight with a particularly ferocious viburnum, they said, no big deal. Still—they looked healthier. They seemed healthier. They seemed more like their old self.

I just wished that I had been the one to help get them there.

“Hey,” they said. “What time is it?”

“It’s almost six,” I said, keeping my voice soft. “You wrote a poem.”

“Oh,” they said, almost embarrassed. “Yeah.”

“You wrote it on the chore wheel.”

“Sorry about that,” they said. “I just needed paper, and it was the first thing I saw. Did I mess it up? I can help you make another one.…”

“Can I read it?” I asked.

“Do you want to read it?” Ros said.

It was a good question: Did I want to read this poem that featured the word love, this poem that most likely was not written for me? Couldn’t I let Ros share this poem with its intended audience and look the other way, like a good friend should? How badly did I really need to rub salt in the wound?

Very badly, it turned out.

“Of course I want to read it,” I said.

They looked at me for a long time, like they couldn’t trust my answer.

“You can read it,” they said finally. “But just know that it’s not very good.”