“This one’s beautiful too,” Cyrus says, pushing another photo toward me. “And this one of the lake. You know what, I think we should just choose from your photos.”

“We can choose one of yours too,” I tell him, just to be a good teammate.

He snorts. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Do what?” I say innocently.

“Deny the fact that my photos could give the average citizen car sickness,” he says. “It’s fine. Photography isn’t really my forte.”

“You don’t need it to be,” I say. “You already have so many things.”

“As in … materially? Because I believe that’s Oliver. Did you know he has a backup Porsche for his backup Porsche?”

“That’s deeply upsetting. But I mean what Oliver was talking about on the train.” I collect the five chosen photos in a neat pile and bind them together with the hair tie on my wrist. “You found your thing—your calling, your passion, whatever you want to call it—years ago. You know what you’re good at, and you know what to do with it.”

His expression turns thoughtful. “Maybe that’s your problem.”

“You’re a problem,” I say automatically. “Sorry. Reflex. Do go on.”

“I feel like you always do things for the sake of something else,” he tells me. “Am I wrong?”

“No,” I say slowly. “But isn’t that everyone? Isn’t that, like, the point?”

“I don’t love literature because I think it’ll make me famous or rich somewhere down the line, or because it’ll be an interesting point of conversation at a party one day,” he says, and it’s as if he’s reciting my internal dialogue from when I was modeling, all the reasons I gave myself to keep going. Reasons that had once sounded perfectly valid to me. “I love literature because it’s meaningful to me.”

“Just that?” I ask in disbelief.

“Just that,” he says.

“I don’t really know what I like these days,” I admit, except that’s not entirely true. There’s want bundling in my nerves, thrumming through my blood when I lock eyes with him, and I can imagine a number of things I would like to do right now.

He looks away first, twisting in the direction of the front door. “Did you hear that?” he asks.

“Hear what?”

“I think that was Wang Laoshi,” he says, standing up and striding toward the entrance to peer through the peephole. “He’s already patrolling the area.”

We both check the time. It’s already five minutes past curfew.

“Maybe you should sneak out now,” Cyrus suggests. “Before it gets too late.”