“Tied down?” Nick exhales, then looks at me. He’s finally starting to look a little angry, and the thought both scares and excites me. “So you’re going to stay in stasis until your dad’s gone?”

“I’m sorry my life is so boring for you,” I say, letting the sarcasm drip off my voice. “Sorry I’m such a buzzkill, always taking care of my family and stuff.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Nick says. “I’m just saying, I don’t see why you can’t do something you want, especially when someone wants to help you.”

“Because I don’t want this!” I shout, taking a step back. I gesture between us. “I don’t want anything else to handle. I don’t want anything else to take care of. I don’t want another responsibility, and I sure as fuck don’t want any help.”

Nick laughs, and this time his smile is a small, bitter thing. “You don’t want this?” he asks, mimicking my gesture. “Because that’s not the impression I was under.”

“It was a mistake,” I say, meeting his eyes, daring myself not to look away. “I knew we shouldn’t hook up, and you knew we shouldn’t hook up, and we did and it was a bad idea. It was the movie that screwed everything up.”

“That movie didn’t change anything for me,” Nick says, taking a step toward me. “It didn’t change the way I feel.”

I swallow hard and force myself to keep looking him in the eyes. “It was a mistake.”

Nick stops moving and looks at me. Both of us stare at each other for a moment. “Okay,” he says.

After a beat, I ask, “Okay . . . what?”

“Okay, you’re right. It was a mistake.”

I can’t help remembering the last time we had almost this exact conversation in this exact place, after the first time Nick and I kissed, when I told him we should pretend it never happened and I finally wore him down until he agreed with me.

Why do I do this, I wonder for a moment. Why do I push every person who cares about me away until it’s me, all alone, doing everything? What is wrong with me?

But Nick agrees with me, and that’s what I wanted. “It was a mistake.” I stare at my feet. “So . . . what now?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Nick shrug. “It goes back to how it used to be. We’re coworkers. We don’t have to talk about anything or see each other outside of the shop.”

“How is that going to work?”

“It’ll be fine,” Nick says, already back to work, already forgetting what happened. It’s easy for him to turn this off; why is it so easy for him?

I nod and bite my lip. “Yeah. Well. See you tomorrow.”

He lifts a hand in a wave without looking at me, the way he would to any coworker he didn’t care much about.

I grab my stuff out of the back and head out without saying another word or looking at him again. It’s not raining on my short walk home tonight; in fact, it’s unseasonably warm, the kind of spring evening that would typically fill me with joy. I stop and look at some flowers pushing their way up through the soil in someone’s front yard, and I’m seized with the desire to reach over and pull them out.