Mandy shrugged. “A bit of both. I don’t need the help, exactly—I planned my time much better this year than I did last year—but it would make things go faster, and you’d feel like you’d accomplished something.”

“As opposed to…?”

“As opposed to sitting in here sulking until you’re sure everyone else is asleep. Come on. Bedazzle things with me.” Mandy’s smile was less pointed this time, but no less laser-focused. “I refuse to let Roxanna spoil your weekend.”

At last, I understood. “She asked you when you’re going to get a boyfriend again, didn’t she?”

Mandy’s grim nod was all the answer I needed.

People who don’t understand our dynamic tend to look at our housing situation—two unmarried women and one unmarried man—and assume either we’re all having sex with each other, or one day Lucas will push his luck with one of us and we’ll wind up on the news for murdering him. People are kind of awful that way. Roxanna is a special kind of awful, because she looks at our situation and, without wanting to move in and give up her perfectly curated lizard habitat, just assumes that whenever one of us is single, we’re about to be making a play for Lucas.

Mandy wasn’t single when she moved in. Mandy was happily involved with a mountain of a man named Robert, who walked through the world with the exaggerated gentleness of someone who had become very large very young, and knew on a bone-deep level that everyone around him was breakable. He rode a motorcycle and regularly showed up at the house dressed in black leather, looking like something out of a Mad Max film. He also had two ginger cats he loved more than life itself, and did cosplay with Mandy at conventions, and she had just raised the question of whether he could move in with her to Lucas when his sister had called to tell us that Robert had been in an accident. A semi had lost control on the bridge. There had been nowhere for him to go.

According to the hospital, he hadn’t suffered. That was probably supposed to make us feel better. It did, for me, a little. I don’t think it helped Mandy at all. Only time was going to do that. Unfortunately, it had happened long enough ago that Roxanna seemed to think the statute of limitations on mourning had expired, and now every other visit, she was offering to introduce Mandy to someone—anyone—who wasn’t Lucas.

Mandy looked at me and sighed.

“You’re cute,” said Mandy. “You need to learn how to brush your hair more than twice a week, and I would kill to take you shopping for some better clothes, but you’re cute. Why doesn’t she ask you about your love life, and leave me the hell alone?”