Ash’s teasing expression turned serious, and he put a hand on Truman’s arm. “You are too.”

The words sounded pat, but Truman could tell he meant it.

“I don’t always know how to talk about the things I think about,” Truman said. “I wish I were creative like my sisters and I could paint about them or something.”

Ash screwed up his face. “Uh, are you kidding? You’re creative. You came up with thirty creative ideas to grow my business. You made a whole website. You take beautiful photographs. And you’re basically obsessed with an epic fantasy series that you’ve said determines the goals of your life. What on earth makes you think you’re not creative?”

Truman smiled at this characterization but brushed it away. “Nah, that’s just, like, business strategy and unhealthy escapism. My sister Miriam is a painter and my other sister Eleanor is a musician. Like, they’re proper artists. I’m an accountant, for god’s sake.”

Ash frowned.

Growing up, Truman had watched his sisters cultivate their arts. It had always been the two of them, occasionally in collaboration, more often in competition, but always the two of them making something while Truman only consumed. His nascent passion for order and neatness was deemed oddly charming, his inability to settle on a major an indication of his lack of vocation.

He knew his parents were glad—well, relieved—that he had a safe, practical job that paid the bills. But there was never much to say about it, so they never said much. Whenever they talked, they would regale him with the ins and outs of his sisters’ lives and careers. Their album releases, art openings, reviews in journals. His own work, by comparison, had no peaks, no climaxes, just steady work day by day until tax season, when he was busy doing many tiny things over and over at volume.

So he didn’t blame them for not having anything to say about it. He himself had little to say. So he’d talked instead about his actual passions. He’d told them about the fonts he created for titles in his bullet journal, about the new pen he’d found that flew over paper with the smooth glide of bike wheels on fresh macadam. He’d told them how creating a system for planning out and recording the events of his life made him grateful for each day because his system honored every hour of it.

But they’d just nodded politely and said it was lucky he was so good at keeping himself organized. They’d said it was nice he had something to keep him busy. They’d said You could just buy one with the dates and lines already in it, right?

“There are lots of ways of being creative,” Ash said.