When Adam and I wake up, Carly is still sleeping, so we tiptoe around, trying to avoid the floorboards that are known creakers. Adam makes a full pot of coffee and a huge stack of pancakes, which amazes me, because I didn’t even know we had the right ingedients.

“I wanted to make them shaped like something,” Adam says, waving the spatula at the pan, “but they all ended up looking like pancakes.”

When Carly wakes up and stumbles into the kitchen, with puffy eyes and her black and purple hair sticking out at every angle, Adam offers her pancake-shaped pancakes, and I pour her a cup of coffee.

“You guys pre-caffeinate too?” she says, smiling at us. “You two are cute, you know. It’s nice.”

Adam cuts orange slices and Carly and I set places at the little card table in the kitchen that Adam and I hardly ever use.

After breakfast, Adam and Carly and me walk to Decadence together. When we hit the brick walkway of The Commons, it strikes me as funny—the three of us, side by side, like we’re on our way to Oz and short a lion. And at work, Carly is different. She’s chatty. She winks at me when the absurdly picky lady comes in and takes five minutes to get her full order out. She makes me a latte and tells Bodie to watch the register and we take her smoke break together, sitting on milk crates in the alley. She tells me she feels like an idiot, but she really misses Rosemary. She tells me she knows there’s no way it will ever work out for them now, but it doesn’t change the fact that she’s scared to be alone.

“I think maybe everyone is scared to be alone,” I tell her. “Maybe when you get down to it, that’s why everybody does everything. Maybe all we’re doing is trying to be less alone.”

“Are you sure you don’t smoke up?” Carly says, laughing. She taps the side of my boot with the side of hers.

“I sing,” I tell her. “Or I used to. Got to protect the pipes.” Then I realize it was a rhetorical question. I’m not good with those. Someone asks me something and I always feel like I should answer one way or another.

“Why don’t you sing now?”

“My dad smashed my guitar.” I tell her tiny bits of me. Little River, Margo, the diner, the boy. Puzzle pieces, but not too many. Enough that it helps—that it feels like I let some of the steam out.

I’m telling her about Matty and the wife he wanted me to be when Bodie peeks his head out and says, “Can I go to the kitchen now? Psycho chick is back.”

“Which one?” Carly says.

I think it’s another rhetorical question, but Bodie says, “The one with the nipple ring.”