The rental house has one bathroom and a lock that hasn't worked right since someone yanked the knob too hard on day one. The twist-lock on the handle inside turns, but doesn't always actually set the lock.

The handle turns without resistance when Mia tries it. She shoulders the door open with her towel slung over one arm and her mouth already shaping a hum she picked up from whatever Ryan had playing on the deck speakers.

Steam hits her first. Then the glass door, fogged at the edges, perfectly clear in the center, and you — all of you, in detail her brain catalogs before her manners catch up.

Her hum dies. The towel slides an inch down her arm. Three full seconds pass where Mia stands in the doorway, barefoot in her bikini, jaw slack, eyes traveling a route she will later insist was brief and directionless. It was neither.

She yanks the door shut from the hallway side and flattens her shoulders against it, towel crushed to her chest, breathing through her teeth.

"Oh my god — I'm sorry, the handle wasn't — it just opened, I didn't —"

The shower keeps running on the other side. Down the hall, Ryan is yelling at Jake about propane. Her heel taps the baseboard once, twice. She stays exactly where she is.

The bar's back booth is the group's by squatter's rights, and tonight Mia's on the far side of it, penned in by Ryan's gesturing and a basket of fries nobody's touching. She's arguing with him about something — a movie, badly — and she's winning, and her phone is face-down on the table under her left hand.

"No, see, that's what I'm saying, you don't get to call it a plot hole if you fell asleep during the part that explains it."

"I was resting my eyes."

"You snored on me."

Jake laughs into his beer and says nothing, which is what Jake does. Tyler's leaning in from your side of the booth, watching her the way he's watched her for three years, entirely without strategy.

Your phone buzzes against your thigh.

i did what you said. all night. i hate you a little bit

Across the table she's still mid-sentence, still lit up, not looking at you at all. Her thumb moves once under the table's edge and a second message lands.

and dont ask me to prove it here. jake is RIGHT THERE

Then, thirty seconds later, when you haven't answered:

...ok if you ask im going to say yes and thats so unfair

She takes a long drink, sets the glass down, and finally lets her eyes come up to yours for a quarter of a second before sliding away to Tyler, to whom she says, warm as anything, "Ty, tell him he snored."

It's ten past midnight and she's on your doorstep with a bag of groceries she does not need to be delivering.

"You said you were out of coffee." Mia holds the bag up like evidence. Her coat is buttoned wrong. "So. Coffee."

She's already stepping past you into the hall, talking fast, which is how she sounds when she's decided something on the drive over and would like the decision to have been yours.

"I told Jake I was going home. I did go home. I was home for like twenty minutes." The bag goes on your counter. She doesn't take her coat off. "So technically that wasn't even a lie, it was just — an incomplete statement of events."

She turns around, hands behind her against the counter's edge, and looks at you with her chin up and her ears going red.

"You're not going to ask me what I'm wearing under this, are you. You're going to make me stand here."

Game night at Tyler's has reached the stage where nobody's watching the screen. Mia is in the kitchen fishing beers out of the ice, in the jeans and the thin grey top she was instructed to wear, obeying the instruction about what goes under them with an obedience that has made her fidget for four straight hours.

You come in for a glass of water and Tyler's already in there, standing too close, mid-sentence.

"— just dinner. One dinner. I'm not asking for anything."

"Ty." She straightens up with two bottles dripping in her hands and her voice goes so kind it's awful. "You know the rule. I'm not going to wreck this. I love you guys too much."

"Yeah." He nods a lot. "Yeah, no, I know. Had to try."

"You have to stop trying." She kisses his cheek, and over his shoulder her eyes find you, and she holds the look one full second too long before she pushes past with the beers and says, brightly, to the room, "Who wanted the IPA, I forget."

Jake's car smells like his air freshener and nothing else, and he's giving Mia a ride because she asked for one to Twelfth Street, where her cousin supposedly lives. What she almost said was your name, caught it on the first syllable, and turned it into a cough before finishing with the street.

He hasn't mentioned it.

She sits with her hair deliberately over her left shoulder, covering something that took four minutes to fail to cover this morning. Jake drives the way he does everything — calmly, observantly, with no apparent hurry to fill silence.

"You've been weird," he says eventually, pleasantly. "Like, happy-weird. Good weird."

"I'm sleeping better."

"Huh."

The car slows at the corner and her phone lights up in her lap — your name on the screen, plain as day. She covers it with her palm so fast that the covering is the tell.

"Thanks for the ride," Mia says, too quickly, already opening the door before the car fully stops. "Tell Ryan he still owes me twenty bucks."

Two weeks since the beach house and the five of you are in Ryan's living room like nothing happened. To three of the five, at least, nothing did.

Jake's on the floor with his back against the couch, reading something on his phone and half-listening to Ryan explain why his fantasy lineup is going to "devastate" this week. Tyler brought wings. The apartment smells like hot sauce and the candle Ryan lit to cover the hot sauce, which makes it worse.

Mia arrived twelve minutes after you did. She said hi to the room, squeezed Tyler's shoulder on the way past, and has been in the kitchen since — plating the wings onto something that isn't a pizza box, because she can't help herself.

She hasn't looked at you. She's looked at every other object and person in the apartment, including Ryan's cat, including a stain on the ceiling she commented on for thirty seconds too long. The avoidance is so geometric it might as well be a spotlight.

"Does Ryan own a single plate that matches another plate?" she calls out to nobody in particular, holding up two mismatched pieces of stoneware.

"I own experiences, not things," Ryan says from the couch.

"You own mold. I saw your shower."

She rounds the corner with the plated wings, sets them on the coffee table, drops onto the open cushion — the one next to you, because every other seat was taken, and she checked — and pulls her feet up under herself. Her knee settles an inch from your thigh. The contact doesn't happen.

Her phone is face-down on the armrest. She smells like vanilla and the lavender detergent she's used as long as you've known her.

"So," she says to the room, bright, easy, reaching for a wing. "What are we watching."

The group chat got the message at 2:15: does anyone have a drill and like 20 minutes. i bought a shelf and it's winning.

Jake hearted it. Tyler said he was at the station until six. Ryan sent a voice memo that was forty seconds of him laughing at the photo she attached — the shelf leaning against her bedroom wall at an angle, a scattered handful of drywall anchors on the floor, one crooked pilot hole already drilled too high.

That just left you as the one to go help.

Her apartment is small and warm and smells like cupcakes she baked yesterday. She answers the door in bike shorts and an oversized tee, hair up in a claw clip, a smudge of drywall dust on her forearm. The drill is on her kitchen counter next to a level she clearly bought today.

"Okay, don't look at the first hole. I panicked." She steps back to let you in and gestures down the short hall toward her bedroom. "It's heavy. Like, genuinely heavy. I got it up there once and it just—" She mimes something falling with both hands and a sound effect.

Her bedroom is tidy in the way a person cleans when they know someone's coming — bed made a little too neatly, closet door pulled shut, a candle lit on the nightstand. The shelf is solid oak, maybe five feet long, and she wasn't exaggerating about the weight.

"Tools are all in there," she says, pointing at a canvas bag on the floor. "I'll hold it while you mark it, or whatever the process is. I don't actually know the process."

She's standing in the doorway to her own bedroom, arms folded loosely, watching you.

Tyler's uncle's cabin is two hours north and thirty years past its last renovation — wood-paneled everything, a dock that groans, a firepit out back ringed with mismatched camp chairs. The kind of place where cell signal comes and goes and the nearest store is a twenty-minute drive down a road with one lane and opinions about guardrails.

You pulled in last, Jake riding shotgun, late because Jake doesn't believe any trip needs to start before noon. Ryan's Jeep is already parked crooked by the porch and Tyler's truck is behind it. Bags are half-unpacked on the living room floor. Someone propped the back door open and the lake smell fills the lower level — algae and pine and cold water.

The cabin has three bedrooms. Tyler claimed the big one by right of family ownership. Ryan threw his duffel in the second before anyone else arrived. Which leaves the third for you, Jake, and Mia to figure out.

Mia is on the dock in cutoffs and a loose white tank top, feet bare, calves swinging over the water. She came up with Tyler this morning. Her hair is already sun-warm at the ends, and there's a half-empty hard seltzer on the planks beside her.

Ryan's voice carries from inside: something about the grill, propane, a disagreement with Tyler about chimney starter versus lighter fluid that has the energy of a decades-old war.

She turns when the screen door claps behind you. The late-afternoon sun is behind her and she has to squint.

"Finally. Jake made you stop for snacks, didn't he."

She pats the dock planks next to her. The wood is warm.