I don’t sleep. I lie on top of the quilt in Rosemary’s spare room with the window open and listen to the lake do what it does all night, which is breathe in and out and never get tired of it.

I wrote you a letter.

Every time I close my eyes, I see his face when he said it. Not guilty. Not sly. Just tired, and a little stunned, like I was the one who had said something unbelievable.

At six I give up and make coffee in my grandmother’s percolator, which takes eleven minutes and sounds like a small train. I drink it standing at the kitchen counter, next to the calendar that still says April. Her handwriting is in the square for the ninth: Dr. Hale, 2:00. Bring questions. I turn the calendar over so it faces the wall, and then I feel so guilty that I turn it back.

At eight-fifteen my phone rings. Sandra Kowalski. My boss.

Sandra never calls on Sundays. Sandra believes Sundays are for church and fantasy football, in that order, and she enforces it. My stomach drops before I even say hello.

“Hattie. You got a minute?” She sounds like she has already said this sentence to eleven people this morning.

“Sure.”

“I wanted you to hear it from me before it’s in an email.” She breathes out. “Corporate is closing the Lakeview location. December thirty-first. The whole building.”

I sit down on the kitchen floor. I don’t decide to. My knees just fold.

“There’s a spot for you in Denver,” Sandra says, faster now, like she’s pulling off a bandage. “They’re opening a big new place near the airport. Twenty screens, all laser, a real showcase. They asked for you by name, Hat. You’d lead the tech team. It’s more money.”

“Denver,” I say.

“You’d need to go out for an interview in a couple of weeks. It’s a formality. They want you.” A pause. “I know the timing is garbage. I know you’re up there dealing with your grandma’s place. Take a few days. Just let me know by the end of the month.”

After she hangs up I stay on the floor with my back against the cabinets. The linoleum is cool through my jeans. Somewhere outside, a screen door bangs and a dog starts barking at nothing.

Denver. I have been to Denver once, for a trade show. I remember a hotel with a very aggressive air conditioner and a view of a parking garage. I remember thinking the mountains looked fake, like somebody had painted them on the sky to sell a truck.

I pull my knees up and put my forehead on them, and for the first time since the funeral, I cry. Not neatly. The loud, stupid, hiccupping kind, the kind you can only do in an empty house. I cry about Lakeview, with its sticky carpet and its twelve machines I know by the sound of their fans. I cry about Sandra, who is kind and has to make eleven calls on a Sunday. I cry about the April calendar.

I don’t cry about Theo. I’m very clear with myself about that.

“So you’re not crying about Theo,” Priya says.

“No.”

“Just to be clear.”

“I’m crying about corporate real estate.”

We’re sitting on the back steps of the diner at two in the afternoon, between the lunch rush and the dinner rush, which in Hollis Point means between six customers and nine. Priya is still wearing her apron. She brought out two slices of cherry pie and two forks and put both of them in front of me.

I tell her everything. Denver. The gear. The booth at four in the morning, and the light on the screen, and how close his face was. I tell her about my hand on his chest. I tell her what he said.

Priya puts her fork down.

“He said he wrote you a letter.”

“He’s lying.”

“Hat, when has Theo Quintana ever lied? About anything? In twelfth grade he told Mr. Garza he was the one who let the frogs out of the bio lab, and it wasn’t even him. It was me.”

“That was you?”

“That’s not the point.” She turns on the step so she’s facing me. “Listen to me. You have spent eleven years running away from one thing. And now it’s three things. You’re running from this town, and from that job in Chicago that’s falling apart under you, and from a guy who’s standing right there on a ladder. You can’t run from three directions at once. You’ll just go in a circle.”

“I’m not running. I’m deciding.”

“You’re sitting on a step eating my pie with your hands.”

I look down. She’s right. I have abandoned the fork completely.

“If it’s real,” I say slowly, “it would have been in the booth. That’s where we left notes. In the can on the shelf.”

“So go look.”

“I know what’s in the can. Nothing. I’ve known for eleven years.”

“Then it’ll take you two minutes to prove him wrong,” Priya says, “and you can come back and eat the rest of this pie with a clear conscience. Go on. I’ll save you a slice.”

I drive out to the Juneberry the long way, along Shore Road, past the marina and the public beach and the ice cream stand with the fiberglass cone on the roof. I tell myself I’m avoiding traffic. There is no traffic in Hollis Point. There is a tractor on Tuesdays.

Theo’s truck is parked by the tower. He’s up on the scaffolding again, even though he can’t have slept more than a few hours. I sit in my car with the engine off and watch him fit a brace into place, and something in my chest pulls tight, like a thread caught on a nail.

The first note I ever left him was about a cat.

We were sixteen. Rosemary had just hired us both for the summer, me in the snack bar and Theo helping his dad with the speaker wires, and we had exactly one conversation in the first two weeks, which was about whether the Juneberry’s cat was named Buster or Butter. I said Butter. He said Buster. Rosemary refused to take sides.

So I drew the cat. Badly. I gave it a name tag that said BUTTER in huge letters and left the drawing on the projector, where he’d find it when he came up to check the sound. The next night, it was back on the projector with a second name tag drawn on, very neatly, that said BUSTER. Under it he had written: Maybe he has a middle name.

By August we needed somewhere better than the projector. Theo found the empty reel can on the shelf and painted HOLD on the lid in red, and that was it. That was our mailbox, for three summers.

I get out of the car. I don’t look at the scaffolding. I go inside.

The booth is hot in the middle of the afternoon, just like Theo said. The air smells like dust and warm metal and that faint vinegar smell old film gets when it has been sitting in cans for too many summers. I prop the window open with the paint can again. A breeze comes in, halfhearted, and gives up almost right away.

The can with HOLD on the lid is exactly where it always was.

I take it down from the shelf. It’s lighter than I expect. My thumbs find the edge of the lid and I sit there holding it for a long time, the way you hold a gift you already know you’re not going to like.

I open it.

Empty. A little rust around the rim. A ticket stub from 2015 stuck to the bottom, which I recognize, because it’s from the Music Box Theatre in Chicago and I mailed it to Rosemary my first week at school with a smiley face drawn on the back.

She kept it. She kept it in here, in our can, for eleven years. I don’t know what to do with that, so I peel the stub off the bottom and put it in my pocket, and it’s a long moment before I can see clearly again.

Under where the stub was, somebody has scratched a tiny cat into the metal with the point of a screwdriver. It has two name tags. One says BUTTER and one says BUSTER, and the lettering on the second one is very neat.

So he lied. I put the lid back on and set it down on the floor, and I should feel better, and I don’t.

Because Priya is right. Theo doesn’t lie. Theo has never lied to me about anything. He told me when my haircut was bad. He told me when I was wrong about Casablanca. When we were seventeen and I asked him if he was scared about the future, he said yes, terrified, every day, and then he held my hand and told me the future could wait until after the second feature.

If he says he wrote one, then he believes he wrote one.

And if it’s real, it has to be somewhere.

I start at the shelves. I take down every film can, one by one, and open each and look inside and set it on the floor in a row. Casablanca. Rear Window. It Happened One Night. A stack of trailers from the seventies. A Christmas cartoon reel nobody has run since I was a kid. Nothing.

I check the cabinet under the projector. Manuals, rubber bands, a jar of screws, three dead flashlights, a Christmas card from 1998 signed by the entire Dunning family. I check the drawer of the little desk by the door. Pencils. Receipts. A pair of Rosemary’s reading glasses, which I have to stop and hold for a minute before I can keep going.

I pull the rolling chair out and check under the seat. I lie down flat on the dusty floor and shine my phone light under the projector base, where anything that fell would have ended up. A washer. A candy wrapper. Nothing else.

By five o’clock I’ve been through every inch of the room, and I’m sweaty and gray with dust and very close to crying again, which is getting to be a habit.

The only thing left is the top shelf on the back wall, too high to reach without the step stool. That’s where Rosemary kept the Labor Day print. Roman Holiday, three reels, the tape on each can marked with a small red heart.

Nobody touches those cans except Rosemary. That was the rule. Not even me.

I drag the step stool over and climb up.

The three cans sit side by side, neat as books. I lift down the first one and set it on the counter. Then the second. When I reach for the third, my fingers brush something behind it, pressed flat against the wall. Paper. The dry, soft feel of an envelope that has been sitting in the heat for a long, long time.

I pull it out.

It’s a plain white envelope, gone the color of weak tea at the edges. On the front, in blue ink that has faded almost to gray, in tall capital letters that lean a little to the right the way they always did, someone has written HATTIE.

Clipped to the corner with a rusty paper clip is a small square of notepaper. The handwriting on it is tall and slanted, and I would know it anywhere in the world.

For Hattie. When she comes home.

My grandmother’s writing.

I sit down on the step stool, very slowly, because the floor has started to tilt. The booth is completely quiet. Outside, far away, I can hear the whine of Theo’s drill on the scaffolding, stopping and starting, stopping and starting.

The envelope has never been opened.