She tells me about the offer standing in the third row with her phone still in her hand and the screen glowing white behind her.

“Friday,” she says. “Five o’clock. Or they walk away.”

I think about how to answer for a long time. Long enough that the tail of the film stops clicking up in the booth, because the reel has finally spun itself out.

“What do you want to do?” I ask.

“I don’t know.” She laughs, and it isn’t a real laugh. “Twenty minutes ago I knew everything. I knew I wanted you to kiss me again. That was about it.”

“That part’s easy.”

“Is it?”

I don’t answer that, because I’m not sure it is, and she deserves better than me pretending. So I just walk her to her car, and she kisses me once more through the open window, fast and light, like she’s worried someone will take it back. Then she drives home to Rosemary’s house on Shore Road, and I stand in the lot under the string lights until they click off on their timer at eleven.

On Monday I go back to my other jobs.

That’s what I tell myself it is. The frame is done. The Juneberry doesn’t need me every day anymore, and the church on Maple Street has needed a new steeple since before Easter, and Pastor Dana has been very patient and very Christian about it. So I load the truck at six and drive into town instead of out to the county road.

I stop at the Juneberry on the way, just for a minute, because the office door has been sticking since the heat wave and I promised Hattie I’d plane it down.

She isn’t there yet. The lot is empty and quiet, and the snack bar is still yellow and bright, and the string lights hang along the path with dew on the bulbs. I let myself into the office with the key Rosemary gave me in March. I take the door off its hinges and lay it across two sawhorses and start on the bottom edge.

It’s while I’m carrying the door back in that I see the papers on the desk.

I’m not snooping. They’re right there, face up, next to her coffee mug and the blue folder from Lakeshore Partners. A printed email with a company logo at the top. A flight confirmation underneath. Grand Rapids to Denver, September eighth, 6:05 a.m. And a single page with a building on it, glass and steel, and the words OPENING SPRING. LEAD TECHNICAL MANAGER. INTERVIEW SCHEDULE.

The interview is on the eighth. The day after Labor Day.

I set the door against the wall very carefully. Then I stand in the office for a while and don’t read the rest, because I don’t need to. I have been nineteen, standing in a hallway with my truck keys in one hand, doing math about somebody else’s future. I know exactly what this math looks like.

Twenty screens. Opening spring. Lead technical manager.

And against that: an old drive-in on a lake in a town with a tractor on Tuesdays, and a man who fixes church steeples.

I hang the door. It closes clean and quiet, the way a door should. Then I leave before she gets there.

The steeple takes all of Monday and most of Tuesday.

It’s good work. It’s hard, hot, high work, sixty feet up with a harness and a tool belt, pulling out rotten boards so old they were cut by hand, and fitting in new ones that will outlast me. There’s no room in my head for anything else when I’m up there. That’s why I like it.

Hattie texts at noon on Monday. Did you fix the office door? It’s perfect. You’re a wizard.

I write back, Glad it works.

At four she texts again. Priya’s sending pie out to the lot at six. Come eat?

I look at that one for a long time, sitting on a beam sixty feet over Maple Street. Then I write, Stuck on the steeple till dark. Next time.

She sends back a thumbs up. I stare at that thumbs up for longer than any grown man should stare at a thumbs up.

On Tuesday she calls. I let it go to voicemail. I tell myself I’m on a ladder, and I am, but I’m also standing still on it when I watch her name light up the screen, and that part isn’t honest.

Her voicemail is short. “Hey. It’s me. I found something in Grandma’s office I want to show you. Call me back? Okay. Bye.” A pause, and then, fast, like she didn’t mean to leave it on the recording: “I miss you. That’s weird. I saw you on Saturday. Okay. Bye.”

I listen to it three times on my lunch break. I don’t call back.

On Wednesday night, Lucia finds me on the end of the dock at nine o’clock, where Dad goes to tell his jokes.

She doesn’t say anything at first. She just sits down next to me and hangs her feet over the water, and hands me a can of root beer from the six-pack she’s carrying, and opens one for herself.

The lake is flat and dark and full of stars. Somewhere down the shore, somebody is having a bonfire, and every once in a while a burst of laughter comes floating over the water.

“Priya says Hattie’s been out at the Juneberry every day since Sunday,” Lucia says, “staring at her phone.”

“She’s got a lot to figure out.”

“Priya says she thinks you’re avoiding her.”

“I’ve got a steeple.”

“Theo.” Lucia sets her root beer down on the boards. “Pastor Dana told Mom you’ve been on that roof twelve hours a day. Pastor Dana is worried about your health. Pastor Dana has offered to pray for your knees.”

I don’t say anything.

“What happened?” she asks. “Saturday you came home looking like somebody gave you a winning lottery ticket. Everybody saw you under those lights. Mrs. Dunning is already telling people she knew it all along. And now you’re up on a roof and you won’t pick up your phone. So what happened?”

I turn the cold can around in my hands.

“There’s a job in Denver,” I say. “A big one. The kind of thing she’s worked eleven years for. And the developers just raised their offer by a lot. By Friday she can sell the Juneberry for more money than she’s ever going to see in her life, and fly to Denver, and start over in a building with twenty screens.” I watch the bonfire flicker far down the shore. “Or she can stay here. For me.”

“For you.”

“She’d do it. That’s the thing. You didn’t see her face on Saturday.” My throat is tight. “If I ask her to stay, she’ll stay. And five years from now she’ll be running a drive-in that loses money every winter, in a town where she never wanted to live, and she’ll look at me and remember the job she gave up. I already did this once, Luce. I know how it goes. I’m not going to be the reason she doesn’t go.”

Lucia is quiet for so long that I think she’s going to let it go. Then she turns and looks at me with Mom’s eyes, which notice too much.

“You’re doing it again,” she says.

“Doing what?”

“Deciding for her.” She doesn’t say it mean. That’s the worst part. She says it very gently, the way you’d tell somebody there’s something stuck in their teeth. “You did it when you were nineteen, and it cost you both eleven years. Rosemary did it, and she died with that envelope still sitting on a shelf. Now you’re doing it again, and you haven’t even asked her what she wants.”

“She doesn’t know what she wants.”

“Then maybe let her figure it out,” Lucia says. “Without you already hiding on a church roof so she doesn’t have to choose.”

She picks up her root beer and her six-pack and walks back up the dock to the house, and leaves me there with the stars and the bonfire and the thing she just said, which is true, and which I don’t want to be.

I stay out there until the bonfire burns down to a red dot. Then I get in the truck, and I don’t decide where I’m going, and somehow I end up on the county road with my headlights on the long curve of the Juneberry fence.

The sign is off. It’s past ten. But there’s a light on in the booth.

I pull onto the shoulder across the road and turn off the engine. From here I can see the little square window, gold against the dark bulk of the snack bar, and every now and then a shadow crossing in front of it. She’s up there. She’s moving things. Once, she stops right at the window, and I can see the outline of her, standing still with something in her hands, looking out at the empty screen.

I could drive in. I could climb those stairs. I could say, I was wrong, I’ve been scared, I’m sorry.

I sit in the dark with my hands on the wheel for twenty minutes, and then the light in the booth goes off, and I start the truck and drive home before her headlights can come down the gravel drive and find me there.

On Thursday evening Hattie finds me.

I’m packing up at the church, coiling ropes in the back of the truck, and the sun is getting low over Maple Street. Her car pulls up at the curb. She gets out and doesn’t close the door. She’s wearing the gray Chicago hoodie again, and her hair is down, and she looks like she hasn’t slept much since Saturday either.

“You fixed my door,” she says, “and then you disappeared.”

“I’ve been on the steeple.”

“Theo. You were on the steeple. You weren’t in outer space. They have phones on steeples.” She stops a few feet away from me on the sidewalk. “You saw the papers. On the desk. Didn’t you?”

I can’t lie to her. I never could. “Yes.”

She nods like she expected that. She looks down at the sidewalk, and then back up at me.

“I called Sandra today,” she says. “My boss. I told her I’d come out for the interview. On the eighth. My flight’s the morning after Labor Day. Early.” She wraps her arms around herself, even though it’s still warm out. “I haven’t decided anything else yet. About the Juneberry. About any of it. Grant needs an answer by five tomorrow. I just. I wanted to tell you myself. Before somebody at the diner did.”

This is the moment. I know it is. Lucia’s voice is in my head. Deciding for her. Ask her.

But I look at Hattie standing on the sidewalk in the gold evening light, tired and brave and so close to having everything she ever worked for, and all I can see is a girl at a ticket booth at eight in the morning with two cold coffees.

I won’t be that for her again. I won’t be the thing she gave something up for.

“Go,” I say.

She blinks. “What?”

“Go to Denver. Do the interview.” I make my voice steady. I make it sound sure, the way I sound when I promise somebody their roof will hold. “It’s a huge opportunity, Hattie. It’s everything you’ve worked for. You’d be crazy not to go.”

For a second, her face doesn’t do anything at all. Then something closes in it, very quietly, like a door on a clean hinge.

“Okay,” she says.

“Hattie.”

“No, you’re right. Okay.” She takes a step back toward her car. “Thanks for being honest.”

She gets in. She closes the door. She doesn’t look at me as she pulls away from the curb.

I stand on the sidewalk in front of the church with a coil of rope in my hands. I did the right thing. I said the unselfish thing, the grown-up thing. I watch her taillights turn the corner at the end of Maple Street.

And the word is still in my mouth, and it tastes completely wrong.