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“Well, I would appreciate that. I don’t need my PTSD to get riled up.” She smiled.

“You know the romance novel I get. What about the other things? The self-help books.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I just needed to learn something. I mean it. Really. I felt like it was helpful to know what a lot of different people thought about success. Because... because I didn’t really believe everything my dad said. Because I didn’t really think he was the authority. The be-all and end-all about it. And I guess the thing is I just needed a way to learn.”

“And when you go to college, what do you think you’ll go for?”

“Business,” she said without hesitation. “I don’t think I’m cut out to be an employee. I would definitely like to start my own business. Maybe I’ll start my own brewery. Or my own brewery and restaurant. I don’t know. I’m not afraid to work hard. It’s just... figuring everything out. What I’d like is to be able to do the kind of thing that you’ve done here. You helped me. And it’s that kind of expansive thinking, the ability to be able to care enough to help other people... I want that. I genuinely do.”

“If you want to,” he said, “I believe that you will.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Really. Because you’ve done more with the last couple of months than a lot of people managed to do in years.”

“And I lost my virginity,” she said. She looked deeply smug about that.

“Yeah,” he said.

“You know, I always thought I was my own person,” she said. “Because a lot of the things I think are unorthodox. I’m not saying that I’m abandoning all of my beliefs. I stand by a lot of them. But I don’t know that I realize just how many things came from being shaped by my dad. I don’t know if I realized how many things I thought just because it was expedient. I mean that’s the real truth of it. You turn yourself into a hero so that all the things that don’t work for you can be villainous.”

“You do what you have to when you need to survive,” he said.

“I guess so. So tell me,” she said, rolling over to face him. “How come you’ve never had a girlfriend?”

He huffed. He hadn’t expected that question, but with Bix he supposed he had to realize that the unexpected was always a moment away.

“Well, because I don’t want to get married.”

“How come?”

“Do you?” he asked.

She thought about it for a moment. He could see the wheels turning in her head. “No. I mean, it’s silly, right? And at this point, it’s a government institution rather than a religious one. Just another way of monetizing existence.”

“Right. That goes against your ethics.”

“Indeed. And as far as making a commitment to another person for the rest of your life... I dunno. I guess people do it. But I think maybe those people were dropped into the kind of environment where it works. Where you have a house, and a job, and youdon’t want to move a lot. And you don’t need to make a lot of changes. And because of that, it works. It works because they don’t have any mountains to hike up, so to speak. And then a lot of times, it doesn’t work even then. I always wonder how the hell my dad ended up saddled with two of his kids. I mean, I know there are more. But somehow, my mom and my brother’s mom were uninterested enough, or bad enough, that my dad had custody of us. That really is something. I mean, don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t abusive. Neglectful, maybe. He definitely put us in some situations that weren’t any good. But he wasn’t cruel. He never has been cruel. But you know, even he clearly thought at some point maybe he would have a family. Or something like it. He couldn’t do it. Believing that you can do it isn’t enough assurance that you can. I think you only dream of it if it’s what you had, and it made you happy. I never had it. It never made me happy.”

What she said echoed inside of him. Because it was exactly how he felt. Exactly.

He had never heard anyone say it before.

“Yes,” he said. “I grew up in a miserable house. With a miserable woman chained to an asshole of a man. We were miserable kids, who thought... We thought we loved our dad. And that he loved us. I could never understand why I felt so bad all the time. He trained us to believe that love and feelings and all that kind of stuff was something different than what it is. It was toxic. I’ll fantasize about that. We turned our family into something different. When we gather around the table, it’s all of us, with all of our scars, and all that food.”

“And you’ve taken in other people who have been hurt,” she said softly.

“Yeah,” he said. “We do. We’ve taken other people who have been hurt because we get it. But I have no desire to re-create this thing that was shitty back when I had it. It was bad then, I can’t imagine submitting myself to it now. So that’s why I’ve never had a girlfriend. I never saw the point in building a lie for the sake of not being lonely for a while.”

She looked at him, hard. He didn’t like it.

“I think there’s more to it than that.”

“Doesn’t matter. I never have to know if there is. Because that’s reason enough. Arrangements work just fine for me because an arrangement is all I really need too.”

“Do you ever get lonely?”

“Do you?”