There it was again. That question. The one I couldn't answer honestly without explaining everything.
Because I promised Mateo.
"Because you need help," I said again. "And I can offer it."
Lucy looked at me for a long moment. Then, softly said: "He used to say that too. Mateo. That he'd always be there when I needed help."
I didn't know what to say to that but"He would have wanted you to be safe."
It was the only thing I could think of. The only thing that felt true.
"Would he have wanted you to be the one keeping me safe?"
I didn't know if Mateo had imagined, when he made me promise, that it would look like this. That I'd be installing locks on her door and making her coffee and sitting on the floor beside the bed at three in the morning.
"I think he just wanted you to have someone," I finally admitted. "I think that's all he ever wanted."
Lucy's eyes glistened, but she didn't cry. Just nodded, once, and turned away and kept saying.
"Guest room tonight," her voice was thick. "After last night, you can't keep sleeping on the floor beside me. Your back will hate you."
It wasn’t permission. It wasn’t forgiveness. But it was the beginning of something I didn’t know.
CHAPTER 6
Cal
One week.Seven days of Lucy in my apartment, and my entire life had rearranged itself around her presence without my permission.
I started making breakfast before my shifts during her stay. Nothing fancy, just eggs and toast, and of course, a coffee in the way she liked it. I'd be at the stove by six, cracking eggs into the pan I'd bought years ago and barely used, listening for the sound of movement down the hall. The guest room—the one that had been empty for years until she came.
She'd appear in the kitchen doorway while I was cooking, still half-asleep, hair mussed from the pillow. The sun was barely up, but she didn't have to leave for another hour. One of the small changes since she'd moved in—later shifts, no more walking to work in the dark.
She watched me flip eggs and didn't say anything, and somehow that silence felt more comfortable than any conversation I'd had in years.
No need to fill it with small talk just to perform. Just two people existing in the same space, sharing the same air, letting the morning come in slow.
I'd slide a plate across the counter to her. She'd say thank you in that quiet way she had, like she still wasn't used to someone making her breakfast. We'd eat standing up, leaning against opposite counters, and sometimes our eyes could meet.
When I came home from shift, she'd have dinner ready.
I wasn’t sure when it started. Maybe the second night. I'd walked through the door expecting the apartment to be empty, expecting to microwave something frozen and eat it standing over the sink the way I'd done for three years. Instead, I'd found her at the stove, stirring something that smelled like garlic and tomatoes. The house was warm and alive in a way it had never been when it was just me.
"You didn't have to do this," I'd said.
She'd shrugged without turning around. "I was hungry. Figured you might be too."
We ate pasta that night. Stir-fry the next. A surprisingly good chili on Wednesday that she said was her mother's recipe, passed down through three generations of women who believed that food was love and love showed up even when you didn't feel like it.
We'd eat at my small kitchen table, the one I'd bought three years ago when I moved in, telling myself I'd have people over for dinner, host the crew for poker nights, build some kind of life outside thestation. I'd never used it for anything but stacking mail. Now there were placemats. Napkins. Two chairs pulled up close enough that our knees almost touched underneath.
We talked about everything except Mateo.
But when the conversation drifted to the things she loved, something in her shifted. She’d come alive. Like, for example, she told me about the books she’d read. Mysteries, mostly. She said her favorite kind was the kind where you could figure out the ending if you paid real attention. She’d tell me about plot twists she’d seen coming and others that had genuinely surprised her, her hands moving as she talked, her face animated in a way I hadn’t seen before.
And as for the movies she loved, they were old ones, mostly—black-and-white classics her mother had introduced her to, watched on Sunday afternoons with popcorn, blankets, and nowhere else to be. She could quote whole scenes from Casablanca. She could do a passable impression of Katharine Hepburn that made me laugh every time.
Also, she shared a secret with me: she used to watch terrible reality TV when she couldn’t sleep. Dating shows and cooking competitions and people buying houses in places they’d never been. She’d describe episodes to me in elaborate detail, complete with commentary on the contestants’ poor choices, and I’d pretend to be horrified—secretly adding the shows to my own watch list so I could follow along.
