"You lived with Lex, right?" Sienna asked, her eyes on the road. "Before she moved in with Mara?"
"Yeah." Elise shifted in her seat, adjusting the sling. "She was new to the city, didn't know anyone. I offered my spare room. We lived together for about eight months."
"And now?"
Elise watched the streetlights pass. "Now she's at Mara's and I've got a two-bedroom apartment that's too quiet." Elise turned to look out the window. The streetlights passed in steady rhythm, each one casting a brief stripe of orange light across the dashboard. "I don't know. You get used to someone being there. The noise. Lex was loud. She'd leave her kit bag in the hallway and forget to close cupboard doors and play music while she cooked. Then one day it's all gone and the apartment just... sits there."
She tried to smile. It didn't quite land.
"It's not sad," Sienna said. "It's human. Missing someone's presence is normal. Especially when the change happens quickly."
"I'm not good at being alone." Elise hadn't meant to say that. It came out before she could catch it, and she felt her face heat. "I mean, I'm fine. I'm just saying, it's an adjustment."
Sienna glanced at her. Her expression was unreadable in the half-light of the car, but her voice was soft when she spoke. "I live alone too. I understand."
Sienna pulled into the car park of Elise's apartment building. It was a modest place, three storeys of cream-painted stucco with iron balconies. The car park was mostly empty at this hour, just a few other vehicles scattered in the dim glow of the overhead lights. Eucalyptus trees lined the side street, their leaves silver in the moonlight,
Sienna turned off the engine. The car went quiet except for the tick of cooling metal.
Elise unbuckled her seatbelt one-handed, fumbling with the release, and reached for the door handle. She didn't want to go upstairs alone. The thought was there, stark and undeniable, sitting in her chest alongside the pain and the fatigue and the dull weight of the diagnosis.
"Do you want me to..." Sienna started, and then stopped.
"Walk me up?" Elise finished.
"I was going to say, do you want me to carry your bag up for you. But walking you up works too."
The apartment was on the second floor. Sienna carried Elise's kit bag over one shoulder and walked beside her up the stairs, their footsteps echoing in the stairwell. Elise fumbled with her keys one-handed and Sienna reached around her to take them, their fingers brushing in the handoff. The contact was brief and electric and neither of them acknowledged it.
Inside, the apartment was dark and quiet. Elise flicked on the lights. It was a comfortable space: open-plan kitchen and living room, a sofa with throw pillows, a bookshelf filled with a mix of sports biographies and crime novels. A framed Valkyries jersey hung on one wall. The kitchen counter was clean and bare except for a fruit bowl with two oranges and a banana that was past its best.
"Sit down," Sienna said firmly, setting the kit bag by the door. "Where are your mugs?"
"Cabinet above the kettle. You don't have to..."
"Sit down." It wasn't a request. Sienna was already in the kitchen, filling the kettle, opening the fridge to see what was there.
Elise sat on the sofa and listened to Sienna move around her kitchen. The clink of mugs. The hiss of the kettle. The quiet opening and closing of cupboard doors. It was a sound she hadn't heard in her apartment since Lex moved out. The sound of someone else being there. Taking up space. Making noise.
Her eyes burned. She pressed her good hand over her face and breathed.
Sienna made tea and then, without being asked, scrambled eggs on toast. "It's the only thing I can make that isn't a complete disaster," she said, setting the plate on the coffee table in front of Elise. "My cooking skills start and end with eggs."
The eggs were good. Buttery and soft, seasoned with salt and pepper and what might have been paprika. Elise ate with one hand, fork held awkwardly in her right, the sling making every movement clumsy. A bit of egg fell onto her shirt and she swore under her breath.
"Here." Sienna leaned over and picked the piece of egg off Elise's shirt with a napkin, her fingers brushing the fabric just below Elise's collarbone. The touch was brief and domestic and it made Elise's throat tighten for reasons that had nothing to do with the shoulder.
Sienna sat back on her end of the sofa with her own cup of tea and didn't try to fill the silence with empty reassurances. She was just there. Present. Her shoes were off, tucked neatly by the door, and she was sitting with her legs curled under her on Elise's sofa as if this were a normal evening and not the worst night of Elise's career.
"Thank you," Elise said when she'd finished. "For all of this. The hospital. The ride. The eggs."
"It's my job."
Elise set her fork down on the plate. "Walking me upstairs and making me eggs is not your job."
Sienna looked down at her tea. A faint flush coloured her neck, visible even in the warm lamp light of the living room. "No," she said quietly. "I suppose it isn't."
They looked at each other. The apartment was quiet and outside the trees rustled in the night breeze and Elise wanted to ask her to stay. She wanted to say don't go, stay on this sofa with me, because the silence in this apartment is too loud when I'm alone and your voice is the only thing that's made anything feel okay tonight.
