He pulls his shirt back on. “I’m not. I’d rather be strong than have unmarked skin. Some sacrifices are worth making.”
We stay like that for a moment — him in the chair, shirt back on, hands wrapped in white gauze, and me still kneeling on the marble floor with the kit closed beside me. The air has shifted. Something in the room has changed its weight.
I need to know something practical. Practical is manageable. Practical doesn't require me to look at what I'm thinking.
"How long did you rent this for?" I ask.
He looks at me.
Not the assessing look, not the controlled blank. Something simpler — genuine confusion, as if I've used a word in the wrong language.
"Rented," he repeats.
"The apartment." I gesture, vaguely, at the impossible marble floors and the floor-to-ceiling glass and the forty floors of Miami skyline arranged behind it like a backdrop. "How long's the lease."
A pause. Something moves through his expression — I catch it before he organizes it away.
"I didn't rent it," he says. The voice for facts that require no defense. "I bought it. For you."
I hear the words. They don't immediately arrange into meaning.
"You bought it," I say. Flat. The sentence just sits there. I can't make it do anything else.
"Yes."
“When?”
“Four days ago.”
I look at the windows. Three walls of glass. The rooftop pool. The kitchen stocked by someone who knew what I ate beforeI did. I know Miami real estate the way anyone knows things they've been too poor to touch — abstractly, by category. An address like this. A penthouse like this.
Millions. Plural. He bought millions of dollars of real estate for a woman who wouldn't leave a motel.
"That's insane," I say.
"Probably," he agrees.
No deflection. No argument. Just: probably.
He looks at me for a moment.
"It's yours," he says. "Whatever you do with it."
The word lands in the center of my chest and stays there.Yours.I haven't had ayourssince my mother stopped being someone who needed me to come back to. Five years of places that are not-places, walls that belong to someone else, ceilings I stare at and don't learn the cracks of. He's not offering. He's stating. He bought it and now it's a fact, the way his scars are facts — made before he had much say in any of them.
The scale of it doesn't fit anywhere in my understanding.
He stands.
Smooth, efficient, the same economy of motion he arrived with — managed, contained. Brief instruction: eat, sleep, he'll check in tomorrow. The jacket goes back on, hiding the worst of the blood stains. He's at the elevator before I form a response. The doors open at a touch of his hand and he steps inside and he's gone, and the doors close, and the quiet reinstates itself like a lid over everything he just said.
I'm still on the floor. Kneeling on marble. The first aid kit beside me, the space where he was sitting a foot from my knees.
Yours.
I press my palm flat against the marble and feel the cold of it travel up through my hand, through my wrist, up to somewhere central that has been very cold for a long time on its own.
I don't move for a while, and when I finally do, I only make it to the couch before going boneless.
