"She is," he said.
"You two would look good together," Rhea said. She said it with the seriousness of a kid making a deal at recess. "I'm just saying."
My face went hot. I brought my cup up to hide behind it. The corner of my mouth gave me away anyway and I knew it.
"Eat your toast, Rhea," Daniil said. He said it very small, into his coffee, and the corner of his own mouth gave him away too.
The room settled. The kettle on the stove ticked as it cooled. Rhea began to hum a thin tune around the toast in her cheek, a song I half knew from the apartment, two notes climbing and one note coming back down. I wrapped my hands around my cup and let the warmth come up into my palms. Daniil had not eaten yet. His eyes had landed on the side of my jaw where my thumb had wiped his tear in the dark, and they had stayed there a beat past polite, and then he had looked down at his cup.
15
DANIIL
The shower had gone long. Hot water until the tile fogged and the mirror was a flat white wall and the bruise on my jaw had stopped aching under the heat. I stood in front of the dresser with the towel slung low at my hips and the wet hair pushing droplets down the line of my back. There was the bruise still fading along the jaw that I caught in the dresser mirror. Yellow now at the edges. Almost gone. The shorter hair sat strange on me. I kept catching the shape of it in glass and not knowing the man it belonged to.
I pulled the top drawer open. A row of folded black shirts. I lifted the first one off the stack.
The bedroom door opened.
It opened the way a door opens when the person on the other side has not thought to knock because she has been in and out of this room for a long time without thinking about it.
Chloe came through with the tablet up in her hand and her mouth already moving.
"So I was looking at this thing for Rhea, and I think we could "
The sentence stopped on the second clause. Her eyes had found me. The tablet did not lower. Her mouth stayed open on the word she had not finished saying. The color went up her neck in one clean line the way ink takes paper, fast and even, and reached the underside of her jaw before she remembered her hand.
She pulled the door closed in front of her own face.
I stood there with the shirt half lifted and listened to the latch click.
A laugh came out of me. Low. One short note. The kind of laugh that surprised me out of myself because I had not heard it in this body yet and did not know I had it.
I put the shirt on and worked the buttons up from the bottom. Soft black cotton, washed too many times. I left the top two open. I stepped into the dark pants and pulled them up and ran one hand through the wet hair to push it off my forehead. I sat down on the edge of the bed and put my forearms on my thighs and waited.
The knock came small and polite.
"Can I come in now?"
"Yes."
The door opened the way it should have the first time. Careful. A hand's width. Then the rest of the way. She came through it with the color still high in her cheeks and a small half smile pinned to one side of her mouth and the tablet held in front of her chest like a thing she could put between us if she needed to.
"I'm so sorry. I should have knocked."
"Sit beside me. You're fine."
She crossed the rug. She sat on the edge of the bed at arm's length from me, both knees together, the tablet across her thighs. The mattress dipped under her weight by a smallamount. I turned my body toward her. The mattress dipped a little more under mine.
"What were you going to say?"
She breathed out. Found the sentence again.
"Rhea hasn't been in school in over a month. I was thinking we could start her on an online thing for now. There's a program the boys I used to nanny were in. It's not perfect, but it's something. She's smart. She'll eat it in a week and ask for more."
"Can you set that up for me?"
"Anything you want."
