"Okay." I slip past him without touching him because he looks like touch would break something load-bearing. "I'm sorry."
He shuts the door behind us. I hear the lock turn over.
He doesn't look at me again for the rest of the night.
I lie awake in a bed that isn't mine, down the hall from a door with a lock in it, and I think about the gap-toothed girl and the boy who never smiles, and I do the math I don't want to do.
That's who taught him the rules, I think. Not how to make them. How to need them.
So I decide, somewhere in the part of the night where you make the decisions you actually keep, that I'll never ask him about her. Not once. He can tell me or he can carry her alone forever. But I'm done being one more thing he has to brick over.
I just wish my heart would quit trying to walk itself down that hall.
MAXIMO WAITED UNTILthe apartment went dark before he let himself do the one thing he only ever did alone.
He sat in the study, in the good chair, with the bad memories, and he opened the videos.
He knew how many there were, down to the last one, the way you know the count of a thing you can never make more of. He played them in order. Mary at the piano, botching the same bar and blaming the bench. Mary narrating a rainstorm like a sports commentator. Mary turning the camera on him across some restaurant table,smile, Max, your face won't crack,and his own younger voice telling her to behave.
Behave.
He'd heard that word two days ago, in a diner, aimed by a stranger at herself. He tried to hold his sister's laugh in his head, the exact pitch of it, the way he had held it every night for two years like a stone in his pocket. And tonight, for the first time, it came back to him wrong. It came back brighter. Louder. It came back sitting on a kitchen floor with mascara running, laughing at nothing, laughing like the whole world was still worth it.
Maximo shut the laptop hard.
He had come home to grieve his sister and let her go.
Instead he was losing her in real time, one crowded, cheerful, unforgivable memory at a time, to the girl she had died to keep alive.
Chapter Six
THE MORNING AFTER Ifind the room with the lock, Maximo hands me a fresh rule along with my coffee.
"Rule twenty-four." He aims it at a point just past my ear because he still isn't looking at me straight on. "Don't open locked doors."
I just nod. This is his home, I crossed a line, and so I simply take my coffee in silence, then my pills, and when I see him staring at my little orange bottle—
"Immunosuppressants," I tell him. "I had a heart transplant a couple of years back. This one"—I tap my chest once—"came secondhand from a stranger, so I take these forever, I don't get to skip them, and yes, I'm aware it makes me sound extremely dramatic at parties."
He doesn't answer, but the way he's looking at me?
I don't know why, but there's just something in his eyes that makes me hold my breath. I feel like he's about to say something—
"When's your audition?"
And so he does, but I guess I don't really know him as well as I hoped because I was definitely expecting something else.
Bummer.
But anyway, at least he still cares enough to ask, right?
The thought cheers me up, and all is good in the world again.
"It's actually a callback," I clarify, "and it's in an hour. But it's just a small part—"
"And you're wearing that?"
I look down at myself. Jeans. A t-shirt that has outlived three apartments. "It's a grounded, real-people role. I'm dressing in character."
