"Ifyou'rethe one taking advantage."
"I'm serious."
"So am I."
"Fine, then." He leans back and folds his arms. The forearms are back, doing nothing, ruining my life. And he gives me his whole terrible attention, the kind that makes the rest of the room go quiet and out of focus. "What are you so serious about?"
And I could joke. I'm always joking. It's my best trick and my only shield and it's gotten me out of every room I ever needed to leave. But since he asked...
"You," I tell him. "I fell in love with you at first sight."
He doesn't so much as blink. "Then you're even dumber than I thought. I won't change my mind. I'll never see you as a woman."
"Then how do you see me?"
A pause. A small one, but I've started collecting his pauses, and this one has weight.
"A little sister."
Oh.
And my heart, the one that isn't originally mine, the one a stranger died to hand me, gives a hard, off-beat thud at those two words,little sister,like they reached a room in me I've never once been inside. It doesn't make sense. It hurts for no reason I can find, and I do what I always do with a thing that hurts for no reason I can name. I shove it somewhere I won't have to look at it, and I keep going.
"Okay. I'll take it." I stick out my hand across the ruins of the takeout. "You're my big brother from now on."
"Are you insane?" It comes out rougher than his usual unshakeable calm, like I've knocked something loose in there that he'd bolted down on purpose.
"About you? Yes." I keep my hand out there, shameless, grinning, terrified. "That's why I'll take anything that lets me stay in your life. So how about it, big brother?" I wiggle my fingers. "When can I move in?"
I watch thenoform. It gets all the way to his mouth, and I know that mouth. That mouth has a doctorate in telling me no.
His lips part.
"Tonight," Mr. H says.
And then he looks like he wants to arrest himself for it.
TONIGHT.
Tonight.
The word kept coming down in him like a gavel, and there was no court on earth where he could overrule it. One word, and he had handed a broke girl in a thrift-store jacket the keys to the one place he had sworn no one would ever get inside again.
He had told her he saw a little sister. It was the cruelest sort of lie, the kind with just enough truth in it to stand up in court because he did not see a little sister. He saw a woman, and she was grown, broke, and blazing, and a good thirteen years too young for the thoughts he had no business having about her. And that was the smaller of the two crimes. The larger one was beating in her chest at that very moment, and ithadbeen hislittle sister, and the two truths sat down in him side by side and refused, no matter how he arranged them, to be the same size.
Forbidden. There was no gentler word for what she was to him, and Maximo had spent his whole life not needing gentle words.
He would send her away. In the morning, when she was fed and safe, when it could be done cleanly and for good.
He already knew that he wouldn't.
Chapter Four
I OWN TWO SMALL SUITCASES, and I've fit my entire life into them with room left over. I know it sounds tragic to some, but I think it just means I'm efficient.
"Is that everything?" Mr. H is looking at the suitcases with a frown.
"Yup." I set them down in the entryway of a penthouse so big it might have its own weather. "I'm a minimalist. It's very in right now."
