Talia stays on the couch, facing me. The apartment is quiet. The bourbon warms my blood. The locks are engaged.
"My father found me," I say.
I say the words for the first time to someone outside the house. Cole knows about the calls, the envelope, the dead name. I told him everything that Saturday. He's been carrying it since. Dante knows what he witnessed, the tremor in my hands during the 413 call, and he knows what he told me the night he stood in the spare room doorway.
Lock your door.
Beyond that, I'm not sure what Dante knows. He suspects more than he shows.
But telling Talia is different. Her hands tighten around the mug, and she doesn't ask what I mean.My father found memeans the same thing in her language as it means in mine. The locks held. Then they didn't. The name stayed buried. Then it didn't.
Talia holds the mug. That is the only response. Her face doesn't change. Her body doesn't move.
"When?" she asks.
"Three weeks ago. An envelope on my door. Hand-delivered. My—" I stop. "The name I had before. The one I changed. He used the sealed name."
"Have you read it?"
"No. It's been in my bag for three weeks."
"And you've been at Elm House."
"I've been at Elm House."
She nods. No question follows about why the apartment with four locks stopped feeling safe. No question about why a house with two men and a spare room with a lock that works from the inside became the place I went back to night after night. My breathing count runs three cycles at Elm House. It runs eight here.
"Does Cole know the full picture?" she asks.
"He knows about the calls. The envelope. The dead name on the front. He doesn't know what the letter says because I haven't opened it."
"And Dante?"
"Dante knows less than Cole. But Dante suspects more than he should." I pause. "He fills silence fast."
Talia's mouth tightens. She's spoken to Dante a handful of times. Surface-level interactions. But Talia watches where people stand, what they touch, what they withhold. In two meetings, she has seen what took me six months to see: Dante covering me with a blanket, then withdrawing every mug from the counter in the same week.
"He's not like—" I start.
"I know he's not." Talia sets the mug down. "I'm saying that a man who suspects you're in danger without having the fullpicture will fill in the blanks himself. And Dante has access to tools most people don't."
"You know about the family."
"Everyone knows about the family, Maya. The people who pretend they don't are the same people who pretend the three-inch gap on the bench is about team strategy."
Her mouth barely moves on the last word.
"You need to tell them," she says. "Both of them. The full picture. I can see what carrying it is doing to you. You keep measuring the room. Your hand keeps going toward that bag. That's how we're trained, right? Handle it. Contain it. Don't let anyone see the cost."
"Talia—"
"The threat is bad enough," she says. "The carrying makes it worse. I carried mine for four years before I told anyone. Four years of performing fine while it ate through the floor of every room I stood in. By the time I let someone hold it with me, I was standing on air." She pauses. "Don't wait until the floor is gone."
The apartment is quiet. The building's pipes hum.
"I'm going to open the envelope," I say.
"Tonight?"
