55

Marianna.

Packing your entire life takes approximately four minutes when your entire life fits in a Target bag.

Marco is standing in the doorway of the guest room, arms crossed, watching me with the specific expression of a man who's trying to be helpful but doesn't actually know what "helpful" looks like in this context. He's wearing the same Georgetown Law shirt from this morning, now paired with jeans and the kind of energy that says I have a plan and you're going to follow it whether you like it or not.

"That's it?" He's staring at the Target bag. At the sundress. The cracked iPhone. The sad little collection of underwear that I've been hand-washing in Duane Richter's bathroom sink like a Depression-era housewife. "That's everything?"

"That's everything."

"Mari." His voice does that thing. The soft thing. The thing that makes me want to either hug him or punch him, depending on the day. "You've been here for two weeks and you have one bag?"

"The airline lost my suitcase. I told you this."

"You told me 'the airline misplaced a few things.' You did not tell me you've been living out of a plastic bag like a refugee from a very low-budget disaster movie."

"It's fine." There's that word again. Fine. My eternal, pathological mantra. "I've got the job now. First paycheck hits next week. I'll buy actual clothes. Like a person."

Marco doesn't respond. Just looks at the bag with an expression I recognize from childhood — the one he'd make when he found my lunch money in the laundry because I'd forgotten to eat again. The one that's three parts concern, two parts frustration, and one part the specific guilt of an older brother who thinks he should've caught something sooner.

He doesn't know what he should've caught. Neither do I.

"Okay." He claps his hands once. Decision made. "Clothes situation — we're fixing that. Today. I've got a Nordstrom Rack card that—"

"Marco, no."

"It's not charity. It's an investment. You can't show up to your fancy sports rehab job in the same Target blazer every day. People will think you're in a simulation."

"I can buy my own clothes."

"With what? Your fourteen dollars?"

"I have more than fourteen dollars."

"How much more?"

"...Sixteen. The airline compensation cleared."

Marco stares at me. I stare back. We have a moment.

"Nordstrom Rack," he says again, with the finality of a judge delivering a sentence. "Non-negotiable. Consider it an early birthday present."

"My birthday is in November."

"Very early."

I want to argue. Want to pull out the speech about independence and self-sufficiency and not being anyone's charity case — the same speech I've been giving myself since I landed in this city, the same speech that rings increasingly hollow every time I accept another kindness from someone who doesn't owe me anything.

But Marco is already moving. Already grabbing the Target bag with one hand and my arm with the other, steering me toward the hallway with the practiced efficiency of someone who's spent his career managing professional athletes — people whose bodies are worth millions and whose egos require the navigational skill of a UN diplomat.

"Did you leave anything in the bathroom?" he asks.

"No."

A lie. I left Duane's hoodie. The $340 one. The black one that smells like cedar and bergamot and whatever dark, expensive thing his cologne is made of. The one I've been wearing every night like armor, like a talisman, like the physical manifestation of a feeling I don't have the vocabulary for.

I left it folded on the bathroom counter. Precisely. Deliberately. The way you return something that was never yours to begin with.

The apartment is quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that makes you hyperaware of your own footsteps on marble, your own breathing, your own heartbeat marking time toward something you're not ready for.

Marco walks ahead of me through the living room, bag in hand, already talking about the Wynwood apartment — the layout, the neighborhood, the café two blocks away that does Cuban coffee strong enough to raise the dead.

I'm half-listening.

The other half of me is scanning the apartment. The kitchen where Duane made me chamomile tea at 3 AM. The hallway where he pressed me against the wall. The gym where I watched him destroy a punching bag in the dark. The kitchen island I hid behind, the counter where he kissed me, the floor where he sat beside my bed because I couldn't sleep and he somehow knew that his presence — just his presence, nothing more — was the only thing that could quiet the noise in my head.

Two weeks. I've been here two weeks. Fourteen days. Three hundred and thirty-six hours.

It took me approximately twelve of those hours to fall in love with Duane Richter.

Which is stupid. Which is the most predictable, most cliché, most fundamentally me thing that could've happened. The girl with the love letter and the broken body and the talent for catastrophic decision-making falls for the unavailable man. Again. Still. Always.

Except this time he's not unavailable.

This time he kissed me back. This time he held me in the dark and told me I wasn't broken. This time he was inside me and I didn't freeze and the world went white and for the first time in twenty-three years I understood what it means to be fully, completely, terrifyingly present in my own body.

And now I'm leaving.

"The bedroom's a little small," Marco is saying. He's by the elevator now, pressing the call button. "But you'll have your own bathroom, which — trust me — is the difference between siblings who love each other and siblings who commit homicide. I've seen the crime statistics."

"You haven't seen any crime statistics."

"I watch Dateline. Same thing."

The elevator arrives. The doors open. That polished metal interior where I've studied my own wrecked reflection more times than I can count.

Marco steps in. Holds the door.

"Coming?"

I should move. Should follow him. Should get in the elevator and ride it down and walk out of this building and start the next chapter of my life in a Wynwood two-bedroom where nobody makes me tea at 3 AM or sits on the floor next to my bed or looks at me like I'm something worth decoding.

"One second," I hear myself say. "I forgot something."

"What? You said you got everything—"

"Just — one second. I'll be right back."

I turn before he can argue. Walk back into the apartment on legs that feel like they're operating on a separate electrical system from the rest of me.

The hallway stretches ahead. Grey marble. High ceilings. The same hallway I've walked a hundred times in two weeks, barefoot and wearing his clothes, always moving toward something or away from something, never standing still.

Duane's bedroom door is closed.

I know he's in there. Can feel it the way you feel a storm approaching — pressure change, static electricity, the particular density of air that happens when the atmosphere is deciding whether to break.

I raise my hand to knock.

Don't.

Lower it.

Raise it again.

My knuckles hover an inch from the wood. I can hear my own breathing. Too fast. Too shallow. The kind of breathing that a clinical professional would identify as acute anxiety response and a normal person would identify as girl about to do something stupid.

I don't knock.

I press my palm flat against the door instead. Just... hold it there. Fingers spread. Feeling the grain of the wood beneath my skin, the faint vibration of something on the other side — music, maybe, or just the hum of a building that costs more than my entire existence.

This is insane. I'm standing outside a closed door, touching it like a psychopath, communicating telepathically with a man who doesn't do telepathy. Who doesn't do communication, period, unless it involves monosyllables and that infuriating "mm" sound that conveys exactly nothing and somehow everything.

Say something, I think at the door. Open this door and say something. Say "don't go." Say "stay." Say anything that gives me permission to —

To what?

To blow up my brother's trust? To complicate the one good thing I've built here — the job, the career, the tiny, fragile scaffolding of a life that doesn't revolve around a man?

I drop my hand.

Step back.

Turn around.

And nearly walk directly into Duane Richter.

He's right there. Standing at the other end of the hallway, between me and the living room, like he materialized from the shadows. Black t-shirt. Dark jeans. Bare feet on marble. Hair still damp from a shower I didn't hear.

He's holding my phone charger.

Not the cracked iPhone. My actual phone charger — the one for my original phone, the dead one, the one I dropped in the airport puddle a lifetime ago. I didn't even know he had it. Didn't know it survived.

"You left this," he says.