56

Marianna.

Four minutes. I timed it. Marco was still parking the Uber—because of course he made the driver wait while he "ran up to check if the AC worked," which is Marco-speak for let me make sure I hid all the embarrassing stuff—and I was already standing in the middle of his living room, bag at my feet, officially moved in, staring at a water stain on the ceiling that looked unsettlingly like the Virgin Mary if the Virgin Mary had given up.

The apartment is one bedroom, one bathroom, and a space that calls itself a living room with the confidence of a man in cargo shorts calling himself "basically a chef" because he owns a George Foreman grill. The kitchen and living room are separated by an IKEA rug that has a mysterious brown stain roughly the shape of Florida, or possibly a manatee in existential crisis. I've decided not to investigate.

The couch is secondhand. You can tell not because it looks worn, but because it's collapsed inward in this very deliberateway, like it's had years to think about its place in the universe and made peace with it. The kitchen has a coffee maker, three mugs (one with a hairline crack that Marco has oriented "strategically" toward the wall), half a box of penne, and one very ambitious onion that has started sprouting despite no one asking it to.

I love it here.

That thought arrives without warning, the way good thoughts sometimes do—sideways, when you're not braced for them. I'm standing in this four-hundred-square-foot monument to functional poverty, afternoon light cutting through busted blinds in gold stripes across the scuffed hardwood, and something in my chest just... unclenches.

Duane's apartment was a museum. Beautiful and temperature-controlled and so aggressively perfect that I spent two weeks there afraid to leave fingerprints on anything. This is a place. People actually live here. People burn toast here and leave their running shoes by the door and have cable TV they don't fully pay for because the neighbor's WiFi password is literally "password123."

My feet are on the ground.

Literal ground. Specific, slightly sticky, completely real ground.

I didn't realize how floaty I'd been until I stopped.

Marco appears in the doorway looking like a man who has definitely just kicked something under his bed.

"Okay," he says, crossing his arms. "Terms."

"Terms."

"You take the bedroom."

I wait. There has to be a catch. Marco Reyes does not offer bedrooms without catches. Marco Reyes once charged me two dollars to change the TV channel in 2009.

"I take the couch," he continues.

"The couch that looks like it's trying to become a bowl?"

"It's got character."

"It's got a dip in the middle deep enough to lose a golden retriever."

"Half the rent," he says, steamrolling my very valid structural concerns. "utilities split down the middle. You buy your own groceries. I buy mine. No touching my leftover Cuban food—I'm serious, Mari, last time you 'just tried a little bit' of my ropa vieja I opened the container and it looked like a crime scene—"

"That was one time—"

"—and you do your own laundry. Wash cycle only, don't touch my stuff, the dryer has a setting that will actively destroy performance fabrics and I don't have time to explain which one—"

"Marco."

He stops.

"Thank you," I say.

He does the thing he always does when feelings get too close—pivots ninety degrees, finds something across the room to look at, clears his throat like his body is trying to manually eject the emotion.

"Yeah, well." He picks up a throw pillow. Sets it down. Picks it up again. "You're my sister."

"Very astute observation."

"Shut up. I'm being nice."

"You're being you," I say. "Which is basically nice but with a lot of packaging material."

He throws the pillow at me. I catch it. We look at each other across the collapsed couch and the Florida-shaped stain, and something warm and ridiculous passes between us that neither of us will ever acknowledge out loud because we are Reyes children and we express love through sarcasm and competitive pillow throwing.

"Half the rent," I confirm. "Deal."

"And no bringing F1 drivers here."

My face does something. I don't know exactly what it does, but whatever it does, Marco sees it, because his eyes narrow by approximately three millimeters.

"I'm kidding," he says slowly, watching me.

"I know."

"...Was that a weird thing to say?"

"Nope."

"Mari."

"Marco."

We stare at each other. He has our mother's eyes—warm brown, perceptive in a way that's inconvenient when you're trying to hide things. I have them too. We both got the eyes and the sarcasm and the inability to ask for help until we're already bleeding on someone's marble floor.

"Okay," he says finally, apparently deciding to let it go. "I'm ordering Pollo Tropical. You want the Caribbean chicken or the TropiChop?"

"TropiChop. White rice. Extra beans."

"That's what I'm getting."

"So order two."

"I'm not ordering two of the same thing—"

"Then I'll eat yours."

"You'll eat—" He points at me. "This is exactly why I charged you for channel changes. This is cause and effect."

We eat on the couch, which requires a certain core strength to navigate given its topography, watching a Marlins game that neither of us actually cares about. Marco has strong opinions about the bullpen situation that I follow with exactly twelve percent of my brain. The other eighty-eight percent is doing what it always does at approximately seven in the evening: inventory.

Day one of the new life.