CHAPTER 2

     Ria's mornings began before the light did.

     She rose at five-thirty — not because she needed to, but because the hour before dawn was the only time the apartment felt purely hers. She moved through the kitchen in bare feet and quiet, filling the kettle without letting it clank against the stove, pulling open cabinet doors with two fingers instead of four. She had learned every creak in this apartment over the years. She knew which floorboard announced itself and how to step around it. She had calibrated her entire early morning existence to the project of not being heard.

She cooked for two without deciding to. Rice, always. The particular ratio of water he preferred — softer than most people made it, the grains just barely holding their shape. Miso broth from scratch because the packaged kind had a chemical aftertaste he had mentioned exactly once, two years ago, and she had never bought it since. She wrapped everything in the proper containers, labeled them with times — breakfast, lunch — because structure was the only language she had for the thing she couldn't say out loud.

Her own reflection caught her sometimes in the window over the sink while she worked. Red-rimmed eyes on her worst mornings. Pressed lips when she was fighting the tremble. She had become very good at the pressed-lip expression. It required practice; she had been practicing for a long time.

     She loved him. That fact was as simple and as impossible as any fact she had ever known. It lived in her the way a splinter lives in skin — small, deep, impossible to ignore but too embedded to remove cleanly. She had not chosen it. She had not wanted it. It had arrived sometime in the years after her mother married his father and they had become, by the administrative logic of family, something the world would call siblings, and she had understood immediately and with blunt certainty that what she felt did not comply with that definition and also that it could never, not once, not in any form, be spoken aloud.

She left the trays outside his door and went back to her own room to prepare for college. She packed her bag carefully — lecture notes she had already organized the night before, the specific pens she used for different subjects, the small bottle of ibuprofen she carried now because the tension headaches had started around the second week of Kai's silence and had not stopped since. She left the apartment without knocking on his door. She had learned not to knock in the morning. Knocking in the morning only reminded him that she was expecting something from him, and expectation was the thing he was least equipped to carry.

     The panic attack happened on a Tuesday. She was certain of the day because she had a semiotics lecture at nine that she had been anxious about, and she remembered the anxiety clearly because when she heard the sound from his room — a gasping, ragged, furniture-scraping sound — the anxiety about the lecture simply ceased to exist, replaced by something that moved faster and colder.

She didn't knock. She used the spare key she had never told him she had made. She had made it three weeks into his silence, not as a violation but as insurance, the way a sailor ties a second knot.

                                                                                  * * *

      He was on the floor beside the bed. Curled on his side, knees toward his chest, one hand pressed flat to the hardwood as if trying to push himself upright and finding his arms insufficient to the task. His breathing was the wrong kind — too shallow, too fast, a rhythm that fed itself. His skin had gone the grey-white color of paper left too long in damp air. His eyes were open and tracking the middle distance with the unfocused terror of someone watching something no one else in the room could see.

Ria crossed the room in four steps and knelt beside him. She didn't touch him immediately — she had read enough to know that sometimes touch during a panic attack escalated it, that the unexpected contact of a hand could read to the body as threat rather than comfort. She put herself within his eyeline first.

     "Kai." Her voice was even. She had practiced this evenness, this particular frequency that was neither alarm nor falsely cheerful. "Look at me. Look here."

His gaze found her. She watched it focus — the terrible, effortful way his attention had to travel back across some tremendous distance to arrive in the present moment.

"Breathe with me," she said. She made it audible — exaggerated the inhale, made the exhale long and visible. In. Hold. Out slow. She did this five times and watched his chest begin to synchronize with hers, the way one pendulum eventually matches another through simple proximity.

      When his breathing approached something like normal, she moved closer. She put one hand lightly on his shoulder blades, over his shirt, and felt the trembling in him like a small engine that hadn't learned how to stop. She wrapped her arms around his frame without pulling — just present, just warmth, just the information that another body existed and had chosen to be here.

      "You're not alone," she said softly. Her voice cracked on the last word. She had been saving that crack up for a long time.

His breathing hitched. He didn't speak. He didn't hold her back. But he didn't push her away either, and she decided that evening to count this as a form of progress.

                                                                               * * *

      Later, much later, when he had subsided into the exhausted flatness that follows panic, he said: "You shouldn't waste yourself on me."

The words were quiet, delivered toward the middle distance rather than at her. She sat beside him on the floor, her back against the side of his bed, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched.

She didn't answer for a long time. The silence between them was a room she had furnished carefully over years, and she knew its dimensions better than he did.

      Then she said: "That's not your decision."

He had nothing to say to this. She had thought for a long time about what words would fit this space, and she believed, with quiet confidence, that these were the right ones — short enough not to ask too much of him, but precise enough to mean something.

That night she wrote in her diary. She had been keeping the diary since the beginning of this — since the platform, since the locked door, since the first cold tray she had carried up the stairs and left with its meal untouched. She wrote in it the way she spoke to him: in the dark, without demanding to be heard.

     She wrote: I'll love him silently, even if he never sees me.

She tucked the diary beneath her pillow and switched off her light. In the hallway, silence. In his room, silence. She lay in the dark and she was not at peace, exactly, but she was decided. Decided people can sleep even when they are not at peace.

                                                                              * * *

She slept.

     She did not know that earlier in the evening, while she had been in the kitchen refilling the kettle, Kai had stood in the hallway for almost two minutes. His hand had hovered over the diary, which she had left on the hallway table while reaching for her keys. He had not opened it. He had looked at the cover — at the small decorative bird on the corner, at her handwriting on the first page visible through the translucent cover — and then he had put it back. He had retreated to his room without making a sound.

      He had sat in the dark and he had thought about the fact that the diary existed, that she was writing in it, that the things inside it were about him. He had thought about this for a long time. He did not feel what he should have felt. He felt something too complicated to name and too dangerous to examine and so he examined it from a distance, holding it at arm's length in his mind the way you hold an unfamiliar animal — wanting to know what it was, terrified of what it might do if it came any closer.

                                                                                   ✦