Sweet Romance19 min read
Don't Call Me Just "Sister": My Neighbor Came Home
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I never thought the hallway light would go dim enough to make my heart jump.
The elevator sighed open and he stood there—long limbs pressed into a long coat, taller than I remembered, silhouette like someone who had learned to take up space. For a moment my fingers forgot the keys in my hand.
"You're home early," I said before I could think to be sharp.
"Hi, Kaitlyn," he said. His voice had dropped, a low thing that belonged to grown-up mornings and late-night meetings. "Long time."
I froze. Of all the names I could hear that night—bosses, clients, apartment delivery people—his name was the one that pushed everything out of me. Everett Williams. The boy I had fed and scolded and let sleep on my couch for two years. The boy I used to joke about as my "project." The boy who once put his head on my lap and told me he hated the world.
"Everett?" I tested, because if I let myself hear the way he said it, I might fall back into the rhythm we'd had when he was still a teenager and I the only adult who believed in him. "What are you doing here?"
He reached, impossibly casual, and took the keys from my fingers. "You always leave them funny," he said. Then he pushed the door, flicked on the light with a practiced slap, and walked inside like he owned the route.
"That couch still survives?" he asked, nodding toward my small beige sofa.
"It does," I said, arms clinging to my tote. "Everything's the same."
"Even that blanket," he said. "Did you keep my stupid striped pajamas?"
That sentence broke something in me—comfort and something else, an odd, old ache. He went to the bathroom, still filling the apartment with noise, as if he'd never left.
"I'm sweaty. I'm going to shower," he called, and then the bathroom door shut with a solid thump.
Steam began to whisper out under the door. I stood there, empty-handed, my keys useless. My chest sped up as if I'd climbed the stairs two at a time.
I told myself he would leave. That he had come, stayed for a night, and gone. I'd pick up my life the next morning. I pulled on calm like a sweater and went to open my fridge for something to steady myself. I found a bottle of juice—his favorite from when he was sixteen—and handed it to him when he emerged, hair wet and curls flattened.
"I want wine," he said, looking almost offended.
"You drink now?" I said, laughing too loud. "You're twenty-three, don't act like a scandalous adult."
"I am an adult," he said. He looked around my kitchen, and for a second the boy from six years ago slid back to the surface—a sharper chin, a smile that still started like a question. "Where's the good cup? I need something that says 'welcome back, you've aged well.'"
I threw a paper towel at him. He took it and used it like he'd done it a hundred times before, as if my apartment had been his for years. He put down a small aluminum suitcase by the door—cheap, silver, the kind people use for business trips.
"Five hundred," he said, as if he were reading a price tag aloud. "Nice, huh?"
"You bought a suitcase," I said. "Since when do you have money for suitcases?"
He shrugged, muscles visible where a sweater clung. "Since I learned how to make money," he replied simply.
The next morning I found him sprawled on my beige sofa, legs hanging off one side, the striped pajamas I recognized from memory clinging to him like a flag. A childish thing but somehow more adult in the way his jaw moved when he slept. I sidled closer; a ridiculous, private impulse made my fingers itch to smooth a curl from his forehead.
He woke with an exaggerated stretch and a half-dream smile. "I'm moving back," he said before I could ask.
"You are?" I left the word out like a test.
"Yeah," he said. "I don't have anywhere. Can I crash for a while?"
"I…" The voice that came from my throat was the good-sister voice that had steered him through exams and broken cigarettes and quiet, rainy nights when his stomach rumbled. "It's inconvenient."
"It's convenient for me," he said, sliding one knee over to rest on the couch arm. "I already know where the light switches are."
"That's not the point," I said, and both of us knew it wasn't. I thought of apartment listings, privacy, the small boundaries that hold a life together. I thought of the eight years we'd shared as a neighbor and two years when I had taken him in as if he were my responsibility.
"Come on, Kaitlyn," he coaxed, with a grin that could make you forgive anything. "I'll sleep on the couch. I won't be a bother."
He had always been able to frame the world like that—an appeal that made help sound like a gift. I remembered the day his grandmother died and how I had found him in the stairwell with his hands clasped and his face clean with shock. I had said something stupid and brave and then: "I'll take care of you." He had believed me, and I had meant it.
"I won't be your landlord," I said, because I was trying to be a proper adult. "You stay a few nights, I help you find a place."
He tilted his head and pretended to take offense. "How could you be so uncharitable? After I served you so well last time."
"Last time?" I demanded.
"You mean, when I saved you from boys who thought they could push us around? When I let you be heroic and almost get me arrested?"
I bit back the memory of a brick and the way his mouth had once been pressed in anger at the unfairness of being looked at. He had laughed when I told the story at first; now his lips softened into something like nostalgia.
"I was supposed to be useful," he said, eyes bright. "You promised to look after me. Now I'm paying you back."
That night he brought out clothes that didn't fit the small, threadbare image I had kept of him. Brand tags, little embroidered things. A watch that sat heavy against the table like a new planet. He claimed they were affordable, that he'd pawned a startup or two, that he'd hustled. "I had to learn fast," he told me. "You taught me how not to take shit. I learned how to take chances."
It took me less than seventy-two hours to notice how his presence rearranged my life.
"You're not sleeping in my bed," I told him the first morning. "The bedroom is mine."
"Only because I promised the couch," he answered, blue eyes like a dare. "You still put out those stupid throw pillows. You always match everything like you're preparing for a catalog."
"You're being impossible."
"That's my special talent."
We settled into a precarious domesticity. He made coffee his way and left the capsule box on top of the counter like an accusation. He hung shirts in my closet as if he had been given permission to do so by some unspoken authority. He started buying groceries in odd quality—expensive cheeses, orange juice of a kind I'd only ever read about—and left the bags by the door like trophies.
There were small victories that sent the familiar, dangerous lift up through my chest.
"You're smiling," I told him once as he reached to tuck a loose strand of hair behind my ear.
He kept his voice quiet. "I don't smile a lot," he admitted. "But when I do, I want to give it to you."
"Since when did you decide what you give and to whom?" I teased.
"Since forever," he said. Then he kissed my cheek, quick and warm, and I felt something like a child who'd been caught taking a cookie and then offered another. The moment was small and huge at once.
Outside my apartment life, the world treated him like a different species. People glanced; women raised their eyebrows; a coworker even joked, "Kaitlyn, is that your boyfriend?" and then, on seeing Everett's easy cold smile, said, "Oh." Rumors and whispers bloomed like summer flowers I didn't want to smell.
Everett reveled in the attention, sometimes. Once, at a team outing that I had attempted to attend with him, he leaned over and whispered, "They're all thinking the same thing: he's mine." He did not mean it as a boast. He meant it like a fact about gravity.
"Stop saying things that make people stare," I hissed.
"Let them stare. You look good when you're fuming," he said, and brushed my fingers with the pad of his thumb. The touch sent a long, slow thrill through me.
Then, one afternoon, I followed a thread I shouldn't have.
My curiosity is a dangerous animal. I looked for a proof of how he'd come by his sudden wealth because the kid who used to be afraid of riding the subway suddenly drove cars with logos I couldn't place and wore watches that made me blink.
On a wet Saturday I watched him step out of a dark red Panamera with a woman who belonged in another life—poised, lipstick like a banner, pearls, the sort of self-assurance that doesn't ask for permission. Her hair was cropped in that chic way; she moved like she paid attention to the way the sun hit things. She hugged Everett in a way that suggested business and whatever else passed between them.
"Investment partner?" I asked later, more to myself than to him. The word felt clinical and small.
"One of them," he said. "Helga Moreno."
Helga. He had said the name like it was a magic formula. She was older; I could see that at a glance—thirty, forty, whatever number it took to make someone both frightening and magnetic.
"That was a meeting," Everett said, diverting like he always did. "She helps startups. She liked our pitch."
"Pitch?" I echoed. Images of him sleeping in my hallway like a stray came to flame against images of him getting out of that car, holding shopping bags in the crook of his arm. "What do you actually do? I didn't study techno-capitalism."
"It's boring," he murmured. "I design products. I meet people with money. I sell things that people need."
I wanted to argue. I wanted to demand how long he'd known Helga, what her relationship with him meant. Instead I said nothing, because how do you explain that the way he smoothed the hair behind my ear felt more intimate than any contract he'd probably ever signed?
When I finally asked, he looked at me, serious, and something leaked through the practiced smile. "Do you think it's wrong?"
"Do I think what is wrong? You making money? You standing next to an older woman who buys you things? You bringing slippers into my home?"
"All of it." His hand found mine and his thumb stroked the inside of my wrist like someone reading a pulse. "You ever think you were too good for me?"
"No," I said quickly. It felt like a lie and a truth at once. "I thought—" I stopped. Thinking was dangerous because thinking made sentences that he would untie with some charm or mischief.
"I thought you taught me to be better," he said, low.
"I did." My voice held a steel I didn't feel.
That night he brought home a tiny blue box and set it on the coffee table. "For you," he said simply.
"Is this one of Helga's?" I asked, suspicion like a stone.
"It is from me," he insisted. "I bought it with my own stupid money."
I studied the box. Inside, a small thing: a keychain shaped like a tiny spaceship. I laughed, and he laughed, and for a moment we were just ridiculous two people who had survived things.
But the doubts didn't evaporate. I stood vigil the evening I saw Helga kiss his cheek and heard her call him "Everett, my dear," in a tone that made me want to shove a fist between them. Later, when bags of Tiffany and LV appeared at my door like smug awards, my stomach did a peculiar flip.
"Why did she give you stuff?" I demanded, voice low and unkind.
"Because investments have perks," he said, and then his arms went around me. There are ways to be both brazen and protective. "Because people like giving me things. Because I am fortunate."
"Are you her—"
"Employee? Partner? Companion? What do you want me to be?" His question split the air between us. He sounded wounded in a way that made me want to glue my mouth shut.
"I'm not accusing," I lied, and then lay down a law I couldn't enforce. "I want honesty."
"Always," he promised, and kissed the hollow of my throat, reminding me why promises sometimes felt like warmth.
We had a brief, ridiculous period of bliss that existed because he, suddenly, had currency—and because I, tired and lonely and used to being the caretaker, felt a delicious flutter when someone took care of me back. He brewed tea the way I liked it. He learned my coffee order. He left my cold feet tucked inside his sweater sleeves and called it "warming practice."
"You're different," he'd say sometimes, between the lines of a joke, and then press his forehead to mine. "You used to be the one who scolded me and now you let me steal blankets."
"Don't get sentimental," I told him, because was I allowed to have a soft spot? "You're being vague to avoid chores."
"Vague and handsome," he corrected. His hands were creative and gentle; he found a way to touch that didn't demand. It made my ribs go warm.
But I still kept one secret. I had seen the message from the bank. Once, when his phone lit up because he'd left it on the table, the notification showed a clever number with commas like mountains—numbers I had never let myself imagine for someone whose teenage nights had been spent worrying about cheap cigarettes.
I confronted him, finally.
"It was on your screen," I said. "The balance."
"What balance?"
"The long one," I said. "You have a lot of money."
He sighed, not angry, not ashamed—just tired, as if my surprise made him more sleepy than anything. "Everett," he said softly, and the name fell like a small apology. "I don't want it to scare you."
"It doesn't scare me," I lied. "It just—makes things confusing."
"Then make them simple," he said, blunt and foolish and honest all at once. "Marry me."
He said it once like a boy who'd never understood the scale of the word. It floated between us like a thrown coin. It was not romantic; it was a claim, a direction. "Marry me," he repeated as if he were practicing the sound.
"You can't be serious," I said, shocked. "You're twenty-three. I am thirty. It's not—"
"I am serious," he said. "I wanted to be small and honest and ask you first. Kaitlyn, please."
His earnestness made me want to melt and also to object violently. "You are impossible," I snapped. "Do you think I would accept to be a fantasy?"
He looked like a boy who had been told he couldn't have a toy, then pleaded, then steeled himself. "I just want to take care of you. Let me."
"You're not my custody arrangement," I said, which sounded cruel and petty, because words about ownership have a way of slipping.
He laughed, but the sound was raw. "You taught me to be arrogant," he observed, somewhat ruefully. "Now look at me."
The tension eased into a different kind of closeness after that. We argued and made up; he learned to boil water properly; I learned to let him hold my hand on a train. People around us loved to say, "Age is just a number," which made me want to roll my eyes until they hurt. It was a phrase that pretended to be kind but also ignored how maturity and life experience can be different things.
Then one night, the thing that would break and remake our life happened.
We were at a small family-like party for my coworkers. Drinks, laughter, the easy noise of colleagues who thought they knew us after seeing us together. Everett was there, unprecedentedly handsome in a slate shirt with a few buttons undone. He was my neighbor, my trouble, and my delightful complication. A girl from accounting, Brenna, had been joking with him all night, drawn to the magnetism he seemed to carry.
"Is he your boyfriend, Kaitlyn?" she asked, waggling her eyebrows.
"No," I blurted. "He's my neighbor."
"Neighbor at this point?" Blythe Faulkner, my colleague and traitor in good humor, piped up, delighted. "I thought you had a date. Kaitlyn, you sly fox."
I felt thirty-five pairs of eyes swivel toward us like a pack. Everett smirked at the attention with casual ease, and then leaned over and whispered, "Imagine what they'd do if they knew I've been sleeping on her couch."
I pushed him with my elbow, but he caught my hand and brought it to his mouth for a slow, public kiss on the knuckles. The gesture was perversely tender and made heads turn. I flushed and then laughed, because he had always been best at undermining my stern face.
After the party, beneath the hum of a taxi's engine, he turned to me and said, voice small, "I love you."
It was both more and less than I'd expected. The words fell from him like an offering. I swallowed.
"I don't know what to say," I answered. "You said that before."
He looked at me like he had been carved from light. "I did. And it's truer now."
"That's nonsense," I said to him and myself. "You're infatuated."
"Maybe," he conceded, but then he added, "But it isn't. Not only infatuation."
"Everett," I warned, because there were things between us that were fragile and not mine to take apart. "Don't build the sky with promises you can't keep."
"I don't want to build the sky," he said, "I want to make the house we live in safe."
"You can't make me a house," I said, voice small and airy. "Not like that."
He was quiet for a long time. Then he said as if he were considering a trivial fact, "I left before because I thought I couldn't be what you needed. But I can do things now. I can make things easier."
"That's not what I need," I said.
"Then tell me what you need," he insisted.
"I need honesty," I said. "I need boundaries. I need food on a table and a space where I don't wake up with your legs over mine and panic because we blurred something that should be clear."
He smiled thinly. "I thought that blurred things into something better."
"Not always," I replied.
We fell into a quiet agreement—less grandiose than marriage, more practical. He would find a place of his own. He would pay rent. He would be honest about his relationships. I would not pretend I was immune to his charms.
It lasted, in its strictness, for three weeks.
Then there was the night Helga came over, because Helga had a thing for seeing the people she invested in in the light of domestic normalcy. She arrived like a star and placed a set of bags on my hallway floor as if she were praising a colt. Everett greeted her with a warmth that was affectionate and practiced.
"Kaitlyn," Helga said, like someone who had rehearsed this syllable, "you take good care of our boy."
"Our boy?" I said, more sharply than intended.
She smiled, not unkindly. "Everett has been a marvelous investment."
"Is this—" I started, and Everett put his hand over mine.
"The only investment I ask of him," Helga said to me, "is honesty and effort. Everything else I can buy."
Her candor was a slap dressed in jewelry. People in the kitchen made small noises, and my colleagues eyed the scene. Everett looked a little defensive—which was absurd, because the woman had given him gifts in public. It was hard to tell where business ended and affection started; the two were braided.
After Helga left, I found the bags in our hallway, a litany of price tags and things that made me want to laugh and cry at once. Everett sat in the doorway and exhaled.
"I'm not selling myself," he said. "I am my own person."
"I didn't say you were," I replied coldly.
He reached for me, and because I'm a human who has soft spots where years of solitude carved the shape for someone else's warmth, I let him. This was the trouble with him. He could touch in the exact places where I had stored my loneliness, and the ache would bloom.
Our lives started threading together in new ways. We joked about our strange contract: rent, privacy, dinners, promises. The edge between "sister" and "something else" hovered like a humid cloud.
"Do you ever regret me raising you?" I asked one night, half-drunk on wine, revealing myself to be the kind of person who likes to ask traps.
"No," he said simply. "I was better when you were watching."
"Better how?"
"Less scared to try," he said. He looked at me with such steady softness that I felt foolishly like someone who could be repaired by his eyes.
And then the late night happened—the one that made me wake the next morning with sun in my eyes and his arm a chain around my waist and the memory of consenting to something that felt both inevitable and dangerously tender.
He slept like a small animal, breath hot against my back. When I moved a muscle, he mumbled and curled closer. I remembered the boy on my staircase years ago, and the man who now fit like a hand in my life.
"You'll always be my first," he said in a sleepy voice, the thing I hadn't expected.
"Wha—" My brain fuzzed with the impossible sweetness of the sentence. "Everett, what are you saying?"
"You're my first," he repeated, more focused. "I kept my first for you."
Keepings and offerings have strange power. There was an honesty there so blunt it was almost clumsy. He wasn't the type to speak elegantly, but to hold truth like a block of wood—solid, heavy, inescapable.
I lay still, absorbing the weight of that statement like a warmth seeping into cold fingers. It made me feel less guilty about the night, about the way my body had betrayed my better sense and given in. It also made me look at him more fully and wonder at the ways we were both changing.
A few days later, the house of cards we had built began to wobble.
I was at work, and a rumor slid across the office like oil on water. "He sleeps with investors," someone said, with the rhythm of someone who has tasted scandal. "They give him gifts. Maybe you should wake up."
It stung sharper than I planned. I came home and found Everett at the table, fingers tapping his phone. He looked up with a face that tried to be calm but failed.
"What now?" I asked.
"We need to talk," he said. His voice had an edge thin as wire.
"About what?"
"About Helga."
The conversation that followed wasn't dramatic in a cinematic way. There was no grand showdown at the table with a chorus. It was quieter, which made it more vicious. He explained that Helga was an investor, that their relationship was professional, that the gifts were tokens of business affection. He called them "perks."
"And the car?" I asked. "The watch? The bank numbers?"
"They're mine," he said. "I earned them."
"I don't doubt that you earned something," I said. The accusation in my voice surprised me. "But you didn't tell me. You left me with the idea that you were scraping by. You let me play matron when you had a house of cards I couldn't see."
"I didn't hide them to hurt you," he said. "I just—didn't know how."
"When you said you wanted to 'take care of me,' you meant buy me things?" I demanded.
"I meant a lot of things." He stood and walked to the window, palms flat against the glass, as if distance might give him wisdom. "I meant time. I meant effort. I meant to be someone who won't leave you on a stair.
"You're upset because I didn't show you my numbers," he added, voice rougher. "But money doesn't fix the things you worry about."
That's when the slippery speaking began; excuses folded into each other. He said he'd been ashamed of appearing too successful because he didn't want to be only a source of anxiety. I said I felt betrayed. He said he hadn't wanted to stake a claim on me. I said then why had his hand been so quick to put a keychain in my palm and call it home.
The sting of betrayal doesn't always need a villain. Sometimes it's just the slow accumulation of unshared truths.
I told him he needed to move out. He looked like someone who had been told to unlearn a language. "Why?" he said, like he had never heard the word before.
"Because I need clarity," I said. "Because you living with me is messy when you won't be honest."
He laughed, a small, incredulous sound. "You ask me to be honest and then tell me to go?"
"Yes," I replied. "I ask honesty because I want you to be able to stand on your own, not because I want to be kept in the dark."
He paused, and then his face changed from hurt to a mischief I knew too well. "Fine," he said lightly, and then softer: "I'll leave when you say so. But you know I'll keep calling you for dinners when I'm back in the neighborhood."
"You're impossible," I muttered.
The first day he left was a peculiar kind of funeral. The apartment felt too big and yet hollow. My nights were quieter and rougher. I realized I'd given up a kind of closeness that now felt irrevocably sweet and terrible.
Then the office drama mounted. People speculated. A whisper campaign suggested all sorts of things—that Everett was some kind of kept man, a gigolo for the city's women of capital. It was nonsense and not entirely without observational basis. But the worst was watching the way my colleagues' faces changed when they saw me in the hallway with a key I no longer trusted.
One afternoon, the office's rumor queen confronted me near the break room. "Did he sleep with Helga?" she asked with a smile that meant to wound.
I looked at her and then laughed, a short, sharp sound. "Why does it matter?" I said. "Because you want to watch me be humiliated?"
"It's not about humiliation," she said. "It's about curiosity."
"Curiosity kills everything," I said. "Go ask Everett."
When I finally saw him again, he looked different in a way that pierced me. The ease was gone; there was an earnestness burned through by hurt.
"I met someone," he said. "Not Helga. Someone who introduced me to a group that can take the company further. I have to go on a trip. Beijing, maybe Paris. I might not be back next month."
"My chest tightened. "Is this how you leave again? Without warning?"
"I'm not leaving you." He looked very small when he said it. "I'll be back when I promised I'd return."
"Promises," I said, feeling faintly cruel.
"You said you wanted boundaries," he reminded me. "I'm trying to respect them."
On the day he flew away, I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about the striped pajamas shoved into a laundry basket and the aluminum suitcase left in the corner like an accusation. I thought of the brick I had used to protect him in a fight. I thought of the night he had told me he loved me like it was the simplest truth. I realized then I had to decide what I'd been raising him for: to keep him a boy who might one day be broken, or to bring along something of myself and risk the fall.
I made a choice I wasn't sure how to own. I walked to the window, looked at the city like someone trying to memorize a face, and whispered into the dark, "Take care, Everett."
When the months passed—no, I must not say "months passed" only as a recap. Instead, I will tell you specific nights and the way each felt.
One night, I received a picture message from a number I did not recognize. It was Everett, lens close-up, his smile slack and genuine, leaning against a balcony railing with a panoramic city-light backdrop. He wrote, "Airport bar. Miss the couch."
Another time he sent me a scarf he'd bought for me in a city I couldn't pronounce. Inside, there was a note: "For the nights you get colder than normal." The words were tender and precise in a way that made me forgive him sometimes, small pieces at a time.
There were days when I missed the ruthless, adolescent earnestness of him—the one who would punch a wall for the sake of a principle. There were other days when I admired his grown-up choices. Most days lived between those poles, like breath held and released.
When he returned again—back through the elevator door as if conjured—the first line he said was the same. "Kaitlyn. Long time."
I was tired of being surprised at how a person could both wound and mend you. I had matured enough, or perhaps grown duller; I felt less like a hero and more like someone too vulnerable to be heroic. Everett didn't ask to move back in this time. He asked for permission to be the person who came when I was tired.
"Can you let me in?" he asked.
"I don't promise anything," I said.
He smiled, not the wild grin of a boy but a patient expression that held both apology and hope. "Fine. Can I have coffee with you sometimes?"
"Sometimes," I answered, which is as good as a yes when two people are learning to be honest.
There are moments that make a heartbeat—the ones the sweet romance world calls "heart-fluttering." I can list a few. The first is when Everett took off his coat and wrapped it over my shoulders without being asked because the office air conditioner betrayed my skin. He doesn't often show tenderness like a performance—it's private, precise.
The second is when he laughed awkwardly and, because he said he didn't know how to be gentle, slid his fingers under my wrist to show me how, gently and clumsy, like demonstrating a new tool. My pulse skipped as if someone had said my name in a crowded room.
The third is the night he wrote my name on the corner of a napkin during a boring meeting and then folded it into a paper airplane to send across the conference room like a child. "I've never stopped leaning on you," he said when it landed: a small confession that made an ordinary weekday electric.
I won't promise a flawless ending. Life is messy and lovers even more so. We argued about the way he retreated into work and I leaped into worry. He argued about how I sometimes turned maternal when he needed a partner. We had therapy sessions that involved him making coffee and me making lists and then both of us forgetting the lists.
At the end of a strange, long season, what saved us was not money nor dramatic promises but small acts—taking an umbrella when one of us left, opening a jar when the other's hands were full, staying to watch a stupid TV show together when either of us wanted to sleep.
We still kept the aluminum suitcase in the hall, an artifact that made us both laugh and tremble. He bought a second beige blanket to replace the old one he's slept under. He still put his cold feet against my stomach. I still told him to stop calling me "sis" in public because it made the world think we were something easier. He still kissed the knuckles of my hand when he wanted to say "sorry" without pride.
One evening, as rain ticked against the window and the small beige sofa looked even smaller with two people on it, Everett brought out a tiny spaceship keychain and handed it to me.
"For the way you taught me to aim," he said.
I closed my fingers around the cold metal and felt it anchor down into my palm. He looked at me the way he had when he was a boy, with the same stubborn tenderness. "Don't call me just 'sister,'" he added with a grin, and the apartment filled, for a moment, with a fragile kind of laughter that belonged only to us.
I couldn't promise the rest of our lives. I can only promise that, when the world felt too loud and soiled with rumor, we learned to make a small space that smelled of oranges and cheap wine and the faint lemon of his cologne—an honest place where a woman who once fed a boy could decide whether she wanted to keep doing it as his sister or someone else. For now, we let the striped pajamas hang between us, a reminder of how it all began: with a cracked stairwell, a brick, and a promise to care.
The End
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