Isabel and Destiny

The First Night

September 2020

The text had come on Monday at 04:51.

I'm with Sara. I'll be home Thursday night.

Destiny had read it lying in bed with the phone an inch from her face, the AC unit rattling in the window, and she had read it four more times before she understood what was bothering her about it. It was what it didn't say. Anyone else would have put don't worry at the end. Or all good. Or I'm fine. Isabel would have put I'm fine at the end if she'd been fine, because Isabel put exactly what was true in a message and nothing else, and she never left out the reassuring parts to be dramatic. She didn't know how to be dramatic.

So she hadn't been fine. Or she hadn't known yet if she was.

Destiny had written back ok!! love you, bring me something from the fancy kitchen with two emojis, because that was what she would have written on any other Monday, and then she had lain there until it got light, not thinking about the house near the Everglades, not thinking about a woman on a couch cleaning a gun with a handkerchief, not thinking about anything, very carefully.

---

By Thursday she had cleaned the apartment twice, which was a sign of something, because she hated cleaning and everybody who had ever met her knew it.

She'd bought flowers. She'd bought limes and a bottle of mezcal she couldn't afford and a little bag of dried hibiscus from the Mexican grocery on 8th because she'd seen a video. She'd queued up a movie, a terrible one, a disaster movie with a volcano and a divorced scientist, because the worse the movie the more Isabel said, and Destiny liked it best when Isabel said things.

She'd put a new mask on the hook by the door, the black one with the little white collar pattern she'd bought as a joke. Matches your uniform. Isabel had never worn it. Destiny put it up anyway.

At 22:40 the key turned in the lock.

Destiny was on the couch with her feet under her and a cocktail shaker in her lap, and she had meant to be very casual about this, so she said, without turning around: "If that's a burglar, the good stuff's in the bedroom, and by good stuff I mean nothing, I have negative money."

"It's me," Isabel said.

"I know it's you, Iz, I'm doing a bit."

She turned around.

Isabel was standing just inside the door, taking her shoes off. She did it the way she always did it: one, then the other, heel against heel, then bending to line them up on the mat with the toes pointed at the wall. She was wearing the black dress with the white collar and a gray cardigan Destiny didn't recognize, too long in the sleeves, probably Sara's. Her hair was tied back tight. There was good color in her cheeks.

She looked fine. She looked completely fine. She looked, Destiny thought, and then immediately stopped herself from thinking, like a photograph of Isabel.

"Hi," Destiny said.

"Hi."

"You're alive."

It was a joke. It was the kind of thing she said. She heard it come out of her mouth a half second before she could stop it and it landed in the little apartment in a way she didn't like, and Isabel, straightening up from the shoes, looked at her with those eyes.

Her eyes were gold.

Destiny had known that about her since school. Everyone had asked, back then, if they were contacts, and Isabel had always said no, and people had always thought she was lying, and she never was. They'd been a strange light brown, almost amber. Honey, Destiny had called them once, drunk in a hotel bar in Lisbon.

They were gold now. Not honey. Gold, like the edge of a coin.

"Hi," Destiny said again, because she'd forgotten she'd already said it.

Isabel didn't answer the joke. She looked at Destiny for a moment longer, and something in her face moved, very slightly, the way it did when Destiny was sad and Isabel didn't know what to do with her hands. Then she came across the room and sat down on the other end of the couch, and folded her hands in her lap, and was still.

That was the other thing.

Isabel had always been still. That was one of the first things Destiny had ever noticed about her, the stillest girl in a building full of girls who fidgeted. But it had always been a person's stillness. A held stillness. You could see the effort in it, a little, if you knew her, the way you can see the work in a very good handstand.

This wasn't held. It was just still. Like a chair.

---

"Okay," Destiny said brightly, "I have a thing."

"I can tell."

"You can't tell, you just walked in."

"The shaker is in your lap and there are limes on the counter and hibiscus on the floor by the fridge. You dropped some."

"Okay, you can tell. Shut up." Destiny uncapped the shaker and started pouring. "It's a mezcal hibiscus sour. With lime and a little agave and the hibiscus, which I steeped, like a professional, for twenty minutes. There was supposed to be egg white but I got scared of the egg white. I watched a video."

"You always get scared of the egg white."

"Salmonella is real, Isabel."

She poured two. They were very pink. She held one out.

Isabel looked at the glass for a moment, and Destiny saw her look at it, and there was something in that look she didn't have a word for. Not reluctance. Not disgust. Something closer to the way you look at a step you're not sure will hold your weight.

Then Isabel took it, and said "thank you," and drank.

Destiny watched her over the rim of her own glass. She told herself she was watching for the verdict. That was the ritual: Destiny made something, Isabel tasted it, and Isabel gave it a number out of ten, and the number was always devastating and always correct, and Destiny pretended to be wounded and secretly wrote it down in her notes app. The best had been an eight. The worst had been a two, a mistake with cucumber that neither of them talked about.

Isabel swallowed. She held the glass in both hands. She looked at it.

"Well?" Destiny said.

It took a long time. It took so long that Destiny started to smile, because a long pause usually meant a good number, and then stopped smiling, because Isabel's face wasn't doing what it did before a good number.

"I can't taste it," Isabel said.

Destiny laughed. "Wow. Okay. Rude."

"I'm not being rude." Isabel was still looking at the glass. "I'm telling you. I can't taste it. I don't think it's the drink." A pause. "I'm sorry. I know you made it for me."

The AC rattled. On the TV, frozen on the menu screen, the volcano was erupting silently on a loop.

"Did you get sick?" Destiny said. She could hear her own voice getting quicker. "Is it, like, the thing? The virus? You lose taste with the virus, I read about it, Iz, did you get tested? Were you at the house with a bunch of people? Because Sara doesn't mask, I've seen her, she doesn't wear one, ever—"

"I don't have the virus."

"How do you know?"

Isabel was quiet.

It wasn't a long silence. It wasn't a dramatic one. It was exactly as long as it took Destiny to understand that the answer to how do you know was something Isabel had, and was not going to give her.

Destiny had spent eight years with the most honest person she'd ever met. She had asked Isabel whether dresses were ugly (*yes*), whether guys were into her (*no*, no, yes but he's married), whether she'd ruined a job interview (*partially*). She'd made a game of it. It was the most reliable thing in her life, better than money, better than her family. You asked Isabel a question, you got the truth, and it was always a little worse and a little better than you were expecting.

She had never once asked Isabel a question and gotten nothing.

"Okay," Destiny said, a little too fast, "okay, you don't have the virus, great, love that for you."

She laughed. It came out a beat early.

---

They watched the movie. Destiny talked through it. She always did, and she did it more tonight, a steady stream about the scientist's terrible haircut and the geology, which was fake, and the love interest, who was clearly the scientist's ex-wife's sister, which nobody on screen seemed to find strange. She talked because Isabel was listening. She could feel her listening. Every so often Isabel said something short and dry, that's not how lava moves or she's going to die in the next scene, and she was right both times, and Destiny laughed for real, and for a few minutes at a time it was fine. It was Thursday. It was a bad movie. They were home.

Halfway through, Isabel got up and went out onto the little balcony and lit a cigarette.

Destiny watched her through the glass door. She watched her because she'd always watched her smoke; there was something steadying about it, the one small messy habit in a woman who ironed her socks. Isabel stood at the railing looking at the parking lot and the dark palms and the orange glow over the Palmetto, and she held the cigarette the way she always held it, between two fingers, low.

She put it to her lips.

The tip glowed. Destiny watched the smoke come off it and drift sideways in the wet September air. She waited for Isabel to exhale. There was always a little cloud, when she exhaled. Isabel always turned her head slightly away from the door to do it, a courtesy, even outside.

The tip glowed again, a second drag.

There was no cloud.

Destiny watched her smoke the whole cigarette. The tip glowed eight times. Isabel stood at the railing with the smoke curling up off the end of it into the dark, and not once did any come out of her.

Destiny looked back at the TV. The scientist was running across a parking lot while cars exploded behind him. She looked at it very hard.

She's holding it, Destiny thought. She's just holding it in. People do that.

She didn't think anything else. She had a place she put things she didn't want to think, since the night in the lodge with the bucket and the brush. She put this there, next to the other thing, and closed the lid.

---

At some point near the end Isabel went to the bathroom and stayed there for a while. The fan was on. Destiny turned the movie up a little. She didn't know why she did that. She told herself it was the good part.

When Isabel came back she sat in the same place and folded her hands in the same way, and her cheeks had the same good color, and she was, if anything, a little paler around the mouth.

"You okay?"

Isabel looked at her.

"I don't know yet," she said.

It was the most honest thing Destiny had ever heard anybody say, and it was the worst, and Destiny felt her eyes go hot so suddenly that she had to look down at her empty glass.

"Okay," she said. "That's okay. That's allowed."

"I know."

"I'm just saying. It's allowed."

"I know." Pause. "Thank you."

The credits rolled. Neither of them moved to turn it off. The volcano went quiet under a lot of sad music. Somewhere outside a car alarm went off and stopped.

"Iz," Destiny said.

"Yes."

"Did Sara do something to you?"

Silence again. The same silence. Destiny made herself sit in it. She made herself count, the way Isabel did, one, two, three, and she got to nine before Isabel spoke, and when she did, she didn't answer the question.

"I need to ask you for something," Isabel said.

"Anything."

"Don't open my door during the day. Please. Even if you think something's wrong. Even if I don't answer. Knock if you want. But don't open it."

Destiny stared at her.

She could see the whole thing. She could see all the questions stacked up behind her teeth: why, what's in there, what happened in that house, what are you. She could feel every one of them. She could feel, too, underneath them, a very old, very quiet part of her that had grown up in the service of people with money and closed doors, a part that her mother had trained and her grandmother had trained into her mother. That part had already understood. It had understood when the text came on Monday at 04:51. It had understood at the door, looking at gold eyes that used to be honey.

That part of her said: you do not open doors in houses like that.

"Okay," Destiny said.

"You're sure."

"I said okay. I'm not going to open your door, weirdo. I don't even like going in your room, it's so clean it makes me anxious." She stood up, grabbing the glasses, because her hands needed to be doing something. "You want a real drink? Not a sad pink one? I have tequila. Or wine. Or—"

"No. Thank you."

Of course not.

Destiny carried the glasses to the sink. Isabel's was still three quarters full. She poured it out and watched it go pink down the drain and rinsed it and set it upside down on the rack.

When she turned around, Isabel was standing behind her. Destiny hadn't heard her get up. She hadn't heard her cross the kitchen.

She almost dropped the glass. She didn't. She'd been trained better than that.

"Jesus, Iz."

"Sorry."

Isabel reached past her and took the dish towel off the oven handle and folded it in thirds and hung it back up, straight. Then she stood there for a moment very close, and Destiny thought she was going to say something else. She could see her deciding. She could see the shape of a sentence behind Isabel's closed mouth, and then Isabel put her arms around her.

She'd done it maybe five times in eight years. Isabel did not hug people. She'd hugged Destiny at graduation, and in Lisbon, and once in a hospital parking lot when Destiny's grandmother died.

Destiny stood very still in the middle of the kitchen with a wet glass in one hand.

Isabel's arms were warm. Her cheek against Destiny's hair was warm. She was holding on a little too tightly, the way you hold onto a railing on a boat. Destiny put her free hand on her back.

There was no heartbeat under it.

Destiny moved her hand, just a little, as if she were rubbing a circle. She did it without thinking, a comforting thing, a thing you do. And she felt the shoulder blades and the warm fabric of the borrowed cardigan and the curve of Isabel's spine, and nothing inside any of it moved at all.

She kept her hand there.

"I missed you," Destiny said into Isabel's shoulder. "It was really boring. I cleaned twice."

"I saw," Isabel said. "You missed the top of the fridge."

Destiny laughed. It was a real one, finally, wet and ugly, and she hid it in the cardigan, and after a moment she felt something that might have been Isabel laughing too, very quietly, with no breath in it.

---

At 06:40 Destiny heard the door to Isabel's room close, and the lock turn, and then, after a minute, a soft sound she couldn't place, like fabric being pushed against the bottom of a door.

She lay in her bed with the AC rattling and the gray starting at the edges of her blinds.

At 12:15 she got up and made coffee and a grilled cheese she didn't finish. She stood in the hallway outside Isabel's door with the plate in her hand. There was a towel wedged along the gap at the bottom, rolled tight, perfectly even.

She raised her hand to knock.

She didn't. She went and got a sticky note and a pen from the junk drawer and wrote on it and stuck it to the door, at eye level, pressing the corners flat with her thumb.

Leftovers in the fridge. You don't have to eat them. Top of the fridge is clean now. D.

She went back to the kitchen and stood at the counter and ate the rest of the grilled cheese, cold, in four bites, and did not think about anything at all.

The Following Weeks

Autumn 2020

---

Tuesday, 15 September

The first thing I learned was that I could not keep the ritual.

Destiny makes something new every Thursday. She has done it since Lisbon. She finds a recipe on her phone, buys one ingredient she can't afford, gets frightened of one step, skips it, and makes the drink anyway. I taste it and give it a number. She has kept every number in her notes app since 2016. I know because I once saw the list over her shoulder, and she snatched the phone away and said don't look at my feelings.

I can't taste anything now. Not properly. Sara told me I would get better at pretending, and I have, a little, but pretending is not the same as tasting, and I will not give Destiny a number I haven't earned.

So on the second Thursday I told her that. Plainly.

She stood at the counter with the shaker in her hand and looked at me for a long moment. Then she poured one glass, only one, for herself, and sat down across from me at the little table, and drank some, and closed her eyes.

"Okay," she said. "It's gin. It's that fancy pink gin. Grapefruit, fresh, I squeezed it, you'd be proud. Rosemary syrup, which I made, and which is too strong, I think. It smells like a Christmas tree fell into a swimming pool. The first sip is sour and then it goes kind of bitter and then the rosemary comes in at the end, like a guy who shows up late to a party and talks too loud."

She opened her eyes.

"Well?" she said.

I thought about it for a long time. She let me.

"Six," I said. "The rosemary is doing too much. You should have strained the syrup sooner."

She stared at me. Then she laughed so hard she had to put the glass down.

"You can't even taste it."

"I'm rating the description."

"You're rating my description."

"It was a six," I said. "The part about the swimming pool was good."

She wrote it down. I saw her. Under the date she typed 6 (descr.) and then, after a moment, a little heart.

We have done it that way every Thursday since. Her descriptions have become very good. She says it is the most she has ever thought about anything she drinks. Last week she compared a mezcal to a cigarette someone smoked in a church, and I gave it an eight, the highest score in the list, and she has not stopped talking about it.

I rouse the Blush every night I come home. It costs me. Some nights it costs more than others. I have started, without deciding to, doing the arithmetic on the way up the stairs: how much it will take, how much I have, whether I will need to go out again before dawn.

I have not yet come home without it. I don't intend to.

---

Wednesday, 23 September

Destiny had a bad day.

I knew before she said anything. She was home before me, which was wrong, because on Wednesdays she works late; and she was lying on the couch with the lights off and her work shoes still on, which was very wrong, because Destiny hates her work shoes more than anything in the world and takes them off in the elevator.

"Don't," she said, when I reached for the light switch.

I didn't.

I took my own shoes off and lined them up, and then I went and sat on the floor by the couch, with my back against it, near her head. That's where I sit when she is sad. I learned it in school. If I sit next to her she feels watched, and if I sit across from her she feels interviewed, and if I sit on the floor with my back to her she can look at the ceiling and talk to it, and I am only there, like the furniture.

I heard her breathing. I heard her heart. It was going fast and uneven, the way it does when she has been crying and has stopped and is thinking about starting again. I have always been able to tell when Destiny has been crying. Now I can hear it from the stairwell.

After eleven minutes she said, to the ceiling: "Mrs. Albrecht said I folded her napkins like a hotel."

I waited.

"Like, in a mean way. Like hotel was a bad word. In front of her whole book club." Her voice cracked on club. "I've been folding napkins for that woman for two years, Iz. She's never said anything. And today she decides it's hotel. And then she made me refold all of them, with the whole book club watching, and one of them, Margot, the one with the teeth, she said oh, don't be hard on her, the help is always a bit rigid, and everybody laughed, and I just stood there and folded napkins."

I said nothing. That was right. She didn't want anything said yet.

"I'm good at the paperwork," Destiny said. "I'm really good at the paperwork. I do their taxes, basically. I found twelve thousand dollars they were overpaying their pool guy. And she's never said anything about that. She says my napkins are hotel."

Her heart was slowing down. I listened to it slow.

"Are they?" she said. "Hotel?"

It was a real question. She wanted a real answer. She always does, from me. It is why she asks me.

I thought about her napkins. I have watched her fold them. She does them fast, with a sharp crease, all the same, in stacks, because she wants to get it over with and move on to something she's good at.

"Yes," I said. "They're hotel."

She made a small, wounded sound.

"But Mrs. Albrecht's husband is having an affair with his physical therapist," I said, "and Margot has been sleeping with her tennis instructor since June, and the book club has not read a book since 2018. They talk about the book for four minutes and then they drink until someone cries. You told me. You also told me Mrs. Albrecht serves store-bought hummus in a bowl and calls it homemade."

There was a long silence above me.

Then Destiny began to laugh. Slowly at first, into a cushion, and then helplessly, a wet, snorting laugh, and I felt the couch shake against my back.

"Oh my God," she said. "Oh my God, the hummus."

"Your napkins are hotel," I said. "It doesn't matter. Everything else in that house is worse than hotel. Everything else in that house is a motel on the side of a highway."

She laughed until she was crying again, but it was the other kind of crying. Then she reached down and put her hand on top of my head, just rested it there, the way you'd rest your hand on a dog, and left it.

I didn't move. I didn't want her to take it away.

After a while she said, drowsily, "Your hair's so cold."

I know, I thought. I'm sorry. I'd forgotten the Blush doesn't reach my hair.

"It's the air conditioning," I said, and then felt the wrongness of it start at the center of me, the second floor laid over the first, and I stopped, and said instead, "I was out in the wind."

That was true. I had been. I let it stand.

She didn't notice anything. She was almost asleep. Her hand stayed on my head until she was all the way asleep, and then it slid off, and I took her work shoes off, one and then the other, and lined them up by the couch with the toes toward the wall, and covered her with the blanket, and sat back down on the floor, and listened to her heart until it was the slowest it gets.

---

Saturday, 3 October

The grocery store is the Walmart on 8th Street, because it's the only one open all night. I drive. Destiny comes with me, even though she doesn't need to, because she says Walmart at midnight is the best people-watching in Florida and she can't miss it.

We put on masks at the door. Hers is the black one with the little white collar. Mine is plain black. She says we look like two maids robbing a bank.

We go down every aisle. I push the cart. She puts things in it that she will not eat and I take some of them out when she isn't looking. I leave the ones she will actually eat. I have had eight years of practice at telling which is which.

In the snack aisle she holds up a bag of chips in a flavor I have never heard of. Something with pickles.

"Would you eat these?" she says. "Hypothetically. If you could eat."

I look at her. She's looking at the chips. She said if you could eat the way you would say if you had a million dollars. Lightly. A game.

She hasn't asked me why I don't eat anymore. She has watched me push food around a plate and not finish it for three weeks. She has heard me in the bathroom afterward, I think, though she turns up the TV every time, loud, and says she's watching the good part.

She has invented a reason. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's a diet. Maybe it's the virus. Maybe it's Sara, some rule of Sara's house, some strange Old World fasting thing. She has built a small, safe room in her head where there is a reason, and she lives there, and she never opens the door to look at what the reason actually is.

I know the room. I was trained in the same kind of house.

"No," I say. "They'd be terrible."

"You don't know that."

"Pickle chips are always terrible."

"Wow. Okay. Snob." She puts them in the cart anyway. She'll eat three and throw the rest away. "You'd eat the salt and vinegar ones, though. You used to eat those all the time."

"I know."

She looks at me for a second over the top of her mask. Her eyes are very green under the Walmart lights, and very tired, and something in them is asking me a question.

I wait. I don't know what I would say if she asked it.

She doesn't ask it. She reaches past me and takes a bag of salt and vinegar chips off the shelf and puts them in the cart, too.

"For the apartment," she says. "In case."

In case what, I don't ask.

At the register, a man in front of us is arguing with the cashier about a coupon. He is loud and red and sour-smelling, and his heart is pounding with a fury far too big for a coupon, and I stand behind Destiny and look at the side of his neck and count, very carefully, one, two, three, until I feel her fingers find mine by the cart handle and squeeze.

I don't know if she knows what she's doing. I think she just thinks I'm uncomfortable in crowds.

I am, now. Just not the way she means.

I let her hold my hand the whole way through the checkout. The man with the coupon leaves. The Hunger lies back down. Destiny pays with a card I know is near its limit, and I don't say anything, loudly.

In the car she opens the salt and vinegar chips and eats one and hands me the bag.

I hold it on my lap the whole way home.

---

Tuesday, 13 October

Destiny got sick.

Not the virus. She tested twice, the rapid kind, the swab up the nose, and swore at the ceiling both times. It was a normal thing, the flu or a cold that had forgotten when to stop. But she was hot and miserable and her heart was going fast and thin, and she was scared, because everyone was scared that year.

"You should stay away from me," she said, from under three blankets. "If it's the thing and the test is wrong. You should stay away."

"It won't matter if I get it," I said.

She looked at me from under the blankets. Her eyes were glassy with fever.

"That's a weird thing to say, Iz."

"I know."

She kept looking at me. I let her. After a while she closed her eyes.

"Okay," she said. "Then stay."

So I stayed.

I learned how to make soup from a video on her phone, the way she learns cocktails. I couldn't taste it, so I followed the recipe exactly, to the gram, with the kitchen scale she bought for baking and never used. I made her tea with honey. I sat on the floor by the bed with my back to it and read out loud to her from a paperback she'd left on the nightstand, a romance novel with a shirtless Scotsman on the cover, and she laughed at how seriously I read the love scenes, and then made me read one again, and laughed harder.

On the second night her fever went very high. I sat on the edge of the bed and put my hand on her forehead, and she sighed and leaned into it.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that's nice. You're so cool. Keep it there."

I had not roused the Blush that night. I had forgotten. I had been busy with the soup.

My hand was cold. As cold as the room. Colder.

It was the only useful thing about me, that night.

I kept it there. I kept it there for hours. I moved it to her cheek when her forehead warmed it, and to her neck, and back to her forehead, and she slept, and her heart slowed down, and at 04:12 her fever broke and she started sweating and kicked the blankets off and muttered something about the Scotsman.

At 05:50 I went to my room, and put the towel along the bottom of the door, and lay in the dark.

I listened to her heart through the wall until the day took me.

---

Wednesday, 21 October

I wake at 18:41.

It is the same every night now. No drowsiness, no drifting. Nothing, and then the ceiling. Then the Hunger, where it always is. Then my hands, and I check them, because I always check them, because for the first few nights after the Embrace I was afraid I would wake up with them different.

Then I lie very still and listen.

The apartment is small. The walls are thin. The refrigerator hums. The AC rattles in her window. There is a car alarm somewhere on the next block, and a neighbor's television, and the ice maker in the freezer dropping a new tray.

And under all of it, in the next room, Destiny's heart.

She sleeps late on Wednesdays. She's still asleep now, although it's dark out, because she has always been terrible at mornings and worse at evenings. Her heart is slow. Sixty-one, sixty-two. It skips a beat every so often, a little stumble, harmless. It always has. I didn't know that about her until this month.

I count it. I count it every night, before I get up, before I make the bed or open the blinds or check the phone or do anything at all. I count to a hundred of her heartbeats.

I don't know why I do it. That is not true. I know exactly why I do it, and I have decided not to hold it in words.

At one hundred I get up. I make the bed. I fold the throw in thirds. I take the towel from under the door and fold that, too, and put it on the shelf.

Then I go to the kitchen and put on water for her coffee, because she'll be up in twenty minutes and will be unbearable until she's had it, and I get down her mug, the one with the chipped handle she refuses to throw away, and I set it next to the machine with the handle turned toward where her hand will be.

I don't know how many more weeks it will be like this. I suspect not many. Things in Sara's house do not stay the same for long.

I rouse the Blush. It costs me what it costs.

The water starts to boil.

In the next room, I hear her heart speed up as she begins to wake.

Comming Clean

> Retcon note: This piece establishes that Isabel knew about Destiny's ghouling, asked Sara for it, and was given permission to tell Destiny the truth herself. These are placeholder assumptions. If the ST decides differently about who chose, when, or how, this story should be rewritten or discarded.

---

November 2020

The apartment had never been this loud.

Destiny sat on the couch with her knees pulled up and listened to it. The refrigerator, which she had always thought of as quiet, had a rattle in it now, a tiny metallic tick every eleven seconds, and once she'd noticed it she couldn't stop. The AC unit in her bedroom window hummed in two notes, not one. Somewhere below, three floors down, someone was frying onions, and she could smell them through the floor, through the carpet, sweet and burnt.

The lamp was too bright. She'd turned it down, then off, then on again, because the dark was worse.

She had not slept properly in four days. She had not needed to. That was one of the things Sara had said, sitting across from her in the big cool kitchen near the Everglades, hands folded on the table, calm as a woman explaining a new filing system. You won't need as much sleep. You'll heal faster. You'll notice more. Some of that will be pleasant. Some of it won't be.

Destiny had asked what the unpleasant part was.

Sara had looked at her for a while and said: Knowing.

---

She had known before Sara told her. That was the part she hadn't said to anyone.

Not the word. Not vampire. She would have laughed at the word. But she'd known the shape of it. Since the lodge and the bucket and the brush. Since a woman in a suit cleaned a gun with a handkerchief and told her that not telling Isabel had been good. Since her mother, a long time ago, in a house on Star Island, had taught her that some employers only rang for you after dark and that you never, ever, asked why.

She had known the shape of it for weeks. The gold eyes. The cigarette. The cold hand on her forehead when she was sick, the only cool thing in the world, which she'd leaned into like a cat and never once let herself think about. The towel under the door. The soup made to the gram by a woman who didn't taste it.

She'd built a room in her head where there was a reason for all of that, and she'd lived in it for two months, and it had been a good room. Comfortable. She'd put the TV up loud in it.

Then, four nights ago, Sara had opened the door of that room and walked in, and set a crystal glass on the kitchen table with something dark and red at the bottom of it, and said, very gently for her: You can drink this, or you can go home and forget this conversation. Isabel has asked me to offer it. She will not be angry if you refuse.

Destiny didn't remember deciding. She remembered the glass. She remembered it was cold and then it wasn't. She remembered the taste, which wasn't a taste, which was more like the first warm day of spring after a winter that had lasted her whole life, like standing in the sun with her eyes closed and every nerve in her body turning its face up toward it. She remembered making a sound she had never made in her life. She remembered holding onto the edge of the table.

She remembered crying afterward, for no reason, for every reason, for an hour.

And then Sara had told her. All of it, or all the basics: what Sara was. What Isabel was now. What had happened in that house two months ago. The word. The rules, the first ones, the ones that would keep her alive.

At the end, Destiny had asked, with her voice shaking: Why didn't she tell me herself?

And Sara had said: Because I told her she couldn't. Now she can. She'll come to you. Let her say it.

That had been four nights ago.

Isabel had not come home since.

---

The refrigerator ticked. Eleven seconds.

Destiny had made a drink. She hadn't meant to. Her hands had done it, the way they did everything when she was scared: limes, a bottle, a shaker, ice. It was sitting on the coffee table now in a glass, sweating, untouched. She didn't even know what she'd put in it.

Her heart was going very fast. She could hear it now, too. That was new. She could hear her own heart, like someone knocking politely inside her chest.

She can hear it too, Destiny thought. She's always been able to hear it. The whole time. Every night.

She put her face in her hands.

Out in the hallway, the elevator chimed.

---

I stand on the landing outside our door for four minutes.

I can hear her through it. I could hear her from the elevator. Her heart is faster than I have ever heard it, faster than when she was sick, faster than the night with the body. A hundred and twelve. A hundred and fourteen. It's the fastest thing in the building.

She's afraid.

I knew she would be. Sara told me she would be. I have told myself for four nights that she would be. It is different to stand here and hear it.

I have not roused the Blush.

I decided that on the drive over, at the light on 27th. Every night for two months I have come home and paid for it, to walk through that door warm and breathing and a little flushed, to be a photograph of myself for her. I have never once come home without it. I told myself I never would.

Tonight I'm not going to pay.

Tonight she gets to see what's true. If I'm allowed to tell her, then I'm going to tell her all of it, and all of it includes this. She has been living in a room with the TV turned up loud. I'm not going to walk into the new room she's in and lie to her with my skin.

My hand is on the doorknob. It is not shaking. It's cold, and it's steady, and I hate it very much.

I count her heartbeats to twenty.

I open the door.

---

Isabel stood in the doorway, and Destiny saw her.

She had seen her every night for two months. She had not seen her.

She was pale. Not a little pale; not tired, not sick. The color of paper. The pink that had always been in her cheeks, which Destiny had never once thought about, was gone, and underneath it was a face that was Isabel's face in every line and had nothing living in it at all. Her lips were gray. Her chest didn't move.

She was completely still. Not holding still. Still, like a coat on a hook.

And Destiny could smell her. That was new too. Under the cigarette and the leather of her jacket and the lavender soap she'd used since school, there was something else, cool and old and faintly sweet, like earth after rain, like a church, like the glass Sara had held out to her four nights ago.

Something in the oldest part of Destiny's body, something that had been hiding under rocks since before there were people, said very clearly: Run.

She didn't run. She pressed herself back into the couch cushions so hard that one of them slid off onto the floor, and her hand went to her mouth, and she heard herself make a noise, small and high.

Isabel didn't move. She didn't come in. She stood on the threshold with her hand still on the doorknob, and she looked at Destiny, and Destiny saw her see it. The fear. Saw her take it in, and hold it, and not look away from it.

Then Isabel took her hand off the door, and folded both hands in front of her, and said:

"I'm a vampire."

Just that. Like reading a line off a form. Like telling her the time.

"I died on the thirtieth of August. Sara killed me and made me this. I knew she was going to. She asked me. I've been like this since then. Every night you've seen me since August, I've been like this, and I've been making myself look alive for you. I'm not doing that tonight. I wanted you to see."

A pause. Isabel's mouth moved slightly, the way it did when she was choosing the next thing very carefully.

"I'm sorry I couldn't tell you. I wasn't allowed. I'm allowed now."

The refrigerator ticked.

Destiny took her hand away from her mouth.

"You're," she said, and her voice broke in the middle, "you're not breathing."

"No. Only to talk."

"You're not, oh my God, Iz, you're not breathing, you haven't been breathing, have you been breathing? At all? Since August?"

"When I wanted you to see me breathe. Not otherwise."

"The cigarette."

"Yes."

"The soup. You made me soup. You didn't taste it. You made me soup to the gram."

"Yes."

"You put your hand on my head. When I was sick. You were so cold. You were so cold and I said it was nice and you just, you kept it there, you kept it there all night—"

"You had a fever of 39.6," Isabel said. "It was the only useful thing about me."

Destiny made a sound that was not a word.

---

I stay in the doorway. I don't know if she wants me to come in. I'm not going to decide that for her.

The questions come out of her all at once, like water through a broken wall, and I understand what they are. They're every door she didn't open. Every room she built. She's knocking them all down, one after another, and asking me to tell her what was behind each one.

And I can.

I can tell her. For the first time in two months, when she asks me something, I'm allowed to answer it all the way down.

Did I eat? No. I pretended, and I was sick afterward, every time. Yes, the bathroom. Yes, that's why the TV.

Did it hurt? The dying? Not the way she thinks. That's all I can say about that tonight. That's true too.

What do I eat? People. She flinches. I let her. I tell her I don't kill them. I tell her I take only enough. I tell her about the man at Walmart with the coupon and the pounding heart, and how I counted, and how she held my hand at the register and it was the only reason I kept counting. She puts her hand over her mouth again. Her eyes are wet.

What happens when the sun comes up? The towel. Yes. That's what it was for.

Does Sara know about me and her? Sara knows about everything.

Is this why my eyes changed? Yes.

Did you know about the chips? The salt and vinegar ones? In case?

Yes, I say. I knew. I kept them. They're in my room. I haven't opened them.

She starts to cry then. Properly. Loudly. Her face crumples and she makes a noise like something tearing, and her heart goes to a hundred and thirty, and every part of me that's still a person wants to cross the room and every part of me that isn't is standing very still so as not to frighten her more.

It is the most honest I have ever been with anyone. It is like taking off shoes that were too small, after walking in them for a very long time. For two months there have been two floors inside me every time I looked at her: the one where I was her friend and the one where I was this. I've been standing on both of them. Every night. Every question.

There's only one now.

I didn't know how tired I was.

---

"Iz," Destiny said, when she could talk again. She was wiping her face with the back of her wrist, badly. "Iz. Sara said you asked her."

Isabel didn't answer right away.

"She said you asked her to offer it to me. The glass. This." Destiny's hand moved vaguely at herself, at her face, at the new loud world. "Is that true?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

It came out harder than she meant. Or exactly as hard as she meant. She didn't know. There was something under the fear now that was hot and bright and awful, and she didn't know if it was anger or the other thing, the warm spring thing from the glass, still moving through her, or both, tangled.

Isabel looked at her for a long time.

"Because you were living in a room," she said at last. "And I could hear you living in it. Every night, I came home and I could hear you turning the TV up. I could hear you not asking. I watched you buy me chips I couldn't eat. And I couldn't tell you why. And I couldn't lie to you, either. I've never been able to lie to you. So I just stood there, every night, in the middle of all the things we weren't saying, and I couldn't stand it anymore."

She stopped. Started again.

"And because you're going to get older," Isabel said, very quietly, "and I'm not. And I didn't want to watch that from the outside. I wanted you in here with me. Where I could tell you things." A pause. "That's selfish. I know. I asked anyway. I would ask again."

Destiny stared at her.

And then she laughed.

It came out of her like a hiccup, wet and startled, and then again, and then she was laughing and crying at the same time, bent over her own knees on the couch, because it was the most Isabel thing she had ever heard in her life. That's selfish. I know. I asked anyway. No apology. No softening. Just the truth, set down on the table like a plate, and whatever Destiny did with it was hers to do.

"You," Destiny gasped. "You absolute. You psychopath. You asked my boss to give me vampire blood because you missed talking to me."

"Yes."

"You couldn't just, like, get a therapist?"

"I can't go out in the day."

Destiny laughed so hard she slid half off the couch.

---

When she stood up, finally, she did it slowly. Her legs felt strange. Everything felt strange. The air in the room was full of smells and the lamp was too bright and the refrigerator ticked and her friend was standing in the doorway, still, pale, cold, not breathing, waiting to be told whether she could come in.

Destiny crossed the room.

It was eleven steps. She counted them. She didn't know she was going to count them until she did. At the fifth step the old thing under the rocks said run again, very loudly, and she told it to shut up. At the ninth, she could see Isabel's eyes clearly, gold, steady, and something in them she had never been able to see before, not in all the years, because it had always been under the Blush and the breathing and the careful pink cheeks.

Isabel was afraid too.

She was standing there like a coat on a hook, not moving a muscle, because she was afraid that if she moved, Destiny would stop coming.

Destiny stopped in front of her.

"Can I," she started, and didn't know how to finish, so she didn't. She just put her head down against Isabel's chest, the way you'd put your ear against a door, and held very still, and listened.

Nothing. Cloth. Leather. Lavender. The cool, old, rain-and-church smell. And under it, where there should have been a heart, a silence so complete it had a shape.

She'd felt it before. In the kitchen, with a wet glass in her hand, and she'd moved her fingers in a little circle and pretended she hadn't.

She didn't pretend now. She stayed there with her ear against that silence and let herself hear it all the way.

"There's nothing," Destiny whispered.

"No," Isabel said. Above her head. Very quietly. "There's nothing."

Destiny put her arms around her.

After a long moment, Isabel's arms came up and went around her too. Cold. Careful. Holding on like the railing of a boat.

"Hey," Destiny said into the jacket. "Can I ask you something else?"

"Anything. You can ask me anything now."

"When I was asleep. Did you ever. Like. Listen?"

A pause.

"Every night," Isabel said. "Before I get up. I count your heart to a hundred."

Destiny closed her eyes.

"That's the creepiest thing anyone has ever said to me," she said, and her voice broke all the way down the middle of it, and she held on harder, "and if you ever stop I'll kill you."

"I'm already dead."

"I'll figure something out."

Behind them, on the coffee table, the drink she didn't remember making sat sweating in its glass, the ice gone to water. Later, a long time later, when they'd finally sat down on the couch with the lamp turned low and Destiny's heart had come all the way back down to something like ninety, she would pick it up and taste it and find she could taste all of it now, every layer, the lime and the bitter and something smoky she didn't remember adding, sharp and clear as a bell. And she'd describe it, for twenty minutes, in more detail than she'd ever described anything in her life.

And Isabel would give it a nine.

The Weeks After

Yes, all of it works. Three small notes before I write:

The bond. I'm reading your line as Sara keeping Isabel at the first step (you wrote "keeping it at third," which I assume was a slip). The story won't name bond steps anyway. It will only show that both of them feel strongly about Sara, and that Isabel recognizes what Destiny feels because she feels it too.
Snow. It doesn't snow in Miami (the famous exception was 1977). The Miami version is the first real cold front in December: 12 degrees, people in parkas, Christmas lights going up on balconies. Destiny would absolutely joke about it, so I've used that.
Ending. I've combined the two: there's a question Destiny decides not to ask, and then the question Isabel asks her. Isabel's question ties into the ghoul standing, so that theme lands there.

The List

Monday, 16 November 2020

The list goes on the fridge, obviously, because I'm a professional.

I wrote it on the back of a Publix receipt at four in the morning, the first night after she told me, while she was in the bathroom doing whatever it is she does in there now. (Not the thing I used to think. The other thing. The thing where she just stands in front of the mirror, it turns out, and checks that she's still in it. Which is question one, so hold that thought.) Then I copied it out properly the next evening in my good handwriting, on the lined notepad from the drawer, and put it on the fridge under the magnet shaped like a flamingo, and I numbered it, because if I'm going to have a nervous breakdown I'm going to have an organized one.

Isabel came into the kitchen, read it top to bottom, took the pen out of the cup, and wrote a small, neat check mark next to number one.

Then she turned to me and said, "Yes. I'm in mirrors."

That was it. That was the whole answer. Check mark, four words.

"Okay, but, like, properly in them?"

"Properly."

"Not blurry? Not, like, just your clothes floating?"

"No." She considered. "Sara says cameras sometimes don't like us. Photos come out wrong. I haven't tested it."

"So you don't know."

"I don't know about cameras. I know about mirrors. I check every night."

"Why do you check every night if you already know?"

She looked at me with that face. That's the other thing about this whole situation that nobody warns you about: I thought, once I knew, I'd finally be able to read her. Like I'd been missing a decoder ring for eight years and now I had it. Nope. Same face. Same exact face. The only difference is that now I know what's underneath the face is a dead person, which somehow does not help at all.

"Because I want to," she said, and went to go find her shoes.

I wrote because she wants to next to the check mark. I'm keeping notes.

Thursday, 19 November

Numbers two through six, in one sitting, because it was a Thursday and Thursday is cocktail night and I had built up a lot of courage in liquid form.

Two: garlic. No. She ate a garlic knot in front of me to prove it, then went to the bathroom for ten minutes, and came back and said, "The garlic wasn't the problem. The bread was the problem." Check.

Three: churches. Sara says it depends on the church. And on the person inside it. I asked what that meant. She said she didn't know yet, and that she's not in a hurry to find out. Half a check.

Four: do you need to be invited in. She actually thought about this one for a long time, which I appreciated, and then said, "I don't think so. I walked into Walmart." Which is fair. Walmart did not invite anyone into Walmart. Check.

Five: stakes. She got very quiet and said, "Yes. But not the way you think." And then she didn't elaborate, and I found out that I didn't want her to, and I skipped to six.

Six: can you turn into a bat. She laughed. Out loud. It was the first time since she came home that I'd heard her laugh, and it was so ordinary, just a little dry huff through her nose, that I had to put my glass down.

"No," she said. "Not me."

"Not you? What do you mean, not you?"

She looked at me with the tiniest bit of something in the corners of her mouth, and I realized, with genuine horror, that she was enjoying this.

"Next question," said Isabel.

I have not been this scared or this entertained since freshman year. I have a new list. It's longer.

Tuesday, 24 November

Here's the thing nobody tells you about the blood.

(Okay, nobody tells you anything. There's no pamphlet. I checked. I literally asked her if there was a pamphlet and she said, very seriously, "No, I've been thinking there should be one," and now I think she's going to write one, which, God help all of us.)

Here's the thing: I can hear her not breathing.

I could always sort of know it, before, the way you know something's off in a room without being able to name it. Now I hear it. We're sitting on the couch watching a cooking show and I can hear the neighbor's toilet flush through two walls and the guy downstairs clipping his toenails (I KNOW, it's DISGUSTING) and the little tick in the fridge, and right next to me there's a person-shaped hole where the breathing should be. It's like when an AC turns off and you suddenly realize how loud it was.

And she smells. Not bad. I want to be very clear, she doesn't smell bad. She smells like her. Lavender soap and leather and cigarettes. But under it now there's this other thing, cool and old, like standing inside a stone church in summer. Like the glass. Like, if I'm honest, like the house near the Everglades.

It's not unpleasant. That's the problem. It's the opposite of unpleasant.

Question fourteen, on the fridge, in slightly shakier handwriting: Why does everything about you smell good now???

She read it for a long time. She didn't take the pen.

"Because of what you drank," she said. "It isn't me. It's what's in you, recognizing what's in me."

"That's so much worse."

"I know."

"Does it go away?"

"No." She paused. "I don't think so. I can ask."

"Don't ask." I didn't want her asking Sara about it. I didn't want Sara knowing I'd wondered. Which, okay, that's a whole other thing, and I'm getting there, give me a second.

Isabel was quiet. Then she took the pen after all and wrote, next to fourteen, in her tiny neat letters: Same for me. With her.

I stood in front of the fridge and read it about nine times.

Thursday, 26 November. Thanksgiving, technically.

We did not do Thanksgiving. Nobody did Thanksgiving this year. My mother called from Kendall and cried on FaceTime about not being able to have the family over and my cousin Nando got into a screaming argument with my uncle about masks in the family group chat and I muted it and made myself a turkey sandwich and ate it on the couch.

Isabel sat next to me and didn't eat anything, and it was nice. It was really nice. It was the first holiday in years I didn't have to smile at anybody.

"Can I ask you a weird one," I said. "Off the list."

"Yes."

"When you're hungry. What does it feel like."

She didn't answer right away. I've learned the difference now between her not answering and her getting ready to answer. This was the second one.

"I count it," she said. "From one to five."

"What, like, pain scale?"

"Like that. One is nothing. I can be around anyone. Five is." She stopped. "Five is when I'm not the one deciding anymore."

I put my sandwich down.

"What are you right now?"

"Two."

"Is two okay?"

"Two is fine. Two is most nights."

"What was the Walmart guy? With the coupon?"

She looked at me, and she didn't flinch, and she didn't soften it, and I've thought about this a lot since: she could have. She could have picked a nicer number. People do that. People do that with everything, with pain, with money, with how they're doing. I do it constantly. I'm fine, I'm like a two, don't worry about it.

"Three," Isabel said. "Almost four. You held my hand."

I picked my sandwich back up, and I ate the rest of it, and I didn't say anything, and after a while I leaned my head on her shoulder, which is cold if she hasn't done the warm thing, and she hadn't.

Which reminds me.

Monday, 30 November

Question nineteen, which I had to work up to: Do you have to do the warm thing when it's just me?

She read it and stood very still in the kitchen, and I watched her decide, and I knew what she was deciding, because I know her, decoder ring or not.

"No," she said. "I don't have to."

"Then don't."

"It's easier for you when I do."

"Is it easier for you when you don't?"

A pause. "Yes."

"Then don't," I said again. "It's our apartment. You don't need to put on a show in our apartment. You spend all night putting on a show for rich people. You don't need to do it for me."

She looked at me for a long time. Then she nodded, once, and went and sat on the couch, and she was pale and still and not breathing and not warm, like a very beautiful piece of furniture, and I sat down next to her and put my feet in her lap like I always do.

Her legs were cold through my socks. It was fine. I got a blanket.

She did it anyway two nights later, the warm thing, when I had a bad day at Mrs. Albrecht's and came home and cried. She didn't say anything. I just suddenly heard her heart start next to me, on the couch, thump, thump, like somebody had switched on a radio in another room, and she put her arm around me, and it was warm.

I didn't say anything about it either. I didn't cross it off the list.

Thursday, 3 December

Okay. The Sara thing.

I have not written this one on the fridge. This one is in my notes app, in a folder called Taxes 2019, because nobody on earth would open that.

I think about her too much.

Not in a weird way. (Okay, a little in a weird way.) Not in a way I can explain. It's just, somebody says Everglades on the news and my stomach flips. I drove past a woman in a gray suit on Brickell Avenue and almost rear-ended a Tesla. When I go to the house now, for work, and I know she's upstairs, in the dark, sleeping, whatever she does, I do my best work in years. I folded napkins at that house on Monday that were not hotel, Isabel. They were art. I did it because I wanted her to see them. She was asleep. She will never see them. I did it anyway.

I told Isabel. Obviously. You can't not tell Isabel things anymore, because she'll just answer you with the truth, and then you feel like a coward for keeping it in.

She listened to the whole thing sitting on the floor by the couch, back against it, looking at the ceiling, the way she does when I need to talk and not be looked at.

"Is that normal," I said, at the end. "Tell me that's normal. Tell me I'm not going insane."

"You're not going insane."

"Is it the blood."

"Yes. Partly."

"Partly?"

"Partly it's the blood. Partly it's her." Isabel paused. "I feel it too."

I sat up so fast I pulled a muscle in my neck.

"You?"

"She's my sire. I drank from her. You feel it, and I feel it." She was still looking at the ceiling. "Sara told me there's a word for it and what it does. I'll tell you, if you want. Not tonight."

"You don't hate her? After she, you know." I did a vague gesture that was supposed to mean killed you.

"No," Isabel said.

That was all. Just no. And the scary thing, the really, genuinely scary thing, is that I knew exactly what she meant, because I don't either.

I didn't write that one down anywhere.

Monday, 7 December

The cold front came through on a Monday and Miami lost its entire mind.

It got down to twelve degrees overnight. Twelve. The news did a whole segment. People on my block were walking their chihuahuas in parkas. The chihuahuas were also in parkas. The guy downstairs, the toenail guy, put up Christmas lights on his balcony railing, the big old-fashioned colored ones, and the lady across the parking lot put an inflatable Santa next to her palm tree, and the Santa kept falling over in the wind and she kept coming out in slippers to set it back up.

"This is it," I said, standing on our balcony in my winter coat, which I own for exactly one week a year. "This is Miami snow. This is as good as it gets."

"It's twelve degrees," Isabel said, next to me, in a T-shirt.

"Are you cold?"

"No."

"Are you ever cold?"

She tilted her head. "I'm the temperature of the room. I don't feel it the way you do."

"That's the saddest thing I've ever heard. You'll never be cozy."

"I was cozy last Thanksgiving," she said. "You had the turkey sandwich."

I looked at her. She was looking at the inflatable Santa, which had fallen over again.

I have the list in my coat pocket. I took it off the fridge this afternoon, because it was getting full, and I was going to start a second page. Most of it's checked now. Mirrors. Garlic. Bats (not me, underlined twice, I'm still not over it). Sunlight, in her handwriting, yes, all of it, don't ever test this. What I am now, in her handwriting, a ghoul. Sara's. It's a real word. I'm sorry.

Under that she'd added: In their world it means staff.

And under that, in my handwriting, because I'd read it and laughed for five minutes: SO NOTHING CHANGED.

There's one left unchecked at the bottom. Number thirty. I wrote it three nights ago at 03:00 and I've been walking past it on the fridge ever since.

Are you going to outlive me, or am I going to outlive you now?

I took the pen out of my pocket on the balcony, with the Christmas lights blinking red and green on the railing below us, and I crossed it out. Not a check. A line through it. I don't want that one answered. Not by her, anyway. She'd tell me. That's the whole problem. She'd tell me the truth, and it'd be exact, and I'd have to carry it around like everything else.

She saw me do it. She didn't ask what it was.

"Destiny," Isabel said.

"Mm."

"Can I ask you one."

I turned and looked at her. In eight years, Isabel has asked me for help with maybe three things. She has never once asked me a question like that, like she needed permission to ask it.

"Go for it."

She was quiet for a while. The inflatable Santa's fan whined in the parking lot.

"Sara's people," she said, finally. "Kindred. The ones you'll meet eventually. Some of them will treat you like you belong to someone. Like furniture. It's what ghouls are, to most of them." She paused. "I'm one of them now. They'll expect me to treat you like that too. And I think, if I'm not careful, one day I'll do it without noticing. The way I folded napkins for years before I noticed I was doing it like her."

She looked at me. Gold eyes. Very steady.

"If I ever do that to you," Isabel said, "will you tell me?"

I didn't answer right away. I wanted to make a joke. I had three lined up. Please, like I'd let you. You'd have to fire me first. I'm unionizing. And I looked at her standing there in a T-shirt in the only cold night of the year, not breathing, waiting, having asked me the one question she's never been able to answer herself, and I didn't make any of them.

"Yeah," I said. "I'll tell you. Loudly. Probably in front of people."

"Good."

"Like, embarrassingly loudly."

"Good," she said again, and turned back to the parking lot, and I think, I think, I heard her heart start. Just once or twice. Like she'd forgotten she wasn't doing it and then remembered.

Down below, the lady in slippers came out to put the Santa up again, and this time she weighted it down with a bag of potting soil, and it stayed, and she stood back and put her hands on her hips and looked at it, and the guy downstairs clapped from his balcony. I clapped too. Isabel didn't, but she watched, and when I went inside to make hot chocolate she followed me in and got down two mugs without being asked, even though she knows, and I know, that she's only going to hold hers.

Christmas

Christmas at Night

Thursday, 24 December, 18:20

Destiny left for Kendall with three wrapped boxes, a tray of flan under plastic wrap, and a mask printed with tiny Santas that her cousin Nando had mailed to the whole family as a joke. She stood in the doorway putting on her shoes in the wrong order, left before right, the way she always did.

"Last chance," she said. "My mom would love you. She'd feed you until you died. Again."

"I know," Isabel said.

"I'll be back late. Like, one. Two. My tía Marisa does a toast at midnight, and if you leave before the toast you're dead to her."

"I'll be out when you get back. For a while."

Destiny paused with one hand on the door. "Out out? Or out out?"

"Out. Not the other thing."

"Okay." Destiny looked at her a moment longer, with the particular green squint she used when she was deciding not to ask. Then she said, "Don't clean anything while I'm gone," which was the same as saying I know you're going to clean everything while I'm gone, and left.

Isabel listened to her go down the stairs. Then she stood in the middle of the living room and took stock.

The tree was a small artificial one, bought at a Walgreens on the fourteenth, because every real tree left in Miami by then was brown at the tips and Destiny had refused to pay eighty dollars for what she called "a dying man." Destiny had decorated it on the fifteenth, all at once, in forty minutes, with lights that blinked in three different rhythms and ornaments grouped by whatever had been closest to her hand. It was cheerful and completely without order.

Isabel had not touched it. It was Destiny's tree.

The rest of the apartment was hers until morning.

The Advent calendar on the fridge had one door left. She had opened one door every night since the first of December, at the same time, and given the chocolate inside to Destiny, who had eaten twenty-three of them and complained about the quality of every single one. Tomorrow's door would wait until tomorrow.

She made a list. Of course she made a list. She wrote it on the back of the Walgreens receipt, and it had eleven items on it, and the eleventh was underlined.

The house near the Everglades was dark when she let herself into the kitchen at 19:40.

It usually was. Sara kept almost no lights on for herself; the lamps were for the staff, and the staff had been given the night. Isabel stood in the cool, clean kitchen and listened to the house and heard nothing she needed to hear.

The eleventh item on the list was in her jacket pocket, wrapped in plain white tissue paper, without ribbon.

She had spent a week on the question of whether to give it. She had read, on her phone, in the hours before dawn, about what was polite and what wasn't. She had learned that gifts were encouraged, that thanks was always appropriate, and that a Christmas gift to someone who did not keep Christmas could be read, depending on the person, as a courtesy or as something closer to an imposition. She had decided, at 04:10 on the twentieth, that she would not give Sara a Christmas gift.

She would give Sara a gift, and it would be December, and those two facts would simply sit next to each other.

It was a handkerchief. White cotton, hemmed by hand, which she had done herself over three nights with a needle and thread from the drawer, stitch by stitch, each one the same length. It smelled of jasmine. She had found the oil at a shop in Little Haiti and used exactly four drops.

She laid it on the kitchen table, in the place where Sara had once set down a brown folder. On top of it she put a card. It said Thank you in her own handwriting, and nothing else, because she had tried to write more and every longer sentence had needed a second truth folded inside it, and she could not do that.

She looked at it for a moment. Then she straightened it by a few degrees, so that it lay square to the edge of the table, and left.

She did not know if Sara would like it. She did not know if Sara would mind. She had found, on the drive back, that the not-knowing sat in her chest like a stone, and she had decided that she would carry it without looking at it too closely, the way she carried most things now.

It was the second strongest feeling she'd had all month. The first was on the list, as item nine, and it was still ahead of her.

Thursday, 24 December, 21:05, Kendall

The Reyes Nochebuena was supposed to be small this year, which meant there were only nineteen people in the house instead of forty, and the windows were all open, and the back patio had a fan going the size of a jet engine, and Destiny's mother had printed a sign that said PLEASE MASK UNLESS YOU ARE EATING that nobody had followed since 19:30, because everybody was always eating.

Destiny had forgotten what it would be like.

That wasn't true. She had known exactly what it would be like, and she had forgotten that she was different now.

The lechón had been in the caja china since noon and the whole house smelled like it, and the smell didn't just come in through her nose, it came through her skin. She could smell the mojo on it, the sour orange and the garlic and the cumin, and she could smell, separately, the specific brand of charcoal her uncle used, and under that the grease burning in the drip tray, and under that the patio furniture sweating in the heat. She could hear the dominoes clattering on the card table outside and her tía Marisa telling the same story about 1994 in the kitchen and the TV in the den playing a telenovela special with the volume on thirty-seven, and her little cousin Mateo in the bathroom, crying because he'd dropped his tablet in the toilet.

She could hear everybody's heart.

She stood in the middle of the living room holding a plate of yuca and felt, for a second, like the room was a wave and she was underneath it.

"Mija." Her mother's hand on her arm. "You okay? You look pale."

"I'm fine," Destiny said. "It's hot. I'm just hot."

Which was true. Everything was true. That was the new trick she'd learned since November: say the true part, very firmly, and let people fill in the rest themselves.

The food was unreal. That was the other thing. Her abuela's black beans, which her mother made now from a recipe card in her abuela's handwriting, and which Destiny had eaten every Christmas of her life, and which tonight, for the first time, she could taste all the way down. The bay leaf. The little bit of wine. The sugar her mother pretended she didn't add. It was like hearing a song you'd known forever on real speakers for the first time and finding out there'd been a cello in it all along.

She ate two plates and had to go stand in the backyard for ten minutes.

"So where's the friend," Nando said, finding her there with a beer in each hand. He held one out. "The maid friend. The quiet one. You brought her to Tía's birthday. Freaked out my girlfriend."

"Isabel."

"Isabel. Where's Isabel?"

"She works nights."

"On Christmas Eve?"

"Rich people don't stop being rich on Christmas Eve, Nando."

He accepted that, because it was the truest thing anyone in their family had ever said, and they clinked bottles, and he told her about his girlfriend's new tattoo, and she listened and laughed at the right parts, and some part of her, the new part, was counting how many hours were left until she could go home.

At midnight Tía Marisa did the toast. She did it standing on a kitchen chair, which she did every year, while three people held the chair. She toasted her late mother, Destiny's abuela, and the new baby in the family, and everybody's health, especially this year, and then she looked around the room and said y por los que no están, for the ones who aren't here, and raised her glass.

Destiny raised hers. She thought about an apartment in the city with a little dumb tree in it, and a person who couldn't come, and couldn't eat, and couldn't be warm unless she chose to be.

She drank to that.

At 00:40 she started saying goodbye, which in the Reyes family takes forty-five minutes minimum. Her mother pressed a foil-wrapped plate into her hands at the door. Lechón, yuca, beans, a slice of flan.

"For your friend," her mother said. "So she eats something decent for once."

Destiny looked at the plate.

"Thanks, Mami," she said, and meant it, and didn't say anything else.

Friday, 25 December, 00:05

The Cathedral of Saint Mary was holding its midnight Mass at a fraction of its usual capacity, which meant that at five past midnight there were more people outside it than in.

They stood on the steps and along the sidewalk and across the street under the palm trees, in masks, spaced apart, some of them holding candles that kept going out in the breeze. Someone had set up a speaker by the doors so the people outside could hear. It crackled. Every so often a car went by on Northwest 75th and drowned out the priest entirely.

Isabel stood near the bottom of the steps, a little to one side, hands folded.

She had not intended to come. It was not on the list. She had finished the tenth item at 23:15 and stood in the clean apartment looking at the time, and found she did not want to be inside it.

It depends on the church, Sara had said. And on the person inside it.

She did not go up the steps. She had not been inside a church more than a handful of times in her life, even before, and never for anything but a wedding or a funeral. There was nothing in there she had any claim to. There was also, she suspected, something in there that might have a claim on her, and she did not want to find out tonight which kind of church this was.

So she stood where it was safe to stand, in the overflow crowd, among people who had simply not gotten in.

The singing started around 00:20. Through the speaker it was thin and tinny, the choir small and spread out behind masks. Silent Night. The crowd outside picked it up, not well, unevenly, an old man near her singing in Spanish and two teenage girls behind her singing in English and not quite knowing the second verse.

Isabel knew all the verses. She had never once thought about what they meant. They were words that went with December, like lights and cold drinks and the smell of cinnamon, part of a shape the year took, which she had moved through every year because it was there.

She did not sing. She listened.

A woman beside her, somewhere in her sixties, turned in the middle of the second verse and held out a candle, unlit, as if Isabel was obviously the kind of person who should have a candle and had just forgotten one.

Isabel took it. The woman tilted her own candle and lit it from hers.

"Feliz Navidad, mija," the woman said, and turned back to the church.

Isabel stood holding the small flame. It was warm, very close to her hand. She could feel the warmth only as information, a fact about the air, the way she felt everything now.

She held it until the song ended, and the next one, and until the Mass inside moved on to things she didn't know the words to. Then she shielded it carefully with her palm, walked across the street to her bike, and set it down on the curb, still burning, where no one would kick it over.

She rode home and did not think about why she had taken it.

Friday, 25 December, 01:52

Destiny unlocked the door with her hip, holding the foil plate in one hand and her keys in the other, humming the toast song.

She stopped humming.

The apartment was clean. That wasn't surprising. It was always clean when she came home to it now, and she had long since stopped pretending she didn't know who did that.

It was the rest.

There were stockings. Two of them, on the wall beside the TV, hung from two small nails that absolutely had not been there that afternoon. Red felt with white cuffs, the cheap kind from CVS, and on the cuffs, stitched in white thread, very small and very straight: D and I.

There was a bowl of oranges on the counter, and a bowl of walnuts in their shells, and a small dish of those hard ribbon candies nobody under seventy ever ate. There were candles in the windows, the electric kind with flickering bulbs, one per window, exactly centered.

The Advent calendar had one door left.

And the tree. Her tree, her ugly Walgreens dying-man tree, still had every one of her ornaments on it exactly where she'd hung them, clumped and crooked and wrong. Isabel hadn't moved a single one. But at the very top, where Destiny had never gotten around to putting anything, there was a star. A plain, flat, silver star, the kind you cut from cardboard and wrap in foil, a little lopsided at one point where the scissors had slipped.

Destiny set the plate down on the counter very carefully.

Isabel came out of her bedroom. She was in her pajamas, which Destiny had seen maybe four times in eight years, dark blue, buttoned to the collar.

"You're back," Isabel said. "How was your family?"

"Loud," Destiny said. "Iz. What is all this."

Isabel looked around the room as if checking it against something.

"It's Christmas," she said.

"You made a star."

"The Walgreens didn't have one. I asked."

"You made it out of cardboard."

"Cereal box. You won't miss it. It was the one with the raisins."

Destiny started to laugh and it came out wrong, wet, and she pressed her hand over her mouth. She turned in a slow circle. The oranges. The stockings with the stitched letters. The candles centered in the windows.

"Is this," she said. "Is this what Christmas looked like? At your house? When you were a kid?"

Isabel was quiet for a moment.

"This is what I remember of it," she said.

Which was a different answer, and Destiny knew it was a different answer, and she also knew, from the way Isabel said it, that it was the one Isabel had to give and the one she didn't want to be asked about. So she didn't. She crossed the room and looked at the stockings up close instead.

"You sewed these."

"I stitched the letters."

"With what, your vampire eyes?"

"With a needle."

Destiny touched the D. It was perfect. Every stitch the same.

"There's a plate," she said, not turning around, "from my mom. She sent it for you. Lechón and stuff. So you'd eat something decent for once. Her words."

"That was kind of her."

"I know you can't."

"I know you know." A pause. "Put it in the fridge. You'll want it at noon."

Destiny did. She stood with the fridge door open, the cold air on her face, until she could turn around again.

Friday, 25 December, 17:48

Isabel woke at 17:48.

She lay still for a moment and listened. The AC. The neighbor's TV, a football game. The refrigerator. And in the living room, not in her bedroom, not asleep, Destiny, awake, moving around, humming again, and something sizzling on the stove.

Pancakes. She could smell them. Butter and batter and something artificial, the syrup from the plastic bottle Destiny insisted was better than the real kind.

She got up, made the bed, and opened the door.

Destiny was in the kitchen in her pajamas too, red plaid ones, with her hair in a bun that was mostly falling out. The electric candles were on in the windows. Outside, through the balcony door, the sky was going from orange to dark blue over the parking lot. The inflatable Santa across the way was lit from inside and very slightly leaning.

"Merry Christmas," Destiny said, flipping a pancake. "It's morning."

Isabel looked at the clock on the stove. 17:51.

"It's morning," Destiny said again, firmly. "I decided. It's Christmas morning. I slept until three, I did not go outside, I have not looked at the sun even once, and as far as I'm concerned the day starts now. I made pancakes. You can't have any. That's fine. Sit."

Isabel sat.

Destiny slid a mug across the table to her. Hot chocolate, with marshmallows. Isabel wrapped her hands around it, the way she had held the other mug in December, the way she'd held the candle.

Then, after a moment, she let the Blush come up. She didn't decide it; she simply did it, and it cost her what it cost. Her heart started. Her hands warmed around the mug. She breathed in and the smell of the chocolate came in with it, fuller than before.

Destiny heard it. Of course she heard it. She stopped with the spatula in the air.

"You don't have to," she said.

"I know. It's Christmas morning."

Destiny looked at her, and then went back to her pancakes, and her shoulders did something complicated for a second.

The last Advent door had a small chocolate bell in it, wrapped in gold foil. Isabel opened it at 18:00 exactly and handed it across the table.

"Twenty-four," Destiny said. "Finally. Worst chocolate in Florida." She ate it anyway.

The stockings had oranges in the toes, because that was what went in the toes, and ribbon candy, and in Destiny's, a new mask, black, with a tiny white collar printed on it. "Matches your uniform," Isabel said, and Destiny laughed so hard she had to put her forehead on the table.

In Isabel's stocking there was a new pair of riding gloves, leather, lined, and a pack of her cigarettes, and a tiny bottle of lavender soap, the same kind she'd used since school, and a note in Destiny's handwriting that said NOT FOR EATING.

Then Destiny went to the tree and came back with a flat package in green paper.

"Okay," she said. "So I thought about this a lot. You can't eat. You don't get cold. You don't drink. You don't sleep, you just, like, turn off. I can't get you a spa day. I can't get you a vacation, you can't go to the beach, you'll be a pile of ash in the sand and I'll have to explain that to the lifeguard. So I was sitting there trying to think of anything you still actually get to have. And I thought, okay. What's left."

She put the package on the table.

"The night," Destiny said. "You get the night. That's the whole thing you get now. So you might as well know what's in it."

Isabel unwrapped it. Slowly, along the tape, without tearing the paper. Destiny made a noise of agony.

It was a planisphere. A star wheel, the old-fashioned kind, two plastic discs riveted together, dark blue, with the constellations printed in white and the months and hours around the edge. You turned the top disc to the date and the time and it showed you what was overhead.

Isabel held it in both hands.

She turned the wheel. December. 25. 18:00. The oval window showed a sky she had never once looked at on purpose.

"It's for Miami," Destiny said. "Twenty-five degrees north. I checked. The guy at the store said you can't really see anything here because of the light pollution, but you can see some, and he said if you ever go out to the Everglades." She stopped. "Anyway. You're out there a lot."

Isabel didn't say anything for a while. She turned the wheel an hour forward, then two, and watched the white shapes slide across the little window. Orion. Taurus. The Pleiades, a small smudge of dots. She read the names under her breath, the way she used to read ingredient lists.

"Thank you," she said.

"You like it?"

Isabel looked up. It was the most direct question Destiny had asked her all day, and Destiny knew she'd get the truth, and asked anyway.

"Yes," Isabel said. "I like it very much."

Destiny sat back in her chair and exhaled like she'd been holding it since November.

Isabel's gift was in her room. She went and got it and set it on the table where the planisphere had been.

It was a notebook. Small, black, cloth-bound, the kind from an art supply store, with a ribbon marker.

"Open it," Isabel said.

On the first page, in Isabel's handwriting, very small and very neat, it said:

Lisbon. March 2016. Hotel bar. Gin, elderflower, too much tonic. You said it tasted like a wedding. 5.

Destiny stared at it.

She turned the page.

Porto. March 2016. Port and tonic. You said it tasted like an old man's library. 7.

Home. April 2016. Something with cucumber. We don't talk about it. 2.

She turned the pages faster. Every single one. Every Thursday. Every drink. Every city. Some of the entries were long, whole paragraphs about the night, what they'd been doing, what Destiny had been wearing, what song was playing. Some were a single line. All of them had a number at the end.

Two hundred and forty-something entries. Four and a half years.

The last ones, in November and December, were different. 6 (descr.) and 8 (descr.) and next to the mezcal in the church, the eight, there was a small drawing of a cigarette with a halo.

"How," Destiny said. Her voice didn't work properly. "How did you. I never showed you the list. You never saw the list."

"I saw it once. Over your shoulder."

"You saw it for, like, two seconds, and I grabbed it."

"I didn't copy your list," Isabel said. "I wrote down mine. What I remember. Every one." She paused. "Some of the dates are approximate. I'm sure about all the numbers."

Destiny closed the notebook. She held it against her chest with both arms, the way you hold something you're afraid someone will take back.

"You remember every drink I ever made you."

"Yes."

"Every one."

"Every Thursday."

"Why?"

Isabel thought about it. Destiny could see her thinking about it, and the answer she found, and whether she was going to say it.

"Because they were the best part of the week," Isabel said. "For a long time. I didn't know that until I couldn't taste them anymore."

Destiny put the notebook down on the table very carefully. Then she got up, went around the table, and hugged her, from behind, over the back of the chair, arms around her neck, chin on her head, the way you hug somebody on the couch during a sad movie. Isabel's heart was beating. She was warm. She smelled like lavender and leather and the chocolate in the mug.

They stayed like that for a while. The football game next door went to a commercial.

"The rest of the pages are blank," Isabel said eventually, from inside the hug.

"I saw."

"For after."

"I know, Iz."

At 21:00 they went out onto the balcony with the planisphere.

It was warm again. The cold front had gone through the week before and Miami had bounced right back to twenty-three degrees and humid, and the neighbor's lights were blinking on the railing below, and the inflatable Santa was still leaning.

Isabel held the planisphere up in front of her and turned it to the date and the time. Destiny leaned on the railing and looked up.

"I can't see anything," Destiny said.

"You can see some."

"I can see a plane."

"That's a plane."

"I can see, what is that, that bright one, that's not moving."

Isabel checked the wheel. She tilted it toward the sky, then back down, then up.

"Jupiter," she said. "It isn't on here. Planets move. It's close to Saturn this month. Right there."

"How do you know that if it's not on the wheel?"

"I read about it," Isabel said. "This afternoon. At 04:00." She pointed, very precisely, a little to the left. "That's Saturn. The smaller one."

Destiny squinted. "That's a streetlight."

"Left of the streetlight."

"Oh." A pause. "Oh, okay, I see it. Huh. It looks like nothing."

"It's very far away."

"It still looks like nothing."

Isabel lowered the planisphere and looked at it again, and turned the top wheel a quarter, and looked up, and found the three stars of Orion's belt above the roof of the pallet store across the road, dim through the orange haze, but there. She lifted her hand and traced them for Destiny, one, two, three, and Destiny leaned in close to follow her finger, and said, oh, that I know, everybody knows that one, and then started telling a long story about a boy at summer camp in 2004 who had claimed that Orion was his uncle.

The Move

Three continuity notes before the story:

The bike. Leaving it out is fine. If it ever matters: the H2R line has existed since 2015, and a Florida vanity plate can move from one vehicle to the next. So SERV1CE can exist from 2021 on an older bike (which is what Danny sees in 2022 and 2023) and move to the new 2025 bike later. That keeps the Danny stories intact.
Brickell. In Danny's first meeting (2022), Isabel's registered address is a condo tower in Brickell with its own garage. If they move into Sara's Coral Gables house in early 2021, that needs a reason. The easiest one: by 2022 Isabel has her own haven in Brickell (her Haven merits) while still working at Alhambra Court. Worth deciding at some point.
The Coral Gables family. Danny's stories mention a "family in Coral Gables" that Isabel works for and whose lawyer scares his captain. That could simply be Sara's household at Alhambra Court under whatever public face it wears. I haven't assumed it in the text.

I've set the story from January to February 2021, ending with the move, before the first kill in March.

Day Shift

Rent is due on the 5th. The envelope is in the second kitchen drawer. The leasing office closes at 17:00 and I can't get there in time. I'm sorry to ask. I know it's your day off. — I.

Isabel it is an ENVELOPE. I have walked envelopes places before. I'm a professional. — D.

Tuesday, 5 January 2021

The leasing office was in a single-story stucco building beside the pool, and it smelled like carpet cleaner and burnt coffee, and the woman behind the counter had a plexiglass shield in front of her with a slot at the bottom like a bank teller.

Destiny slid the envelope through.

The woman opened it, took out the money order, and then took out the second thing that was in the envelope, which Destiny had not looked at because it was Isabel's envelope and Destiny was raised better than that. It was a note, on the same yellow paper as the sticky notes, addressed to Leasing Office, in Isabel's tiny handwriting:

The kitchen faucet in unit 3C drips at a rate of one drop every four seconds. I've replaced the washer. The problem is the valve seat. Please send maintenance. Thank you.

The woman read it twice. She looked up at Destiny.

"Is she always like this?"

"Yes," Destiny said. "She's always like this."

"Four seconds," the woman said, and laughed, and wrote up a work order.

It took eleven minutes, including the line. Destiny walked back across the parking lot in the thin January sun, which was the good kind of sun, the kind Miami only has for about six weeks a year, not hot, just bright, and she realized halfway to the stairs that Isabel had not seen this light since August.

She stood at the bottom of the stairs for a second with her face turned up into it.

Then she went up and wrote a note and stuck it on Isabel's door.

Rent: done. Faucet: they're sending someone Thursday. Leasing lady says you're insane (affectionate). The sun is really nice today btw. Just so you know. — D.

At 17:52 she heard Isabel's door open, and a pause, and then nothing for a long time.

When Isabel came into the kitchen she didn't mention the note. She made Destiny's coffee, which she never used to do at night, only in the morning, and set it down with the handle turned toward her.

Could you check my email? I can't keep the phone on long enough to go through it properly. The password is on the index card in the envelope. I'm sorry. — I.

Isabel. Your password is 26 characters long. It has a SEMICOLON in it. I typed it wrong six times and got locked out and had to answer your security questions. Your first pet was named "None"??? — D.

I didn't have a first pet. — I.

I KNOW THAT NOW. — D.

Monday, 11 January

It turned out that Isabel had nineteen hundred unread emails.

Destiny sat at the kitchen table with her laptop and a bowl of cereal (not the raisin kind; the raisin box was a star now) and went through them in the order she would have gone through a filing cabinet, which is to say by sender, then by date, then by what would bite you if you ignored it.

There were the usual things. Newsletters Isabel had never read, from a motorcycle forum, a knife company, three different cleaning supply brands. A pharmacy reminding her about a prescription that expired in 2019. Two emails from a woman named Clara, both long, both with photos of paintings attached, which Destiny starred and did not open, because those were not hers to open.

And then there were the others.

The ones from Isabel's old bank about a debit card that hadn't been used since September. The one from the phone carrier about her data plan, which had gone almost entirely unused since September. The one from a doctor's office in her hometown about an annual checkup she'd missed. A dentist. A reminder from the DMV about a registration. A newsletter from her old maid school with the subject line WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Tell us your story!

Destiny sat there for a long time with her spoon going soggy in the bowl.

It was a person. All of this was a person. It was the thin, boring paper shell that everyone lives inside and never thinks about, and Isabel had stepped out of hers four months ago and it was still standing there, empty, waiting for her to come back and pay the dental bill.

At dusk she put a legal pad on the table in front of Isabel, before the coffee, before anything.

"We need to talk about the dentist," Destiny said.

Isabel looked at the pad. It had four columns on it. Cancel. Keep. Fake it. Ask Sara.

"I didn't know you knew about the dentist."

"I know about the dentist. I know about the eye doctor. I know you have a gym membership you've never used in your life, Iz, I read the contract, it has yoga in it."

"It was free with the apartment."

"It auto-renews."

Isabel looked at the columns for a very long time. Then she took the pen and started, very carefully, sorting.

Wednesday, 20 January

The bank was the worst one.

Isabel told her at dusk, standing in the kitchen, in the same voice she used for everything:

"Sara says the account has to be closed. All of it. She says banks are how they find us."

"How who finds you?"

Isabel was quiet for a moment.

"People who look for us," she said. "I don't know much more than that. She told me not to ask yet."

Destiny, who had learned not to ask yet from a much longer line of women than Isabel had, didn't.

So she went to the bank. She went on a Wednesday at 10:15, when it was quietest, in her nicest work blouse and her mask with the little white collar, with a power of attorney in her purse that had arrived by courier two days before in an envelope with no return address, very thick paper, very correct, signed and notarized in a way that Destiny, who had filed a great many documents in her life, could not find a single flaw in.

The banker was a young man named Kyle, and Kyle wanted to know why her friend wasn't coming in person.

"She works nights," Destiny said. "She can't get here during business hours."

"We have Saturday hours."

"She works Saturday nights."

"We could do a video call."

"She doesn't do video calls."

Kyle looked at the power of attorney again. He looked at her. He looked at the withdrawal slip, which was for the entire balance, in cash, which was more cash than Kyle had apparently expected anyone to walk out of his branch with on a Wednesday.

"Can I ask what the funds are for?"

And Destiny smiled at Kyle with her eyes, above the mask, and said, warmly, without a pause, "Oh, she's moving. Back home, to be with family, with everything that's going on. Her mom's not doing well. She just wants everything settled before she goes. She's very organized."

Every word of it came out smooth as butter. Kyle's face softened. He said he was sorry about her mom. He went to get the manager.

Destiny sat alone at his desk with her hands folded in her lap and felt something she did not expect, which was sick.

Not because she'd lied. She lied constantly. She'd been lying to the people she served since she was fourteen: of course, ma'am; no trouble at all; I love your hummus. Lying was a part of the job the way the apron was part of the job.

It was that Isabel couldn't have.

Isabel couldn't have sat in this chair. Kyle would have asked what the money was for, and Isabel would have told him nothing, or the truth, and Kyle would have called someone. Destiny had just become the part of Isabel that could lie. She had just been Isabel's mouth, for the one thing Isabel's mouth could never do.

It was the most useful she had felt in years.

That was what made her feel sick.

Bank: closed. I have your whole life in my purse in cash and I have never been more scared on a bus. There's a shoebox on your desk. PLEASE put it somewhere that isn't a shoebox. — D.

Thank you. I've bought a safe. It arrives Tuesday. Could you be home to sign for it? — I.

Yes. Also: how do you pay for ANYTHING now??? — D.

Money orders. Cash. The electric company accepts both. I've made you a list. — I.

Of course you have. — D.

Tuesday, 26 January

The safe was the size of a small refrigerator and weighed ninety kilos, and the delivery men, who had been told nothing about stairs, stood in the parking lot looking at the third floor with the expressions of men reconsidering their lives.

Destiny tipped them forty dollars in cash from the shoebox, which she thought was fair, and then realized she now had a perfect accounting of the shoebox in her head, down to the dollar, and that she had to write the forty dollars down, and that Isabel would ask where the forty dollars had gone, and that she'd have to say tipping, and Isabel would say that's appropriate, and she'd feel strangely proud.

She went and wrote it down.

The ledger was a cheap green accounting book from Office Depot. Isabel had started it. Isabel's first entries were perfect. Rent, January, money order, $1,420. Electric, January, cash, $89.14. Destiny's entries, under them, were somewhat less perfect. Delivery guys (safe) (STAIRS) (they looked like they wanted to die), $40. Next to it, at some point in the night, Isabel had written a very small check mark.

By the end of January the ledger was eleven pages long, and more than half the handwriting in it was Destiny's.

Thursday, 4 February, 18:14

Isabel was sitting at the kitchen table when Destiny came home from work, which was wrong. At 18:14 on a Thursday Isabel should have been gone, out, doing whatever she did before Destiny got home, and back at 22:00 to make the Thursday drink and be told about it.

She was sitting at the table with the legal pad in front of her. She had written a list on it. It was a long list. Destiny could see it from the door.

"Hi," Destiny said carefully. "What's happening. Did somebody die? Again?"

"I made a list," Isabel said, "of everything you do for me now."

Destiny put down her bag.

"Okay."

"It's forty-one items." Isabel turned the pad around so she could see it. Rent. Email. The bank. The safe. The dentist. The electric company. The pharmacy. The DMV. Returning the Amazon package with the wrong size gloves. Canceling the gym. Talking to the leasing office. Talking to the courier. Picking up the dry cleaning, which closed at 18:00. It went on down the page and onto the next. At the bottom, number forty-one, in Isabel's handwriting: Lying to Kyle at the bank.

"I didn't ask you to do that one," Isabel said. "But you did it for me."

"He asked what it was for."

"I know. You told me." Isabel folded her hands. "I said I'd tell you. If I ever started treating you like staff. And you said you'd tell me. But I think it happens slowly. I think you don't notice it. Like the napkins."

"Iz."

"I'm going to find another way for some of it. Sara knows people who do this. I'll ask her. You shouldn't have to spend your days carrying my life around in a shoebox."

Destiny looked at the list.

She read it the whole way down. Forty-one things. She remembered every one. She'd been doing them for five weeks, standing in lines, sitting on hold, signing for boxes, and not once had she thought of it as a list. It had just been the week. It had been Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, the way her life had always been, only fuller.

Then she took the pen out of Isabel's hand.

"Okay," Destiny said. "Here's me telling you. Loudly. As promised."

She drew a line under forty-one and wrote forty-two.

42. Being bossed around by Isabel.

And next to it, in capital letters, she wrote: NOT HAPPENING.

"Staff," Destiny said, tapping the pad with the pen, "don't argue. Staff don't write STAIRS in the ledger. Staff don't get to tell you your password is psychotic. I'm not doing this because I'm your maid, Isabel, I'm doing it because I'm really, really good at it, and nobody has ever needed me to be good at it before. Mrs. Albrecht needs me to fold napkins. You need me to keep a whole person alive on paper." She took a breath. "Do you know how cool that is? For me? Do you have any idea?"

Isabel looked at her.

"You can't hand this off," Destiny said. "I'm not letting you. I'll quit being your friend first. Actually, no, I won't, that's a lie, I'll just be really annoying about it forever. You know I will."

"I know," said Isabel.

"So."

"So." Isabel looked down at the list, and at number forty-two. "You're keeping the job."

"I'm keeping the job."

Isabel was quiet for a moment. Then she reached over and took the pen back, gently, and wrote under Destiny's note, very small:

43. Thursdays.

"That's mine," she said. "That one I do."

And she got up and went to the fridge for limes.

Sara says we're moving into the house. Both of us. On the 15th. I'm sorry for the short notice. She says the apartment isn't safe enough for what I am anymore, and that she'd rather have you where she can see you. — I.

...the house house? The Coral Gables house? With the fancy kitchen??? — D.

Yes. Alhambra Court. — I.

I have to tell you something embarrassing. — D.

You don't have to. — I.

My hands are shaking and I'm SMILING. Is that the blood thing? — D.

Yes. Mine too. — I.

Saturday, 13 February

Packing an apartment with someone who can only pack at night was, Destiny discovered, a system.

Isabel packed the kitchen, every dish wrapped in newspaper, every box labeled on three sides with a list of its contents in order, because the kitchen was where she'd lived for five months, making coffee she couldn't drink and soup she couldn't taste.

Destiny packed Isabel's paperwork, because the paperwork was hers now.

The safe went first, on the 14th, with two new movers who had been told about the stairs this time and charged accordingly. Then the ledger, which Destiny carried herself in her purse, because she didn't trust anyone else with it. Then the folder of documents from the courier with no return address, which by now had grown thick: things with Isabel's name on them, lease records, tax records, employment letters from a household in Coral Gables, a letter of reference, very glowing, from somebody Destiny had never heard of. The paper shell of a person, carefully kept alive.

Destiny did not ask where any of it had come from. She just filed it. Alphabetically, then by date. It was the best-organized folder she'd ever made.

Isabel packed one box herself. She did it at 04:00 on the last night, in her room, with the door open, and Destiny, awake on the couch with the TV on low because sleep was optional now and she didn't feel like it, heard the tape go around it three times.

It went in the car, not the truck. Isabel carried it down herself.

Destiny didn't ask about that one either.

Monday, 15 February, 17:58

The room at Alhambra Court had no windows, which Destiny had checked, twice, before the movers brought Isabel's bed in at noon. It had a heavy door with a lock on the inside, and a second lock on the inside of that, and a strip of rubber along the bottom that met the floor so perfectly that Destiny had knelt and tried to slide a sheet of paper under it and couldn't.

She'd made the bed. She'd done it the way Isabel did it, corners first, then the pillows, then the throw folded in thirds. She'd done it wrong, she was sure, but she'd done it.

Isabel had come in the car the night before, with the taped box, and gone into the room and closed the door, and had spent the day there while the movers came and went around her. Destiny had supervised them all day long. She'd told them the room at the end of the hall was a storage room with a sick relative's things and not to go in. They hadn't.

At 17:58 she was standing in the kitchen of the house on Alhambra Court. It was, she had to admit, a very fancy kitchen. It had two ovens. It had a refrigerator with a door you could see through, and it was taller than she was. She'd been unpacking Isabel's labeled boxes into it all afternoon, putting things where she thought Isabel would want them and then second-guessing and moving them.

In her hand she was holding the flamingo magnet from the old fridge, and the notepad, and the pen.

She wrote:

Welcome home. The kitchen is in the kitchen. Your safe is in the closet by the stairs. I told the movers your room was full of a sick aunt's stuff, sorry, it was the only lie I could think of that would keep them out. The mugs are on the left. Your mug is on the left. Also the fridge is enormous and I think I'm in love with it. — D.

She was looking for somewhere to stick it when she heard the lock turn at the end of the hall. The first lock. Then the second.

Isabel came into the kitchen barefoot, in her pajamas, hair down, which Destiny almost never saw. She stopped in the doorway and looked at the room: the two ovens, the enormous fridge, the boxes with their three-sided labels half unpacked, and Destiny in the middle of it with a note in one hand and a magnet shaped like a flamingo in the other.

"Hi," Destiny said. "I was just going to put this on your door."

"I'm here," Isabel said.

"I can see that."

Isabel held out her hand. Destiny gave her the note. Isabel read it, and read it again, and something at the corner of her mouth moved.

"You told them I had a sick aunt."

"You try coming up with something at noon on no sleep. I panicked."

"That wasn't a lie," Isabel said. "I am the sick aunt."

Destiny laughed, loud, in the enormous kitchen, and it echoed a little off the two ovens.

Isabel went to the glass refrigerator and looked at it. Then she took the flamingo magnet out of Destiny's hand, and put it on the glass door at eye level, and put the note under it. Then she stood back, and looked at it, and moved the magnet one centimeter to the left.

"Mugs on the left?" she said.

"Mugs on the left."

Isabel opened the cabinet. The mugs were on the left. Her mug with the chipped handle was the front one, handle turned out.

She got down two, and took out the coffee from the box labeled COFFEE / FILTERS / SUGAR / SPOONS (4), and filled the machine, and turned it on, and the first sound either of them had made in the new house that belonged to them was the coffee maker starting to drip.

Laundry

Tuesday, 20 July 2021

I want it on the record that I was doing my job.

Tuesdays are laundry at Alhambra Court. Everybody's. There's a laundry room off the kitchen that is bigger than my entire first apartment, with two washers and two dryers and a folding table made of some kind of stone, and a drying rack for the delicates, and a little shelf of detergents that are all unscented, because the lady of the house (not a lady, not exactly, I've given up on finding the word) can apparently smell fabric softener from the second floor. I am not being dramatic. Isabel told me. Isabel can smell it from the driveway.

So Tuesdays I do everyone's laundry, and that includes Isabel's, because she leaves it in a basket outside her door at 05:30 in a pile folded more neatly than most people's clean laundry, and because it's my job, and because I like doing it. It's one of the things I can still do for her that she can't really do for herself, not in daylight.

I check the pockets. I always check the pockets. My mother taught me that at twelve, the week I washed my father's lottery ticket.

Her riding jacket was in the basket. The leather one, which she doesn't usually give me, because leather doesn't go in the machine and she knows that and I know that. She'd put a sticky note on it: Lining only. Something spilled. — I.

There was a small notebook in the inside pocket.

Black. The size of a deck of cards. The elastic band kind. I recognized it: she has four of them, the same brand, in her desk drawer, unused. I'd assumed they were for shopping lists.

I should have put it on the stone table and not opened it. I know that. I want it on the record that I know that.

I opened it because I thought it might be a receipt book, and I needed to know if it could go through the wash.

It wasn't a receipt book.

The first page just said July at the top, underlined once, in her tiny handwriting. Then there were entries. Six of them, each with a letter and a few short lines, one entry to a page, the way she labels boxes.

I'm going to write them down, the way I remember them, because I've read them enough times now that I can.

M.
Gym on Bird Rd. Tue/Thu. Leaves 22:50, level 2 of the garage, far corner by the stairwell. Alone. Headphones in, both ears. Doesn't look up.
Choleric, fleeting.
✓ 6/7. ✓ 15/7.

R.
Rideshare. Parks at the Shell on Coral Way between fares, 01:00 to 02:00. Sleeps in the driver's seat 20 min. Window cracked.
Phlegmatic.
✓ 9/7.

A.
Night nurse, Baptist. COVID floor. Off at 23:30. Smokes by the ambulance bay 23:35 to 23:45, alone, always the same bench. Cries some nights. Not every night.
Melancholic, intense.
✓ 3/7. ✓ 12/7. Next: 21/7.

J.
Café on Ponce. Closes 21:00. Trash to the alley 21:15. Two cigarettes. Phones his mother on Sundays from the alley, speaks Portuguese. Has a cat named Biscoito.
Sanguine, fleeting.
Next: 22/7.

And two more, on the next pages. An old man who walks a dog at one in the morning. A security guard at a building downtown who takes his break in his car.

On the inside of the back cover, in pencil, very small, a column of numbers with dates next to them. 3. 2. 4. 2. 3. 4. 3. Like a temperature chart.

I sat on the floor of the laundry room for a while.

I don't know how long. The washer finished its cycle and beeped at me three times and I didn't get up. I was holding the notebook in both hands and I kept going back to J.

Because I know J.

J is Julian. Julian works at the café on Ponce, the good one, the one with the green awning, and I have been going there almost every weekday since we moved in, on my way to the Albrechts'. Julian is maybe twenty-three. He has a little gap in his front teeth and a tattoo of a lemon on his forearm, which I asked about once and he said I lost a bet and wouldn't say what the bet was. He draws hearts in my oat milk foam. He's bad at it. They come out shaped like potatoes. He knows I know they're potatoes, and he does it anyway, and it's the best part of my morning, and I have tipped him probably four hundred dollars since February, in cash, out of my own pocket, because he makes me laugh.

He has a cat named Biscoito.

I didn't know that. I didn't know he talks to his mom on Sundays. I didn't know he smokes. I didn't know he takes out the trash at 21:15.

Isabel knew. Isabel knew all of it. Isabel knew things about Julian that I, who have talked to him every morning for five months, did not know.

And under all of it, in the same handwriting she used for my Christmas notebook, for the Thursday drinks, for Lisbon, March 2016, you said it tasted like a wedding: Next: 22/7.

The day after tomorrow.

I put the notebook back in the jacket. I cleaned the lining, because something had spilled, a small dark stain near the hem that I didn't look at too closely and got out with cold water and the unscented stuff. I hung it up. I did the rest of the laundry. I folded all of it. My hands knew how. That's the thing about being trained: your hands keep going when the rest of you has walked out of the room.

At 18:40 I was sitting at the kitchen table when Isabel came in.

She stopped in the doorway. She looked at me, and then at the table, where I'd put the notebook, right in the middle, on its own, square to the edge. I'd put it like that on purpose. I'd put it like she would have.

Her face didn't change. It never does. But she didn't come any closer, either.

"You found it," she said.

"It was in your jacket."

"I know. I forgot it." A pause. "I've never forgotten it before."

"Did you forget it," I said, "or did you forget it?"

She thought about that. Honestly. I watched her do it.

"I don't know," Isabel said.

"Who are they?"

"People."

"I can see they're people, Iz, I'm asking who they are."

"People who are alone at the same time every night." She came to the table, finally, and sat down across from me, and folded her hands. She didn't touch the notebook. "That's all it takes. Somewhere they are, at a certain hour, where no one else is. A garage. A parking lot. A bench. An alley."

"And you go there."

"Yes."

"And you." I couldn't say it. I'd known for eight months what she was and I still couldn't say it at a kitchen table. "You feed."

"Yes."

"On Julian."

A small pause.

"You know J."

"I know J! J is my barista! J draws potatoes in my coffee and has a cat, Isabel, a cat named Biscuit, in Portuguese!"

My voice went up very high at the end and cracked, and I heard it echo off the two ovens, and I thought about the lady of the house upstairs, asleep, and I didn't care.

Isabel looked at me.

"I didn't know you knew him," she said.

"Would it have mattered?"

"I don't know. I'd have wanted to know."

"What did he do?"

That was the question I had been holding since the laundry room. I'd held it all afternoon. I'd folded it into every towel. Because there had to be something. There had to be a reason. Isabel is a judge, that's what she told me her clan was, that's what she said Sara had said, that's the word she used: judges. They hunt the guilty. It was the only thing that had made any of this bearable. That the monster I love only eats monsters.

So Julian had to have done something. Maybe he hits his girlfriend. Maybe the cat is a front. Maybe he's selling something out of the back of the café, maybe he's not who I think he is, maybe,

"Nothing," Isabel said.

I stared at her.

"He didn't do anything," Isabel said. "He takes the trash out alone. That's all he did."

I don't remember everything I said after that. Some of it was loud. Some of it was about the judges thing, and how she'd told me, and how I'd believed her.

She let me say all of it. She sat there with her hands folded and didn't interrupt and didn't look away, and when I finally ran out, she said:

"I tried."

"Tried what?"

"The judges thing. In the beginning. The first months. I only went for people who'd earned it." She looked down at the notebook. "Men who hurt people. Men who deal. Men Sara pointed at. It works for a while. You find one, you follow him, you take what you need, you feel clean about it."

"So do that."

"There aren't enough of them," Isabel said. "Not ones I can find alone at the right hour every night. And it's every night, Destiny. Or almost. It takes a day, maybe two, to learn one. Then I need him, and I need the next one already lined up, and the one after. And some nights you haven't found the next bad man yet." She touched the inside of the back cover, the pencil column, the numbers. "Some nights it's four."

I looked at the column. 3. 2. 4. 2. 3. 4. 3.

I knew what four was. She'd told me at Thanksgiving. Four is almost the one where I'm not the one deciding.

"At four," Isabel said, "you stop caring whether he's guilty. You only care whether he's alone."

The kitchen was very quiet.

"So you just pick. Anybody."

"Not anybody. People who are alone and won't be missed for twenty minutes. People who'll wake up and think they fainted. People I can leave safe." She paused. "I don't kill them. I've never killed anyone I fed on. That's what I have. That's the only thing I have now, instead of the other thing." And then, lower, the way she says things she's decided to say even though she doesn't want to: "It used to feel worse than it does."

That was the part I couldn't get past. Not the feeding. Not even Julian. That sentence.

It used to feel worse than it does.

Because she said it the way she says everything. Precisely. Like the weather. And she meant it. And she didn't like that she meant it, I could tell that, I've known her for nine years. But she didn't feel the thing she thought she should feel, not all the way, not anymore.

Something had gone. Some little piece had gone, since November. And she knew it, and she'd let me find the notebook, or forgotten it, or both.

"Take him off," I said.

Isabel looked at me.

"Julian. Take him off the list. Please."

She didn't answer right away.

"Because you know him," she said.

"Yes."

"And the nurse? A.?"

"I don't know the nurse."

"No." Isabel reached out and turned the notebook toward herself, and opened it, and turned to J. "So J is safe because you like his coffee. And A. isn't, because you've never met her."

"That's not fair."

"No," Isabel agreed. "It isn't."

She took the pen out of the cup by the phone, the pen we use for grocery lists, and drew a single straight line through J. Through Julian, and the trash at 21:15, and the two cigarettes, and his mother on Sundays, and the cat. One line. Neat. Then she closed the notebook.

"There," she said. "He's off."

And I felt relieved, God help me. My whole chest went loose with it. And the relief felt worse than anything else that happened that night, because I knew what it meant. It meant someone else. It meant a name I didn't know yet, in pencil, with a time next to it.

"I want to see," I said.

Isabel was quiet for a long time.

"You don't."

"I do. I don't want to. But I have to. You told me I could ask anything now. This is me asking. I don't want to just have a notebook in my head. I want to know what it actually is. I can't keep a whole person alive on paper if I don't know what the paper's for."

"It isn't something to watch."

"Then I'll hate it. I'm allowed to hate it."

She looked at me across the kitchen table for a long moment. Then she opened the notebook again and turned to A.

Next: 21/7.

Tomorrow.

"From the car," Isabel said. "Across the lot. You stay in the car. You don't get out, whatever you see. You don't call my name. If anything goes wrong, you drive home, and you don't wait for me."

"What would go wrong?"

"Nothing," she said. "It's a tired woman on a bench. Nothing will go wrong."

Wednesday, 21 July, 23:31

Baptist Hospital at night looks like an airport. All glass and white light and nobody in it.

We parked at the far edge of the visitor lot, facing the ambulance bay, in the shadow of a row of those skinny palm trees that don't give any shade. Isabel had driven. She'd turned off the engine and left the key in it, and then turned to me.

"Key's here," she said. "If you need it."

"I'm not going to need it."

"Then it's just there."

She got out. She walked across the lot. She didn't hurry. She had on jeans and a plain gray T-shirt and her hair down, and she looked like anyone, anyone at all, somebody's sister visiting at a bad hour, which I suppose is what she was doing. She had done the warm thing before she got out. I'd heard her heart start in the car, sitting next to me, thump, thump, and she'd looked, when she opened the door and the dome light came on, pink-cheeked and a little tired and completely alive.

At 23:36 the doors by the ambulance bay opened and a woman came out.

Scrubs, dark blue. A long-sleeved shirt under them even though it was thirty degrees out. Hair in a bun that had given up hours ago. She sat on the bench, the one Isabel had written down, by the concrete planter with the dead flowers in it. She took off her mask and let it hang from one ear. She lit a cigarette and put her head back against the wall and closed her eyes.

I could see her face in the light. She looked about my age. She looked a hundred years old.

Isabel walked up to her.

I couldn't hear. I was too far away, even with the ears I have now, the car windows up, the AC running. I could only see. Isabel stopped at the bench and said something. The woman opened her eyes and looked up at her. Isabel sat down at the other end of the bench, not close. The woman offered her the pack of cigarettes, and Isabel took one, and the woman lit it for her.

They sat there and smoked.

That was the part I wasn't ready for. I had been ready for a lot of things, for a lunge, for a struggle, for something from a movie, and I had my hand on the door handle the whole time, not to get out, just to have my hand on something. And instead they sat on a bench outside a hospital in the middle of a pandemic and smoked, two women, and the nurse started talking.

I watched her talk. I watched her hands move. At one point she put her face in them. Isabel didn't touch her. She just sat there, at the other end of the bench, and listened, the way she listens to me when I sit on the floor by the couch with my back against it and tell the ceiling everything.

The nurse was crying. Not a lot. Just some.

Cries some nights. Not every night.

Then Isabel moved down the bench, and put her arm around her.

The nurse leaned into it. Of course she did. I would have. Anybody would have. She put her head on Isabel's shoulder. Isabel's hand came up and moved her hair back from her neck, gently, the way you'd move a strand of hair off a sleeping kid's face.

And then Isabel bent her head.

I didn't see anything, really. From there, it looked like a hug. It looked like one woman comforting another one, on a bench, in the light from the ambulance bay, and the only reason I knew it wasn't that was that I knew.

It went on for maybe a minute. Maybe less. The nurse's hand, which had been gripping the front of her scrubs, opened slowly and lay flat on her knee, palm up, like someone asleep.

Then Isabel lifted her head.

She sat there for a moment longer, holding her. Then she eased the nurse back against the wall and put the half-smoked cigarette back between her fingers, which closed around it on their own. She stood up. She said something, one more thing, bending down a little. The nurse smiled up at her, slow and dazed and soft, the way you smile at someone in a dream.

Isabel walked back across the parking lot toward me.

Behind her, the nurse sat on the bench with her eyes half closed and finished her cigarette. When it was done she dropped it in the planter and put her mask back on and went inside. She was steady on her feet. A little slow. That's all.

Isabel got into the driver's seat. She closed the door. The dome light went off.

She smelled like cigarette smoke and the hospital's exhaust vents and, under that, faintly, like the thing I'd washed out of her jacket lining with cold water. Her face was flushed. Really flushed, not the performed pink. She looked healthier than I'd seen her in weeks. She looked well.

Neither of us said anything for a while.

"She talked about her patients," Isabel said finally, looking out the windshield. "Four died this week on her floor. One of them was twenty-six. She hasn't told her husband how bad it is. She doesn't want him to be scared." A pause. "She'll sleep tonight. She hasn't been sleeping. She'll think she finally crashed."

"Will she be okay?"

"She'll be tired tomorrow. Iron. She'll drink more water. She'll be fine."

"And you?"

Isabel turned her head and looked at me.

"One," she said.

I knew what one was, too.

She'd walked across a parking lot and sat down next to a woman who was holding the whole world together with her bare hands, and let her talk, and put an arm around her, and been the kindest thing that had happened to her all week, and drunk from her. And both of those were true. That was the part I didn't know what to do with. It wasn't one or the other. It was both, completely, at the same time, on the same bench.

And Isabel was sitting next to me in the car, pink and warm, at one. Calm. Better than calm. Something close to content.

I looked at her face and tried to find the part of it that felt bad, and I couldn't. Not the way there should have been. It was in there somewhere. I believed that. But it was small.

"Can we go home," I said.

"Yes."

She started the car. At the exit of the lot, she stopped and waited for a gap in the traffic on Kendall Drive, and while we waited she took out the notebook and a pen and turned to A. and wrote, under Next: 21/7, a small check mark and the date.

Then, after a second, she wrote something else under it. I didn't try to read it. I didn't want to know if it was a date.

Thursday, 22 July, 08:15

The café on Ponce was busy, the way it's busy on Thursdays.

Julian was at the machine. He looked up when I came in and did the thing he does, the chin lift, the grin with the gap in it.

"Oat flat white?"

"Please."

He made it. He poured the milk, frowning at it, tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth, which he does when he's concentrating. He slid it across the counter to me.

"That's a heart," he said. "I'm telling you now so you don't insult it."

It was a potato. It was the most potato-shaped potato he'd ever made.

"It's beautiful," I said.

He laughed. I paid with a twenty and told him to keep the change, and he said what, again, are you trying to adopt me, and I said how's Biscoito, and he looked at me funny for a second, like how do you know my cat's name, and then I think he decided he must have told me at some point, and he said fat and evil, thanks for asking, and I laughed, and took my coffee, and went out onto Ponce and stood under the green awning in the heat for a while, and drank it.

The First Night

The Following Weeks

Comming Clean

The Weeks After

Christmas

The Move

Laundry

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