Her smile spreads slowly, then all at once, the same way it has since she was five years old.
We talk for another ten minutes about the offer, the timeline, what a move would look like, and the apartment situation.She’s done her research with the thoroughness she brings to everything, and I listen to her walk through it and feel something shift in my heart. Something that has been slightly out of place for a long time and is now settling back where it belongs.
My sister.
Here.
In this city.
By the time we end the call, I’m smiling, and my eyes are doing something I’m going to attribute entirely to the warm June wind. I drop my phone to my side and stand in the evening for a moment, just feeling the size of it.
The door opens behind me.
I don’t turn around as I know the footsteps—the weight and pace of them. Ghost moves in beside me like he belongs there, filling a space I didn’t know was missing. He settles against the railing beside me, eyes on the same stretch of Vegas dusk, steady and grounded in that way he gets that never pushes for answers before I’m ready to give them. After a minute, he reaches into his cut and pulls out the other half of my jerky packet, the one I handed him hours ago and completely forgot existed, and holds it out like this was always part of the plan.
I take it, and we stand there together in the warmth.
“That was my sister,” I say.
“I figured.”
“She might be moving here.”
He hesitates for a moment, then he nods. “Good.” Flat, certain, definitely not a pleasantry, because Ghost doesn’t do pleasantries. Just a fact he has assessed and agreed with.
“You don’t know her.”
“She matters to you.”
I turn my head toward him. He’s still watching the skyline, jaw set in that familiar way that means he’s said exactly what he meant and considers the matter closed. The evening lightcatches the edge of his profile, sharpening every hard line of him, and I realize I’m standing out here in the dark with completely unmanageable feelings for the most controlled man I’ve ever met.
This is fine.
I have made my peace with it.
Mostly.
My phone buzzes. Piper is sending me a screenshot of an apartment listing with bright windows and original tile in the kitchen again. She has circled it in red marker.
Piper:Found one. Don’t panic.
Four seconds later…
Piper:It’s three blocks from you.
I laugh before I can stop it, that specific laugh, the unguarded one—the Piper-induced laugh. Without thinking, I show Ghost the screen. Just turn it toward him because something good happened, he is beside me, and that’s where my hands go.
He reads it—the toothpick shifts. Something at the corner of his mouth does the thing that is not quite a smile but which I have come, over many months, to understand is one.
“She sounds like you,” he says.
I snort out a laugh. “God help you… she’s worse.”
He looks at the screen for one more moment before I take the phone back and start typing something about the tile.
Then Ghost goes still beside me.
Not his usual still. This is something different. It’s the still of someone who has been turning something over and has finished.
