3
RUBY
The flower shop on Smith was already open when I dragged past it, half-dead on my feet, the coffee I'd finished two blocks back already wearing off. The peonies sat out front in a galvanized bucket, big and blowsy and pink, the kind that look like they're about to confess something. A hand-lettered sign leaned in the water. Eighteen dollars a stem. I did the math I always do, the one where I set a thing I want against the rent I owe, and the rent won the way it always wins. I kept walking. I never set foot inside. I want that on the record, for later.
By then I'd already wired three hundred dollars home to my abuela in Ponce, because her roof had developed strong opinions about the rain and her pride had stronger opinions about charity, and the only way around the second was to send the money before she could pick up the phone and argue me out of it. That left me with a banking app that laughed when I opened it and a landlord whose notes under my door had graduated from polite to underlined.
The shift I will spare you. Sixteen hours, two codes, and one gentleman who tried to discharge himself with the IV still in hisarm and made it all the way to the parking structure before we reeled him back in. When I finally came up out of the subway near home, the sky had gone that bruised color it turns right before it gives up on a day, and I wanted three things, in order: a shower, my bed, and to never again be needed by another living soul.
On the train, I had the feeling. I don't have a better word for it. The back of my neck did the thing necks do, that old animal prickle that means a part of you with no manners has noticed something your eyes haven't caught yet. I looked around. Tired faces, a kid asleep on his backpack, a man by the doors reading the same ad I was. Nobody looking back. I told myself it was nothing. I'd been telling myself a lot of things lately, and my record was getting embarrassing.
Deysi was on the couch when I let myself in, still in scrubs, eating cereal straight out of the box like a raccoon who'd recently unionized.
"You look like a crime scene," she said, around a mouthful.
"Thank you. I moisturize."
I dropped my bag, kicked off my shoes, and went for the kettle on autopilot, because tea is the only faith I practice. That was when the first small wrong thing introduced itself.
My tea was back.
I'd finished the chamomile two nights before. I'd stood in this exact spot, tipped the empty box into the recycling, told myself to buy more, and then, like a functioning adult, forgotten. The box on the shelf now was full. Sealed. Same brand. The little orange sticker from the bodega on the corner was still stuck to the flap.
"Deysi. Did you buy tea?"
"Do I look like I own a kettle? I drink whatever's brown and yells at me."
"So you didn't replace the chamomile."
"I wouldn't know chamomile if it sat next to me on the bus." She finally glanced up. "Why are you using your hostage voice?"
"No reason."
It wasn't only the tea. My favorite mug, the chipped one with the faded hen, sat on the drying rack turned the wrong way, handle to the left, and I have been a handle-to-the-right person my entire life, the way some people are born left-handed. The photo of my abuela on the shelf had been nudged a few degrees, just enough that she faced the door now instead of the window. Nothing gone. Nothing broken. Everything sitting half an inch off from where I'd left it, like the whole apartment had been lifted, examined, and set back down by someone very careful.
And on the kitchen table, dead center where you could not possibly miss it, sat a box.
Small. Wrapped. Not the festive kind of wrapped. The careful kind, corners creased sharp enough to draw blood. I knew that paper. I'd met its cousin the week before, in a place that was supposed to be locked, and I'd spent the time since not thinking about it with a discipline that should have won me an award.
They didn't take anything from my apartment. They left something. That was so much worse.
"Okay, your face is doing a thing," Deysi said, sitting up. "What's in the box?"
"I haven't opened it."
"Then open it before I do something braver than you."
I peeled the tape. Inside, nested in tissue, lay a single bar of the expensive dark chocolate I buy myself once a year, on my birthday, as a small private ceremony for surviving another lap around the sun. Nobody knew I liked it. I'd never said so out loud to anyone, because it was mine. Tucked beside it was a plain card. Two words, in ink pressed hard into the stock. Sweet dreams.
Deysi read it over my shoulder and went completely still, which from her is louder than a scream.
"Okay," she said. "That's. Okay. Secret admirer. People do this. It's flattering. Sort of. In a horror-movie way."
"It's a lot of something." I turned the card over. Blank. "How does a secret admirer clear a fourth-floor walk-up with a deadbolt?"
"The super?"
"Marco is seventy-one and thinks the internet is a fad that'll pass."
