Sunday. When they're all in church.
I finish my coffee — June slid it in front of me at some point without my noticing. Bitter and lukewarm and exactly what I needed. The old man turns a page. The couple pays and leaves. June holds my eyes once, half a second longer than necessary, then goes back to her silverware.
The note burns a hole in my pocket all the way home.
The house holds its breath when I walk in. Not the good quiet — the waiting kind, the kind that means someone's been sitting in it too long, counting minutes, working himself into a state. I feel it the second my boot hits the linoleum: Trevor in the kitchen, leaning on the counter, arms crossed, jaw tight enough that I can see the muscle from across the room.
The concentrator hisses from Eileen's room, in and out, a machine keeping a woman alive one milliliter at a time. Past that, nothing. No radio, no TV. Just the refrigerator's low grind and the silence of a man who's been planted in one spot too long.
His posture shifts when I come in. Nothing obvious — a slight straightening of the spine, a settling of the shoulders,the way a guard dog adjusts its weight when someone nears the gate. His eyes find mine and hold. Almost black in this light, doing that thing they do when he's decided something and is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
I go to the fridge. Pull it open. The cool air hits my face and for a second it's the only honest thing in the room. I don't look at him. I can feel him watching the back of my head the way you feel a draft through a cracked window — unwelcome, impossible to ignore.
"Where were you?"
Flat. Less a question than a statement with a question mark stapled on after.
I take out a water bottle. Close the fridge. "June's."
"Why?"
"Coffee."
I move to set my keys down. The pill organizer's in its spot, morning doses gone, the compartments empty and waiting for noon. Everything in its place. Everything but me — because Trevor steps into my path as I turn. Not blocking, not quite, but present, too close, the way he's been all week. Hovering in doorways. Filling the narrow hall with more shoulder than the architecture allows. Like he's waiting for me to slip, to say the wrong thing, to hand him a reason.
It's been like this since he got back. Him inserting himself into whatever air I'm trying to breathe, and I'm tired of it.
"Back off," I say.
He doesn't move. "I'm not doing anything."
"You're standing in myway."
"I'm standing in the kitchen."
I turn to face him, because standing with my back to him feels like giving up high ground, and in this house ground is all I've got. We're close. Closer than two men should be in a kitchen this size, close enough to see the muscle work in his jaw when he clenches it. His eyes are very still and very dark, fixed on mine hard enough to lift the hair on my arms, and I know that look. Have known it since we were kids in that bed, pretending not to feel the heat between us. The look of a man holding something back by sheer will, and the holding is costing him.
"Stop watching me." Flat. Final. Harder than I mean it, edged with everything that's built up since he walked back into this house and decided the walls were too thin for both of us.
"I'm not watching you." Level, controlled, a man practiced at keeping his voice neutral when everything underneath isn't. "I'm living in the same house. There's a difference."
"Bullshit."
"I'm not the one sneaking out at three in the morning."
The concentrator hisses down the hall, indifferent to whatever's happening six feet from its tubing.
I move to get past him. The kitchen's a galley, built for smaller people, forcing proximity whether you want it or not, and Trevor shifts as I move — not grabbing, just adjusting, the way you do in a crowded elevator when someone needs to squeeze by.
Our shoulders brush.
It's nothing. The kind of contact that happens in subway cars and airport lines a thousand times a daywithout anyone noticing. But we notice. Both of us. We go still for half a second, the contact landing somewhere under the skin and setting off something I don't have a name for. My body remembers the doorway three nights ago — his forearm under my hand, his pulse against my thumb, the way we both froze. Same current, same circuit, and neither of us has worked out how to cut the power.
I step back first. My shoulder feels warm where his touched it.
"I don't need you keeping tabs on me." Rougher than I meant, lower, that raw register I drop into when I'm pushed past careful. I can feel the folded note in my jacket, warm from my body, and my hand closes around it without my say-so. Reflex. Protection. The instinct to shield the one thing that matters from the one person who could take it from me by asking the right question at the wrong time.
His voice drops to match mine. "Then stop sneaking out at three in the morning like you're up to something."
