I sit on the back deck for a while, coffee forgotten, Memphis shifting his head from my foot to the warm stone and sighing in the way he has when he senses the mood without understanding it.
One week.
Cable needs to be ready.
The other thing that has happened in a month, the thing I think about considerably less carefully than I think about Mexico, is Sophia.
Or, more specifically, what a month of Sophia in my house has done to it.
And to me.
The first signs were small things. Her mug on the shelf beside mine. The smell of whatever she uses on her hair drifts through the house on mornings when she showers before I’m fully awake. Then, there’s the sound of her moving around in the kitchen, unhurried and comfortable, like someone who has stopped treating a space like a guest and started treating it like home.
She makes breakfast now.
Not every day, some mornings I’m up and gone before she wakes, but on the days we’re both home, she appears in the kitchen and wordlessly takes over. Coming back from feeding Memphis, I find eggs the way I like them, coffee already poured, and Sophia at the island with her mug and laptop open, and her hair loose around her shoulders.
It stopped feeling strange approximately two weeks ago.
That probably should have concerned me more than it did.
She tells me her plans in the morning now. What she is working on for The Ember project, whether Remy is taking her somewhere, or she has a call with Trevor. Not because I asked, but because that’s what people do when they share a space and have stopped pretending they aren’t.
And in return, I find myself telling her things, nothing about the club or Mexico, and nothing that crosses the line between her world and mine, but small things—what is happening at the shop, whether Memphis had gotten out again, and what Flame did at church that week that caused Luke to nearly spit his beer across the table.
She laughed at that one for longer than the story deserved.
Not telling her, I’d replayed the sound of it twice in the car on the way to the clubhouse.
***
One afternoon, I come home to find the house different.
Not dramatically or in a way that announces itself.
Just different.
Flowers are on the kitchen island, something yellow and wild, in a glass jar I don’t recognize, sitting between the coffee machine and Sophia’s open laptop as if they’d always been there. A small canvas is on the living room wall where there hadn’t been anything before, something abstract in warm tones. It looks like the kind of thing that was painted by a human hand rather than produced for the purpose of filling a wall.
I stand in the doorway looking at everything.
Memphis walks past toward his bowl.
“I found it at a market,” Sophia calls from the kitchen, her back to me, doing something at the counter. “There was an artist selling her work, and I thought…” she pauses. “I thought the room could use some color.” She turns around, holding adish towel, and looks at me with an expression that is carefully neutral. “If it bothers you, I can take it down.”
The painting. The flowers. The way the room feels warmer, somehow, the warmth of a space that has someone living fully in it rather than just occupying it.
“Are you planning on staying longer?” The words come out before I fully think them through.
Her expression shifts immediately, something uncertain moving across it, a slight pulling back, the look of someone who has just wondered if they’ve overstepped.
“I’m sorry,” she says quickly. “I should have asked. I just thought… I’ll take it down.”
“Sophia.” Moving into the kitchen, I set my keys on the counter. “Stop.”
She looks at me.
“Don’t take it down.” Finding the right words, the ones that are true without being more than they should be. “I want you here. That’s what I mean… I was asking because it looks like a home, and I wasn’t sure it looked like that before.”
