He cuts me off, saying coolly, "Shall we move to Rule #12?"
And so it goes on.
Rule after rule after rule, but I don't mind at all because I'm a smart girl, and smart girls are very good at rules the way a river is good at a wall. I go around, I go over, and I find the one crack and make myself at home in it.
By dinner the penthouse doesn't sound like the penthouse anymore. It sounds like a place where someone lives out loud. I sing in the shower and forget rule five, burn the popcorn and set off rule nine, and laugh at my own joke so hard I have to sit down on the floor of a kitchen that has clearly never once had a person sit down on the floor of it. When I look up, he's in the doorway just...watching me like I'm a language he used to speak.
MAXIMO WROTE THE RULESdown.
He'd never written a rule in his life. He gave orders and they were obeyed; that was the whole shape of his days. But that evening he sat at the desk that'd been his father's and he wrote them out by hand, one after another, in a column that kept growing, and he understood, distantly, that he wasn't building a list.
He was building a wall.
Because two years ago this apartment had gone silent in a single afternoon, and he'd learned to live inside the silence the way you learn to live with a limp. And now there was a girl on his kitchen floor laughing until she cried, and the sound went straight through him to a room he had bricked up on purpose, and every rule was one more brick, set back in place with hands that weren't entirely happy about the job.
He looked at the list. Twelve rules. It wasn't going to be enough. He already knew it wasn't going to be enough.
At the bottom, under all of them, he didn't write the real rule. He only thought it, once, and then he turned the page so he'd not have to see it.
Don't let her matter. Too late, the apartment told him.
Everything about his place had changed the moment she set foot in it.
She made everything hers just by being herself, and if he wasn't too careful...
It would be the same for Maximo.
All it would take was one mistake. One lapse, one fatal moment in which he would allow himself to forget whose heart was beating behind her chest—
That was all it would take.
And then he, too, would be hers.
Chapter Five
THERE'S A DOOR IN THEpenthouse I'm not allowed to open, which, if you know anything about me at all, is the door I'm currently standing in front of.
In my defense, I was looking for the linen closet.
Rule six says I'm to stay out of the east hall. Rule six didn't mention where the towels live, and a girl can't shower and then drip-dry through sheer force of personality, so here I am, easing open a door that turns out not to be a linen closet at all but a girl's bedroom.
My first thought is that someone still lives here because the bed is made and there's a hoodie thrown over the back of the desk chair like its owner just stepped out for a minute. Then my second thought catches up to my first and taps it gently on the shoulder.
Nobody has stepped out of this room in a very long time.
I can tell by the way the air holds itself. By the too-perfect corners of a bed nobody sleeps in. By the little crowd of framed photographs on the desk, dusted and dustless, the same laughing girl in every one of them, gap-toothed at seven and beaming at seventeen and always, in every single frame, hanging off the arm of a tall unsmiling boy I'd know anywhere because he still hasn't learned how to smile.
Maximo had a sister.
Has. Had. I don't know the tense. Grief is terrible at tenses.
And standing in the middle of all that carefully-kept hush, my chest does a thing I can't explain, a slow hard knock behind my ribs, the kind that earns me a lecture at my next checkup, this secondhand heart of mine leaning toward the room like it already knows the way, and I flatten my hand over my sternum and tell it, without a sound, to behave. Because whatever this is, it's not mine to feel.
"Get out."
I whirl around. He's in the doorway, and I've never once seen his face do this. Every wall the man owns is up and manned. "I'm sorry." I'm already moving, hands lifted like he's the one who needs calming. "I'm so, so sorry, I was looking for towels, I didn't know—"
"Get. Out."
