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It was miserable. I hoped that the food was good and Oliver kept telling me that it was, but I hardly tasted it. Everything was weird! Why would Gramps and Mrs. McGlothen have stared daggers at each other, and why wasn’t Vera talking? She never had a problem using her words! More importantly, why had my mom shown up like this with a man-child in tow? She never visited me! As a sidenote, why hadn’t Oliver done a little more investigation into Ann, his neighbor? He was going to have to carry her out of here.

But she was the least of the problems, because she was asleep. Since she hadn’t eaten and because Vera and I had only picked at the dishes that I’d prepared, there was plenty left over for my mom and Maël. Next time, I would be sure to make a lot of extras in case uninvited people showed up—

No. There wasn’t going to be a repeat of this night, no way.

Luckily, Oliver was strong so he was able to drag his neighbor out, since rousing her proved to be difficult. He had offered to help clean up from the meal, but I thought it was better that he got her home. Clearly, Gramps wasn’t interested in seeing that woman again. He also made a half-hearted gesture toward the kitchen before I told him to go, but Mrs. McGlothen and Vera made it out the door first.

Then I was left with my mom and Maël. “Where are we all bunking?” she asked me, fluttering her fingers around her face. I had forgotten how much she talked with her hands—how long had it been since we had seen each other? Six years? Seven?

No, more. This made no sense. “What are you doing here?” I asked her again.

“Hek—Kat, I’m so tired. Maël and I have gone through a physical journey but also a blow that was tough on us, spiritually,” she answered.

“What?”

But she didn’t want to talk about that, either. She just wanted to go to bed and she thought the best thing would be to unwrap my new mattress and box springs, push all the plastic-y bed parts to the side, and use my room. “It will be easier to put this blow-up thing in the living room,” she declared, tapping my inflatable mattress with her foot. “Maël, help me set up our bed.”

He didn’t say anything but he did step up to assist her, so I forced the inflatable down the hallway and into the living room. By the time I returned, they had shut the door and I heard them both laughing quietly behind it. I had heard those kinds of noises from my mom before, when she’d been with men. They meant that I would have to wear my noise-canceling earbuds.

First, I needed to bring in the rest of her bags and then wash the dishes at the quiet sink. Earlier tonight, Oliver had noticed how everything had changed with that: the glitter was totally gone and there was only the faintest hint of music.

That was all probably a good thing. The singing water very well could have been a sign of something malicious or malevolent, and now? I was free of it, almost. I could look forward to taking a shower and filling my ice trays with absolutely no strange sounds at all.

I could also look forward to finding out what had brought my mom to Detroit—but in fact, I was dreading that conversation. It had to have been pretty bad for her to show up like this, instead of buying a car and going to the thousands of other places where she hadn’t yet tried to do her projects and make a new group of friends.

I didn’t sleep well that night but I was up and ready to meet Oliver the next morning in the lobby. I’d had to go into my bedroom to get my running clothes, so I’d knocked loudly, calling, “Please cover up!” Then I had held my hand over the side of my face so that I couldn’t see the figures on the bed. My mom was never one to wear too much at night and I assumed that Maël would have been the same way.

Oliver raised his eyebrows when he saw me. “You look pretty tired,” he said. “Are you sure that you want to go?”

I didn’t want to stay home, even though the sky that I could see through the glass doors of the Milaflores Building was leaden. “Is it going to snow?”

“Freezing rain,” he told me. “Here, I brought this. It doesn’t fit me.”

No, it couldn’t have, because the coat in his hands definitely wasn’t meant for someone who was 6’3”. “Why do you have this?” I asked.

“I think it was my sister’s and I’m glad I grabbed it, because now you won’t get wet,” he said.

“Thank you.” I did swap out this new jacket for the other one I’d been wearing, which he had previously given me. Then I rubbed my temples to get rid of the headache that was clustering there, throbbing and shooting tentacles of pain behind my eyes. I hoped that pounding across the pavement would help with that.

“Your dinner was delicious,” he told me as we started off. I noticed that he was going even slower than we usually went, and I was very glad.

“Thank you. I don’t really even remember it.”

“I thought it was great,” he reiterated. “So did Gramps.”

“Did he tell you why he’s fighting with Mrs. McGlothen?” I asked.

“I asked,” he said. “He answered that he doesn’t get along with anyone, which is true. But it seemed like more than just his usual rudeness.”

I agreed.

“The strangest part of it, to me, was that Vera didn’t step up. She and Mrs. McGlothen have been friends since they were in elementary school together,” he reminded me. “You would have thought they would have tag-teamed insults, like they do with the mailman that they hate.”

I agreed again that it was strange and pulled up the hood of the jacket. The freezing rain had started.

He didn’t seem bothered by it. “Gramps said that I should mind my own business, a funny thing for the guy who forced a piano on me.”

“Out of love.”