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“Why don’t we just all take a deep breath?” She turns to me with a soft, hesitant gaze. My eyes dart away. “Toren, will you sit and eat with us? Please?”

Not waiting on an answer from me that she knows she won’t get, she turns to her husband. “And you—no hockey talk at the dinner table. It can wait.”

He doesn’t argue with her. He never does.

Tense silence fills the room as Sahara continues to plate and serve the food, sweeping her hair up into the lavender clip she’s always wearing. She’s young, but she’s started to go gray early, the silvery front pieces by the right side of her face slipping out and curling around her softened cheek. Almond brown eyes and thick dark eyebrows make her look more severe than she is—but it’s her complexion that’s similar to mine—dark golden russet skin—enough that someone might mistake her for my mother if we were ever seen together outside of these four walls.

That thought makes me sick to my stomach, enough that I don’t immediately pounce on the steak and potatoes she’s served us.

“How is school?” she asks, eyes wide with a small smile, tentative.

“Fine,” I say, hating the way I sound like a petulant child.

“Did you end up taking the music class?”

I clear my throat and shake my head. “No.”

Sahara doesn’t volley another question my way. Dinner is quiet and tense, enough that it clearly bothers Harris—his wife eventually grabs for his hand.

I finished my food quickly, before asking, “Can I be excused?”

Asking to leave the table was a foreign thing to me, but one particular night I’d stormed off and tried to leave on my bike. Harris had followed me in his truck, breaking just as many speeding laws as I had, before I finally pulled over. He was quiet while I yelled, waited until I was finished spewing vitriol in his direction, waiting for him to kick me off the team.

Instead, he just silently waited, eyeing me keenly, fixing his baseball cap over his dark-haired head.

Finally, after too long a pause he said, “Sahara likes it when we all eat at the table. If you’re not going to eat with us, then fine. Do whatever you want. Just don’t—don’t storm off like that again. Ask to leave.”

After that, I always did. I was used to picking up on new rules quickly.

“We need to talk,” he says now.

“We can, tomorrow morning,” I swear. I just need to get away from this for a few minutes, clear my head.

Harris sighs and nods. I don’t dare to even glance toward Sahara, knowing she probably looks like a kicked puppy right now. I’ve made the mistake of looking before, and it’s too difficult, to see her like that.

You’re the one who hurt her feelings. She made you a meal. She tried to—

Shutting the door to the basement, I flick on the lights.

When I moved in at the start of fall semester, this place was barren. Then, after a week of sleeping on the couch, I arrived back early from a canceled class and walked in on Harris attempting to console his highly upset wife, who was trying to put dark gray sheets onto a brand-new bed.

“What if he hates it?” I’d overheard her ask, eyes wide and watery. She chewed on her nails and flitted her eyes over the room again.

Edison bulb string lights danced from corner to corner, one wall decorated in Waterfell gear and memorabilia that I’d easily bet was half Harris’s. The rest of the room had been filled with a half-empty bookcase, a large desk with brand-new, still-packaged school supplies littering the wood top, and a large leather swivel chair pushed up under it. A white electric guitar was mounted to the wall and beside it, vinyl records on display shelves dotting the wall in a zigzag.

“He won’t hate it—”

“I should take the music stuff down. I don’t want to presume—”

“Sahara . . .” I heard his voice drop into a soft whisper I’d never heard from the stoic man. And then, another sound, like lips to skin, and I slid back up from my perch on the stairs, silently leaving them.

The room is the same now. Even the records on display are exactly the ones she left there—Creedence Clearwater Revival, Pat Benatar, Steely Dan, Nat King Cole, Nina Simone, Fleetwood Mac—I’d noticed a whole collection of their records upstairs as well. She left a bin of others, all well preserved, next to my desk. But the one in the front glared at me, all purple and black, daring me to touch it. To play it.

I didn’t. I still hadn’t looked through the rest.

When she showed me the room, all nervous energy, bouncing around, she told me the bed was the last one they had in stock—a queen mattress now covered in soft charcoals with a black comforter.

“If it’s uncomfortable,” she’d said, “just tell me. We can get a different one. I— Well, I wish I had more time to make this a better space for you.”