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“Spaghetti.”

“From scratch?”

I look at him.

“Right,” he says. “Stupid question.”

The word lands wrong, but he doesn’t appear to notice.

I set the water over the burner and open a can of sauce. Briggs watches me pour it into another pot before examining the label.

“Disargrio sauce.”

I look down. “What?”

“Disargrio.” He points at the can. “That’s what poor people call marinara.”

“You are poor people.”

“I play professional hockey. My funds are currently not in the Disargrio marinara category.”

“You eat cereal from mixing bowls.”

“That’s efficiency.”

“That’s untreated stupidity.”

Briggs goes quiet.

The silence changes the room so quickly that I turn from the stove.

He is staring at the counter.

I replay the sentence and hate myself. I didn’t mean—”

“I know.” He reaches for his sunglasses and turns them between his hands. “It was a joke.”

“A bad one.”

“You’ve made worse.”

“Doesn’t make that one better.”

Briggs sets the glasses down. “Keep cooking.”

I drop the pasta into boiling water, stir the sauce, and slide bread into the oven. Keeping my hands occupied gives both of us somewhere to hide. Briggs asks twice if I’m okay, and I refuse twice to let him turn the room toward me. Eventually, he stops asking.

The quiet that follows lasts long enough to become dangerous.

I stir the noodles, check the bread, and listen to the city moving beyond the windows. A siren passes several blocks away. Traffic crawls through the streets below us. The ordinary sounds make Briggs’s silence feel louder.

I turn toward the island.

He isn’t sitting there anymore.

Briggs stands in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows with both hands inside the pockets of his hoodie. Milwaukee stretches beneath him, glass towers reflecting the late-afternoon sky while cars move through the streets like blood through veins. His reflection hovers faintly over the city, bruised eye and all.

I switch off the burner beneath the sauce.