Page 24 of Knight
I hate how much I notice that.
"Nova—"
"You broke my rule."
He stops. The charm does not come. The grin does not load. He stands in my doorway holding his jacket and looking at me with an expression I have never seen from him before — open, quiet, almost chastened, like a man who walked into a place he was not invited and found something he was not ready to see and is still processing the damage.
"I told you," I say. Quiet. Firm. The voice I use when Marisol pushes back on curfew — the one that sounds calm on thesurface and carries a blade underneath. "My apartment is off-limits. My siblings are off-limits. You do not get to show up where they live because you are bored or restless or whatever it was that made you climb four flights to a door I told you to stay away from."
He nods. One nod. No argument. No deflection. Nobut I wanted to see you, noI was in the neighborhood, none of the lines a man like him keeps loaded for moments like this.
"It won't happen again," he says.
He means it. I can hear it — the absence of performance, the raw simplicity of a man saying something true because a woman told him to and he listened.
I step back. He moves past me into the hallway. His cologne trails behind him — cedar, warmth, something expensive that has no business mixing with the smell of chicken soup from my stove — and I watch him walk toward the stairs.
He takes them carefully. One hand on the railing, each step deliberate, like he is mapping the building on the way down. Memorizing the creak on the third step. The gap in the banister on the second landing. The water stain on the wall shaped like a hand.
He is learning my world. Step by step. Even as I tell him to leave it.
I close the door. Lean my back against it. The wood is cool through my shirt and I press my palms flat against it and breathe.
The apartment is quiet. The Mario Kart menu music loops softly from the television. The pot on the stove is still warm. And his cologne is everywhere — on the air, in the carpet where he sat, on the kitchen chair where he draped his jacket. Mixed with soup and dish soap and the fabric softener I use on Tomás's pajamas. My world and his, layered on top of each other like paint on a wall.
The bathroom door opens. Tomás pads down the hallway in his socks.
"Nova?"
"Yeah, baby."
"When is Romeo coming back?"
The question lands in the center of my chest and sits there like a coal.
"He's not," I say.
Tomás is quiet for a moment. Then: "Okay." He walks to his bedroom. Closes the door. The rocket nightlight clicks on — I can see the blue glow through the gap at the bottom.
I stay against the door. The cologne fades. The soup cools. The building settles around me with its familiar creaks and groans.
He's not coming back,I told my brother.
I am already not sure I believe it.
The Thought She Cannot Afford
I clean the kitchen like I am scrubbing evidence from a crime scene.
Dishes. Counters. The stove top where soup dried in a crescent along the burner rim. I wipe the chair where his jacket sat until the wood squeaks under the rag. I open the window above the sink and let the night air eat whatever is left of his cologne because I cannot function in a room that smells like him.The cold pours in and I stand in it with wet hands and let it strip the warmth off my skin.
Marisol's homework is on the kitchen table. Algebra. I check every problem because that is what I do — I check, I correct, I initial the top corner so her teacher knows an adult reviewed it. My handwriting is steady. My pulse is not.
Tomás is in bed. I sit on the edge of his mattress and pull the blanket to his chin and he is already half gone — eyelids heavy, mouth soft, the rocketship nightlight throwing blue across his cheeks. He smiles in his sleep. A real smile. The kind I have not seen at bedtime in months because bedtime is when the panic finds him, when the dark turns into a weight on his chest and he cannot breathe.
Tonight he fell asleep in four minutes. Still smiling about Mario Kart.
About Romeo.
