A knock on the door pulls me away from the kitchen. I’m a ghost with hot coffee making my way through the apartment. There are quite a few takeout boxes on various surfaces.
I don’t care.
I open the door without looking through the peephole. The worst that can happen is that I get kidnapped again, and what are the odds of that?
Not zero, certainly, but probably not very high at this point.
“Hi.” My sister doesn’t wait for me to answer before she pushes past me, her arms full of two paper grocery bags. “Did you eat today?”
“Yes,” I say automatically, closing the door behind her. This might not be strictly true, but I can’t remember. All I remember is standing in front of the sink. Earlier, I was writing. Or at least I was sitting on my couch, hand poised above a notepad.
The fridge opens and closes in the kitchen, followed by several cupboards. I wander into the living room and look down at the street. No white vans there, either. Paper bags crinkle when London folds them up. In the window I see her reflection emerge from the kitchen carrying something black. A trash bag. She tips several of the takeout containers into it and straightens an abandoned stack of mail on my coffee table.
I swallow hard around a thickness in my throat. “Hey.”
London flicks her eyes up to mine and continues tidying my apartment. “Hey.”
“You’re feeding me. And cleaning my apartment. It’s weird.”
She raises her eyebrows. “Yeah, it is weird, Holly. It’s weird when you’re acting like a dead person in your own apartment. It’s weird when I’m the responsible one between us.”
“Dead people don’t leave takeout containers everywhere.”
London gestures at me with a half-empty carton of Chinese food. “I never know what’s going on with you. You don’t even come out. It’s like you’ve disappeared.”
I snort. “I’m right here. The question is, what are you doing here?”
“I got worried when you didn’t answer my calls.”
Turnabout is fair play, sure. I’m usually the one cleaning up after London. Following her to Paris. Getting her unstuck from shady diamond deals. So on, so forth. But I don’t buy that she’s worry-stricken enough to change her entire personality. Plus, I only missed three calls.
“What’s going on with you?”
“You tell me first.” She sticks out her tongue and goes out into the hall to put the garbage in the chute. “Anyway,” she says, breezing back in. “You’re the one who was detained by the government for questioning in an assassination.”
“You’re different,” I tell her, and the moment I say it, I know it’s true. “You look different.”
“I look like I’m working a regular job. At a coffee shop. I’m taking a social media detox, which means no large influencer checks. Thanks so much for noticing.”
It’s not that. I study her more closely as she shakes out the blanket on my couch and lets it waft down over the back. It’s accurate that she has less of an influencer shine on her. She’s not as tan as she looks in her photos when she’s traveling.
London looks good—she always looks good, because she’s beautiful, but she looks comfortable, in a cream-colored sweater that sets off the red mark on her neck.
It looks like beard burn.
As if she’s been with a man. Recently.
“Who is he?”
London’s eyes go wide in a parody of surprise and her hand flutters toward the neck of the sweater. She catches herself just in time. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Two steps closer, and it’s even easier to see the change in her skin. “Did you have a confrontation with a fir tree, London? Is that it? Or did you have some intense private time with a man? Judging from the state of your neck, he has stubble.”
“What I do in my spare time is none of your business.” My throw pillows are her next target. “You should be worried about yourself. I’m definitely worried about you.”
“I’m fine. I’m more worried about your neck.”
“My neck is fine.”
“Who is he?”
She moves past me with a long-suffering energy. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“So he’s not hot.”
A glare from London. “He is hot. And I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You, London Frank, do not even want to talk about the sexy man who’s all over you at night? I don’t believe it. Talking about boys is your favorite thing. You used to talk about ’N Sync like they were your actual boyfriends. Come to think of it, I’m surprised you didn’t become the author instead of me.”
The coffee sloshes from the mug onto my hand. There’s a beat when I don’t feel the burn and then I do. I don’t hate it. And I know that’s not right.
A person shouldn’t enjoy being burned by coffee, and I don’t like it, not exactly. It’s just that I remember so clearly what it felt like to hurt for someone else. For him.
London is staring at me with open concern on her face. “Your hand is turning red.”
I wave my hand through the air, creating a breeze to cool the burn. “Tell me about the guy.”
She looks away, then down. My sister’s in the middle of my living room, shifting her weight from foot to foot, looking for the next thing to clean. It’s been weeks of this habit. Bringing groceries. Picking up takeout containers. Folding my blanket. But it’s the first time I’ve seen her with skin rubbed raw from stubble. London glances at my hand, which is the same shade of red. And then my face, which probably looks animated for the first time in weeks.
“It’s a guy named Adam.”
“Adam. Nice. Did you meet him at the coffee shop?” I laugh, and the sound is off somehow, but at least I’m doing it. At least I’m finding some amusement in talking to my sister, which is an improvement over a robotic existence. “I bet he slipped you his number on a napkin.”
London meets my eyes, but she’s worrying her bottom lip with her teeth, rubbing a hand along the back of her neck. It’s not embarrassing to meet someone in a coffee shop.
Unless she didn’t meet him in the coffee shop.
Unless the expression on her face is about more than a one-night-stand situation with a hot guy from the coffee shop.
“Adam.” The word takes forever to leave my lips. “An Adam we already know?”
“Yeah.”
I...can’t. I can’t process it, can’t let it soak in, can’t even let the information register for what seems like an eternity but is probably more like a minute. So many questions spring to mind.
Like how, and why, and when.
I’m too shocked to ask any of them.
What would the answers be, anyway? I feel an ancient urge to scold her, remind her about the dangers of being with men like Adam, but it would be laughably hypocritical.
London watches me turn into a statue of a woman holding coffee. “Holly.”
“No. It’s fine. Of course you can have sex with whoever you want.”
“Holly.”
“I’m not judging you. Just be careful, you know. Men like that.” My voice breaks. “Men like that have a way of disappearing. As if they were never even real.”