Chapter 207

Chapter 207
Stella:

The wine glass was still half-full when the pounding started.

Not a knock. Not the polite double-tap of someone who respected boundaries and visiting hours.

This was the kind of aggressive, flat-palmed assault on a door that meant someone had bypassed the building's main entrance—probably by tailgating a resident—and had come straight up without bothering to text first.

I knew who it was before I checked the peephole.

Zoe stood in the hallway with her arms crossed, her hair pulled back in the severe ponytail she wore when she was about to fire someone or negotiate a term sheet she had no intention of losing.

She was still in her work clothes—tailored pants, silk blouse, heels that added three inches she didn't need—and the expression on her face was the same one I'd seen exactly twice before: once when a portfolio company CEO had tried to hide a sexual harassment complaint, and once when she'd discovered her high school boyfriend making out with someone else at prom.

Both times, the other person had regretted it significantly.

I opened the door.

"Emily told me," she said, walking past me into the apartment without waiting for an invitation. "She told me you've been seeing someone. She told me there's been someone in your life for a while now, and you've been hiding it from me." She turned to face me, her eyes sharp and assessing.

"So I'm here to find out who the hell this mystery man is and why my best friend didn't think she could tell me about him."

My throat went dry. "Zoe—"

"Don't." She held up one hand. "I've spent the last hour trying to figure out if I'm more hurt or more angry, and I still haven't decided, so just—don't."

She moved into the living room with the focused intensity of someone conducting an inspection, and I watched with mounting dread as her gaze swept across the space.

The throw blanket Noah always used was folded over the back of the couch. His philosophy textbook sat on the coffee table, a receipt marking his place. The second coffee mug I'd left by the sink that morning.

Small things. Ordinary things. Things that suddenly felt like evidence.

Zoe walked to the bookshelf and pulled out the signed first edition Noah had given me months ago, the one with his careful inscription on the inside cover. Her eyes narrowed as she read it, then she set it down and moved to the kitchen.

The UCLA mug. His favorite, the one he always reached for. She picked it up, turned it over in her hands.

"Whose is this?"

"A friend's," I said, and even to my own ears it sounded weak.

She opened the cabinet above the coffee maker. Two toothbrushes in the holder by the sink—I'd forgotten about those. She turned to stare at me, and something in her expression shifted from anger to something more complicated.

"Stella." Her voice was quieter now, but no less intense. "Whose things are these?"

Before I could answer, she walked down the hallway toward the bedroom. I followed, my heart hammering against my ribs, knowing exactly what she was going to find and powerless to stop it.

She pushed open the door to the guest room—the room that hadn't been a guest room in over a year. Noah's sketchbooks were stacked on the desk. His laptop charger snaked across the floor.

A SCU hoodie hung over the back of the chair, and on the nightstand sat the small succulent I'd bought him as a joke because he'd said he couldn't keep anything alive.

Zoe stood in the doorway for a long moment, perfectly still.

Then she turned to look at me, and I watched comprehension dawn across her face in slow, terrible stages.

"No," she said. The word came out flat, disbelieving. "Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me this isn't—"

"Zoe—"

"Tell me my little brother isn't living in your apartment." Her voice rose slightly, the careful control starting to fracture. "Tell me those aren't his things. Tell me you haven't been—" She stopped, pressing her fingers to her temples. "How long, Stella. How long has this been going on."

It wasn't a question. Her voice carried that particular flatness she reserved for situations where she'd already decided to be furious but hadn't yet decided what to do with it.

I set down the wine glass I'd been holding since she arrived. Outside the window, the marina lights reflected off the water in long, wavering lines, and I watched them for a moment before I answered.

"Since the beginning of freshman year," I said quietly. "His freshman year."

The silence that followed lasted long enough that I could hear my own pulse in my ears.

"I already hit him," she said finally.

I blinked. "What?"

"I went to his dorm first. I hit him twice with a throw pillow, which I realize isn't particularly effective, but it was what I had available." She crossed her arms again, and I could see her hands were shaking slightly.

"He told me to come here. He said you'd explain everything in a way that would make sense, which seems extremely optimistic given that nothing about this makes any goddamn sense at all."

The tightness in my chest loosened slightly—not because the conversation was going well, but because this was Zoe. Furious, yes. Hurt, yes. But still talking. Still here.

"I was scared," I said. "I kept waiting for a moment when it felt safe enough to tell you, and the moment never came, and then too much time had passed and I was more scared of losing you than I was of anything else."

"You could have lost your job, Stella."

"I know."

"You could have lost everything you worked for."

"I know that too."

"And you still—" She stopped herself, exhaling slowly through her nose. "He's my little brother. You're my best friend. Do you understand how deeply weird this is for me?"

"I do."

"He was nineteen. Nineteen, Stella."

"He's twenty-two now. Has been for a while."

"That is not the reassurance you think it is." But something in her voice had shifted—fractionally, barely perceptibly, the way ice shifts in late February when the temperature climbs two degrees and nothing looks different but everything underneath has changed.

"Is he—are you—" She seemed to be having trouble locating the right question. "Are you happy? Both of you. Is this actually something real or is it—"

"It's real," I said. "It's been real for a long time."

She stared at me for another moment, then walked back to the living room and dropped onto the couch with the kind of graceless collapse that meant she'd exhausted her immediate supply of righteous anger and hadn't yet figured out what came next.