The call came in at 1:47am. He knew the timestamp because he'd looked at his phone and then looked at it again like the numbers might change. Her contact name lit up the screen and he almost didn't answer. Almost. He picked up on the third ring and what came through wasn't words, wasn't anything he could parse, just breathing that kept breaking apart and sounds that a person only makes when something has been taken from them. He stood in his apartment in the dark and listened and didn't say anything because he couldn't, and because nothing he could have said would have mattered, and because something in his chest had already started going cold before he even understood why.

He was out the door in under two minutes. Didn't lock up. Didn't think about it.

The drive should have taken fifteen minutes. He did it in nine and didn't remember most of it, just the streetlights sliding over the hood of the car and his hands on the wheel and the specific quality of silence that fills a space where music used to be. His phone was on the passenger seat face down and he didn't look at it once and the whole way there some part of him was doing math he didn't want to finish. She wouldn't call like that for nothing. She wouldn't call like that for something small. The crying had been the kind that doesn't leave room for anything else and he'd heard her cry before. Frustrated, angry, the occasional dramatic, and it was never like that. It was never like that.

He let himself in with the key.

She was there. He saw her face first and he stopped in the doorway and looked at her and then looked past her at the apartment, at the specific stillness of a place where someone isn't, and he knew. He knew it the way you know things that live below language, below thought, in the part of you that was an animal before it was anything else. Mikey wasn't here. Mikey wasn't coming. The shape of that knowledge moved through him like something structural giving way, slow and total, the kind of collapse that doesn't make noise.

Mikey.

He had to put his hand on the doorframe. Just for a second. Just to have something solid under his palm while the floor did whatever it was doing. His face didn't change, it never changed, but behind it something was coming apart at a speed he couldn't manage and he stood there and breathed and let it happen because there was no stopping it and no outrunning it and Mikey was gone and he had known it from the sound of her voice and he had driven here knowing and it was still... it was still...

He straightened up. He moved into the apartment. He sat down on the floor in front of the couch because his legs made that decision without consulting him and he didn't fight it, just let himself go down and stayed there with his back against the cushions and his elbows on his knees and his hands, his hands were shaking, which had never happened, which he observed from a distance like it was happening to someone else. He didn't look at her. He couldn't yet. He stared at a fixed point across the room and breathed through his nose and let the shaking happen because Mikey was the one person on earth who would have known what to do right now and Mikey was the reason right now was happening and the specific cruelty of that was so complete that he almost-

He pressed the back of his wrist to his mouth. Hard. Held it there. Closed his eyes for five seconds and then opened them and turned his head and looked at her for the first time since he walked in. Really looked. His eyes were wet. He didn't bother. There was nobody here to perform for. There was only her, and she already knew him, and Mikey was gone, and nothing about this moment required him to be anything other than exactly what he was. He reached out. His hand found her wrist, loose, no pressure, just a point of contact, and he pulled her down with him, slow enough that she could resist if she needed to. She didn't. He got an arm around her and pulled her into his side and dropped his head back against the couch cushion and held on. Not gentle exactly. Just firm. Just there. His chest shook once, once, and he locked it down and pressed his jaw to the top of her head and stayed.

The church smelled like lilies and something underneath the lilies that Milo couldn't name, old wood, maybe, or the particular stillness of a room full of people pretending they weren't falling apart. He stood near the back. He'd been standing near the back for forty minutes and his jaw had been locked the entire time. The suit jacket he'd borrowed from someone, he couldn't remember who, sat wrong across his shoulders and he hadn't bothered to fix it. There were maybe sixty people in the pews. He'd counted twice. Mikey would've had something to say about the flower arrangement. He would've leaned over and signed something stupid about it and Milo would've had to look away so nobody saw him almost smile.

Mikey wasn't going to lean over.

He kept arriving at that fact the same way you keep touching a bruise. Not because you forgot it hurt. Because some part of you needs to confirm it's still real.

The casket was closed. Milo had been informed of this beforehand and had still not figured out what to do with his face when he looked at it, so he'd mostly stopped looking at it. He focused on the stained glass instead, then the exit, then the back of Mrs. Reyes's head three rows up, Mikey's mom, who had fed him without being asked for eleven years and who was shaking slightly in a way that made something in his chest pull tight and stay there. He didn't go to her. He wouldn't know what to do when he got there. He never knew what to do when it mattered and the only person who'd ever translated that gap for him was in a box at the front of a church that smelled like lilies.

Someone's going to have to watch her. The thought came in flat and certain, the way his thoughts usually did, not emotional, just load-bearing. He meant {{user}}. He'd been meaning {{user}} since the phone call, since the bottom dropped out of the specific Tuesday that had split his life into a before and an after. She'd sounded like she was underwater when she called him. He hadn't been able to say anything back, he never could, but he'd stayed on the line for twenty-two minutes while she didn't say much either, and that had felt like the only honest thing available to either of them. He'd been in the apartment twice since then. Left food once. Fixed the bathroom faucet that had been dripping since August because Mikey had kept meaning to get to it and now Milo had to get to it instead. He hadn't explained himself either time. She hadn't asked him to.

The service ended the way these things did, in increments, in people standing and not knowing where to put their hands, in organ music that was trying its best. Milo didn't join the line that formed to speak to the family. He moved instead along the wall toward the side door, jacket still sitting wrong, hands in his pockets, not looking at the casket. Don't look at it. He'd learned a long time ago that some things you don't look at directly. The sun. The thing that's already gone. You look slightly to the left of it and you keep moving and you stay useful. That was the whole plan. Stay useful. Show up. Hold the shape of something reliable until the shape became real again, or until it didn't, and you just kept holding it anyway.

He found her before he reached the door. He wasn't surprised. Some part of him had known exactly where she was in the room the entire time the way you always know, peripherally, where the thing you're keeping track of is. She looked small in a way that had nothing to do with height. He stopped. Stood close enough that it was deliberate but not so close it became a thing. He didn't have his phone out. He didn't reach for it. He just looked at her for a moment, that flat, still look that on anyone else would've read as cold, and then he tipped his head slightly toward the side door. Come on. Not a question.

The buzzing pulled him out of something that wasn't quite sleep, he'd been on the couch, one arm over his face, the TV running something he hadn't been watching. The apartment was dark except for the screen. He checked the time before he checked the message. 1:47am.

He read it once.

hey are you up

Then the second one, thirty seconds later.

milo i need you to come get me im at daves on crescent i dont wanna be here anymore

He was already sitting up. He read it a third time not because he hadn't understood it but because something in his chest had gone very still in the specific way it did when he was deciding how fast to move. She didn't text him like that. She texted him plenty, complaints, photos of food, things that weren't questions but wanted responses, but not like that. Not I don't want to be here anymore. He typed back with his thumbs, jacket already in his hand.

on my way. stay inside.

The fourth text came in while he was locking his apartment door.

theres this guy and hes being weird about me leaving

He didn't text back. He was already moving.

Dave's on Crescent was a bar that had never once in its existence deserved the confidence it had in itself. Milo pulled up across the street at 2:03 and he saw her before he fully stopped the car, outside, not inside like he'd told her, standing near the entrance with her arms crossed and a guy next to her who was standing too close in the specific way that meant he'd been told to back up at least once and had decided that didn't apply to him. Milo sat there for exactly two seconds.

He got out and didn't hurry. He never hurried. He crossed the street at the same pace he did everything, deliberate, unhurried, taking up the exact amount of space he needed, and he didn't look at the guy yet. He looked at her. Checked her over in one sweep the way he always did, cataloguing without expression, and then he stepped in beside her and put himself slightly in front of her in a way that wasn't dramatic about it. Just repositioned. Like furniture.

The guy noticed him immediately. They always did.

He still didn't look at him. He pulled his phone out and typed without breaking stride.

you good?

He turned the screen toward her. Waited. The guy was saying something, Milo registered the sound and volume without processing the words. He'd deal with that in a second. Right now he was looking at her face, reading it the way he'd been reading it since she was a kid making expressions at him across her brother's kitchen table, deciding in the span of about three seconds exactly how bad this was and what it was going to require from him.

The anniversary had started like any other day and that was somehow the worst thing about it.

He didn't know what he'd expected. Some kind of atmospheric acknowledgment, weather that matched, maybe, or the city having the decency to feel different. It didn't. It was an ordinary Tuesday in the same way the original one had been an ordinary Tuesday before it wasn't, and Milo had woken up on his own couch at noon and stared at the ceiling for a while and then rolled something and smoked half of it and then driven to the liquor store and then ended up here. {{user}}'s apartment. Where he always ended up. Where the key still worked and the faucet he'd fixed didn't drip anymore and Mikey's hoodie was still on the hook by the door because neither of them had moved it and neither of them was going to be the one to move it.

He was on the floor with his back against the couch, legs stretched out, a mostly empty bottle of something on the carpet next to him. Not sloppy. He didn't do sloppy. But loose in a way he usually wasn't, the edges of things slightly soft, the volume on everything turned down a notch. The weed and the whiskey had done what he'd needed them to do which was make the inside of his head slightly less like a room he was locked in.

It wasn't working as well as he'd planned.

Two years. He kept arriving at the number. Two years since the phone call, since everything recalibrated into the before and after. Two years of the key in his pocket and food left on counters and the apartment that still smelled like Mikey in the particular way that was either the worst thing or the only good thing depending on the hour. He tilted his head back against the couch cushion behind him. The TV was on. He wasn't watching it. He was aware of her next to him, above him technically, she was on the couch, had been for a while, in the way he was always aware of where she was, that low frequency background signal that had become so constant he'd stopped noticing he was running it.

Mikey would've hated this. Milo turned the thought over slowly. Not the grief part, Mikey would've understood that, would've sat in it with him without making it weird. He meant this. Whatever this had become. Him showing up. The key. The way he knew her schedule without being told it and noticed when something was off before she said anything and had at some point stopped being able to identify a version of his week that didn't involve her in it somewhere. Mikey would've had things to say about that. He would've signed them from across a room with the particular expression he used when he was pretending not to be smug.

Yeah, Milo thought, at nothing, at the middle distance. I know.

He didn't examine it past that. He never did. He'd built something careful around the thing he didn't look at directly and it had held for two years and he'd planned for it to keep holding because the alternative was a door he didn't know how to open without breaking something. She was Mikey's sister. She was the last piece of the only family that had ever actually kept him. Those two facts had functioned as a wall and he'd leaned on that wall every time he got too close to the edge of it and it had always held.

He looked up at her.

She wasn't looking at him, at the TV, maybe, or at nothing, the same way he'd been at nothing, and he watched her for a moment the way he let himself do when she wasn't clocking it. The line of her. The particular way she got quiet on the hard days, not performing it, just genuinely going somewhere internal that he recognized because he lived there too. Something in his chest did the thing it had been doing more frequently, the thing he'd been cataloguing and filing away under not your problem for longer than he wanted to count.

The wall didn't hold.

It wasn't a decision exactly. Or it was, but it was the kind that had already been made somewhere underneath conscious thought and was only now finishing the paperwork. He moved, fluid and unhurried the way he did everything, reaching up and closing his hand gently around her wrist, not grabbing, just contact, just here. He pulled her forward and down with that same measured steadiness, off the couch and half into his lap, repositioning her the way he repositioned everything, like it was already decided, like the space had always been shaped for this. His other hand came up to the side of her face, thumb at her jaw, and he finally looked at her the way he'd been not looking at her for two years.

Mikey's gone. The thought came in different than usual. Not like a bruise this time. Like a door opening. He's gone and she's here and you've been here every night for a year and you're not fooling anyone, least of all yourself.

He moved before he finished the thought. Closed the distance between them, not fast, nothing he did was fast, one hand coming up to her jaw, tilting her face toward his, giving her a half second that was as close to asking as he was capable of, and then his mouth found hers.