Chapter 1
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The Third Stick
The whiteboard says Cole owes three weeks of bin duty.
Someone — and it was Eli, it is always Eli — has drawn a small diagram beside Cole’s name. A stick figure. A bin. An arrow. The arrow is labelled this is not complicated, Cole in handwriting so precise it could be typeset.
Cole is standing directly in front of the whiteboard, eating toast, reading it with the expression of a man deeply unbothered by accusations he cannot technically dispute.
“I’ve been meaning to do it,” he says, to no one in particular.
“For three weeks,” Zac says from the floor. He’s got his back against the couch, laptop balanced on his knees, not looking up.
“I’ve been very busy.”
“You coach on Saturdays.”
“It’s a lot of Saturdays.”
Rhett moves past Cole to the kettle without commenting. He doesn’t need to. The back of Cole’s neck goes slightly pink, which is basically the same thing as an admission.
I pour my coffee — already made, already exactly right, because Cole has been making my coffee for three years and at this point I think he could do it unconscious — and lean against the counter. The kitchen smells like toast and Eli’s coffee beans, which are on the counter in their usual spot with their usual label.
ELI’S. DO NOT USE.
And underneath, in different handwriting:
PLEASE.
That second word has been there so long it’s faded at the edges. Cole swears he doesn’t know who wrote it. Nobody believes him.
“Nadia,” Cole says, turning to me with the full-wattage grin. “Tell them I’ve been busy.”
“You watched four hours of game film on Wednesday and then fell asleep on the couch.”
Zac makes a sound that is not quite a laugh but is close enough.
“That’s work,” Cole says. “That’s literally my job.”
“The bins, Cole,” Eli says, from the table. He doesn’t look up from his textbook. He says it the way he says most things — quiet, complete, not repeated. He doesn’t need to repeat it. It lands exactly where it’s aimed.
Cole looks at the whiteboard. He looks at the stick figure. He looks at the bin.
“Tonight,” he says.
Nobody responds. The whiteboard stays exactly as it is.
✦
It’s a Tuesday in January and the oak trees out front are bare and the sky is the kind of grey that isn’t threatening anything, just honest about what it is. Through the kitchen window I can see the front porch swing moving slightly in the wind. Nobody’s out there. It just moves.
Rhett sits down at his end of the table with his tea and opens the folder he brought down from his room. Player development notes, probably. He does this most mornings — brings work to the table, doesn’t talk about it unless someone asks, which nobody does because it’s 7am and Cole is still negotiating with the whiteboard.
This is the house. This is what it looks like now.
Zac on the floor. Cole performing innocence at the fridge. Eli making things exactly right. Rhett with the best sightlines, watching everything without appearing to watch anything.
And me, in the middle of it, coffee in hand, pen behind my ear out of habit even though I don’t have anywhere to be until ten.
Three years. I moved into this house with twenty-three dollars and a signed lease and the complete inability to tell my brother what I’d done until it was too late to undo it, and now it is January and the lease is long gone and the house is ours in the way that some things just become yours — not because of paperwork, because of time. Because of Tuesday mornings.
“You’re quiet,” Zac says.
He’s still looking at his laptop. I don’t know how he does that. Reads a room without looking at it.
“I’m always quiet in the morning.”
“You’re quieter than your quiet.”
Cole glances over. Rhett doesn’t look up, but there’s a small shift — almost nothing, the kind of thing you only catch after three years of watching him.
“I’m fine,” I say. “I just haven’t woken up yet.”
Zac looks at me then. Directly. His jaw does the thing it does when he’s processing something he’s not going to push.
He looks back at his laptop.
He doesn’t push.
✦
I buy the test on the way home from the pharmacy at the end of Alderton Street. I’m not even going to the pharmacy for anything — I’m going because I walked past it and then stopped and stood on the pavement for about forty-five seconds doing a calculation I’ve been not-doing for nine days.
I don’t buy it the first time I pick it up. I put it back. I walk to the end of the aisle and look at cold medicine for a while, which I do not need.
I pick it up again.
I put it back again.
A woman with a toddler on her hip reaches past me to grab something from the shelf and gives me a look that is not unkind, and I think: get it together, Reyes.
I buy three.
If you’re going to know something, you should know it properly.
✦
The house is loud when I get back. Cole is on the phone in the living room, laughing at something, feet up on the coffee table. Zac’s jacket is on the hook by the door — he’s home early. From upstairs I can hear Eli, or at least I can hear the particular quality of silence that means Eli is up there studying, which has its own kind of presence after three years.
Rhett’s boots are on the stairs. The man himself, presumably, somewhere above them.
I go up. I say hi to no one. I close my door.
The bathroom is mine — has been since the first day, the ensuite the whole reason I signed the lease without reading it properly, and it is the one room in this house that has always been just mine. Small. The window faces the side yard. In summer there’s a tree outside it that blocks most of the light, but it’s January so the light comes through thin and grey and honest.
I line the three boxes up on the edge of the sink.
I read all three sets of instructions even though they all say the same thing.
I take all three tests.
And then I sit on the floor with my back against the bath and I wait.
✦
Three minutes is not a long time.
Downstairs, Cole is still laughing. I can hear the particular rhythm of it through the floor, the real one, not the performance — he stopped performing about two and a half years ago and the real laugh is warmer and slightly too loud and I have never once minded it.
From the stairs: a footstep. The third stair from the top creaks. It always creaks. Nobody has ever fixed it and nobody is going to fix it and at this point I think the house would feel wrong without it.
Rhett’s footsteps continue down the hall. His door opens. Closes.
I look at the tests.
All three of them.
All three lines.
I already knew. I think I’ve known for nine days and I’ve been filing it under not confirmed, which is the category I use when I know something and I’m not ready for it to be real. I have a lot of categories like that. I’ve been working on it.
But there it is. Three tests. Three answers. All the same.
Downstairs, Zac’s voice joins Cole’s — something short and dry that makes Cole laugh harder. I hear the particular sound of Eli coming down the stairs, quiet and deliberate, and then the soft sounds of the kitchen: the kettle, a mug, the careful order of things being done the right way.
The house moves around me, warm and loud and completely unaware.
I sit on the bathroom floor.
I look at the three tests lined up on the tiles.
I have been the most controlled person in every room since I was seven years old. I have managed everything. I have filed everything. I have kept people at careful distance and called it self-sufficiency and mostly I have been very, very good at it.
I pick up my phone.
I call Jasmine.
She picks up on the first ring.
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