Chapter Twenty
MAXIMO HAD THE APARTMENT to himself, which he'd arranged on purpose, the way he arranged everything.
Jassy was on an overnight shoot. He'd sent enough security with her to invade a small country and had told himself it was about the neighborhood.
It wasn't about the neighborhood. It was that today was the ninth of the month, and on the ninth of this month Mary would have turned twenty-one, and Maximo didn't want a witness for what the ninth did to him.
He did what he always did. He bought the terrible grocery-store cake with the blue sugar roses she'd loved without irony her whole short life, set it on the counter with a single candle she wasn't there to blow out, and sat across from it in the dark kitchen the way you sit across from a person.
And he tried to hear her laugh.
That was the ritual, the real one, the only gift left to give. Every year on the ninth he closed his eyes and called it up, the exact sound of it, Mary at the piano, Mary in the passenger seat, Mary shrieking at some joke only she found that funny. Every year it came.
Until now.
He sat in his dead sister's kitchen on his dead sister's birthday and couldn't, for the life of him, hear her laugh.
But he could hear the other one, and that was what had his chest tightening painfully. Almost suffocatingly even.
This wasn't right.
Maximo leaned forward to blow out the candle himself, and as he watched smoke uncurl from the candle, it was almost like an omen, a glimpse of how his time with Jassy was about to dissolve.
Because the way she was making him forget what he wasn't supposed to forget...
It had to stop. Whatever this was, whatever she was becoming to him, it had to stop tonight, before Mary went silent for good.