Chapter 3 Maren
They moved in early the next morning, with the rest of their lives packed into three matching equipment cases and three deeply unmatched duffel bags.
Thomas claimed the bedroom with the clearest line to my door, and he did it without making any production of the choice. He set a small tactical light on the nightstand and a paperback on the dresser. I tried to get a look at the cover and couldn't. He angled it away.
"What is it?"
"It's mine," he said, and that was the whole answer, delivered so plainly it wasn't even rude.
Brady took the next room. He dropped his duffel on the bed without unpacking a single thing, walked directly into my kitchen, opened my pantry, and made a face.
"Okay," he said, to the shelves. "We have work to do."
"It's a fine pantry," I said.
"It's a pantry in distress." He started pulling things down. "Your spices aren't in any order. Your flour is next to your dog treats. And you have three half-open bottles of the same olive oil, which tells me you buy oil when you're sad."
"I don't!"
"You bought all three of these in winter," he said, checking the labels. "You absolutely buy oil when you're sad."
Within an hour he had alphabetized the spice rack, found my father's old recipe book on the high shelf above the refrigerator, and decided that lunch was happening, that it was his mother's mushroom toast, and that he had a sense of occasion about it.
Damian took the last bedroom and then vanished for forty minutes.
I found him in my pantry, standing on a stepladder, taking out every single item, wiping the shelves with a microfiber cloth he had produced from his own bag, and putting everything back by category and by how often a person would reach for it.
"Brady alphabetized it," I said.
"He did it wrong." He didn't look down. "He put cumin before cardamom."
"Is that wrong?"
"C-A comes before C-U," Damian said. "He can't spell. It's a known issue. We've talked about it as a group."
He climbed down, handed me a small piece of paper, and washed his hands at my sink.
"What's this?" I asked.
"The new layout. So you know where things are. You like knowing where things are. You checked your locks twice the first night we walked the house." He dried his hands. "I noticed."
I looked at the paper. It was a neat little map of my own pantry, drawn by hand and labeled.
Then he went and helped Brady cook, without being asked.
Thomas came in from walking the yard and, also without being asked, started washing my lettuce at the sink.
I stood at my own counter, holding a glass of water, and watched the three of them fit into my kitchen as if they had been a household that simply happened to be missing a kitchen until they found mine.
Lunch was at the dining table I had eaten at alone for two years.
"This is good," I said, around the mushroom toast, and meant it.
"It's my mother's," Brady said. "I'll tell her you said so. She'll pretend she doesn't care and then talk about it for a week."
"You're holding it wrong, by the way," he added.
"I'm holding toast wrong?"
"You're holding it like it's going to escape. Here." He reached over and adjusted my fingers with one warm hand, easy, like it was nothing. "There. Now it can't fall apart on you. Trust the toast."
"Are the mushrooms too earthy?" Damian asked me, quietly, leaning in just slightly. "I can do a second batch, with thyme. It cuts it."
"They're perfect," I said.
He nodded once, like he had logged my answer and reserved the right to disagree later. Across the table, Thomas reached over and topped up my water before my glass was empty. I hadn't asked. I hadn't even noticed it was getting low.
Polly arrived in the afternoon with two bottles of wine and the face of a woman who’s read every romance novel ever printed and considered herself a scholar of the form.
She surveyed the kitchen, and then the men.
"Hello," she said to the room, slow, taking it all in.
"You must be Polly," Brady said, already pouring her a glass. "The famous Polly. We've heard things."
"I bet you've heard nothing good."
"We've heard nothing but good." He handed her the wine. "She likes you. She doesn't like many people. We've been studying the data."
Polly took the glass, narrowed her eyes at him, and then, somehow, within four minutes, the two of them were deep in a conversation about some obscure comedy podcast that I have never once heard either of them mention before, both of them talking over each other and laughing.
My phone buzzed. A text from Polly, sent from twelve feet away.
Maren! This is the most cinematically compromised situation I have ever personally witnessed. There are three of them, and they are all hot. I am unwell.
I looked up. She was smiling sweetly at Brady and typing without looking at her hands.
She stayed until dinner.
At some point during the evening I watched Damian set a small ramekin of olives down beside Polly's wineglass, and then, a minute later, set an identical one beside mine.
He didn't say anything about it. He didn't make a thing of it.
He just put it there, like a man setting a place at a table, and went back to chopping something.
Polly saw it too. She didn't say anything either. But she looked at me across the kitchen with an expression I’ve known since we were eighteen, the expression that means we are going to talk about this later and you are not going to enjoy it.
She left when it got late.
"Walk me out," she said, and I did.
On the front step she hugged me hard, longer than usual, and then held me by the shoulders and looked at me.
"You okay?" she asked. "Real answer."
"I'm okay," I said.
"Good." She kissed my cheek. "I'm glad. Whatever this is, I'm glad."
She got in her car and drove off. I stood on the step a little longer than I needed to, in the cool dark, listening to the three of them laughing about something through the kitchen window behind me.
My phone buzzed one more time.
Mare, the text said. I'm just going to say it. This is the happiest I've seen you since your dad died.