Chapter 2
Orion
I've lived above the compound for six years.
In that time, the apartment has accumulated the particular texture of a life lived mostly alone and mostly forward-facing — meaning I never spent much time looking at it.
The furniture is functional. The walls have three things on them: a wooden cross above the hallway doorway, a framed photograph of my mother's side of the family at a beach somewhere in the Carolinas, and a clock in the kitchen that runs six minutes fast because I've never gotten around to correcting it.
The bookshelf is organized by no system I could explain coherently.
The guitar leans against the wall by the couch because there's nowhere else to put it and I've stopped pretending I'll ever buy a proper stand.
It's fine. It's always been fine. I've never been here long enough at a stretch to notice what it lacked.
Lucia noticed within about forty minutes.
She didn't say anything. She would never say anything — that much I understood about her early, that she was a person who observed without narrating, who formed her assessments quietly and kept them mostly to herself.
But I watched her walk through the apartment on that first evening with the careful, cataloging attention of someone who was memorizing a space they weren't sure they'd be able to navigate safely, and I saw the small pause she made in front of the kitchen, and I saw the way her eyes moved to the coffee maker with an expression that I can only describe as diplomatic restraint.
"The coffee maker is fine," I said.
She looked at me. "It's a drip machine from 2016."
"It makes coffee."
"It makes a beverage that resembles coffee," she said, and the precision of the distinction was delivered so evenly that it took me a second to realize she was making a joke. A small one, wrapped in a straight face, but there. I filed that away.
We'd agreed on ground rules before she moved in.
The second bedroom was hers — I'd moved the guitar amplifier to the storage room off the common area downstairs, which Rhett said I should have done years ago because he was tired of looking at it.
Separate bathrooms would have been ideal but we only had the one, so we established a schedule.
She was up at five-thirty for her opening shifts; I was up at seven.
The mornings were hers. She asked that I leave the kitchen clean before I went to bed, since she baked things early in the morning and needed clear counter space.
I asked that she not move my guitar, which was less a practical concern than a territorial one — I knew it was irrational and I mentioned it anyway, because honest ground rules are better than the version where you're annoyed about something you never said.
She moved into the second bedroom on a Thursday. By Friday morning, the kitchen smelled different.
I can't explain it better than that. She'd brought things — a small tin of coffee she'd ground herself, a set of ceramic bowls nested inside each other, a cutting board that was clearly well-traveled and well-loved.
She hadn't rearranged anything of mine. But she'd added herself to the space with a quiet confidence that transformed it in some way I couldn't quantify, the way a room changes when someone lights a candle, not because of the light exactly but because of the intention.
I said nothing about it. I drank the coffee she left in the carafe before she went to work and spent an embarrassing amount of time afterward thinking about the fact that coffee could, apparently, taste like this.
The awkwardness was real and I won't pretend otherwise.
We were strangers with a shared bathroom and a legal document, and the early days had the quality of two people trying very hard to be considerate of each other, which is its own kind of tension — the stiff, overcareful choreography of it, the way we said excuse me in the hallway and thank you for things that would eventually become unremarkable.
She was quiet in the evenings, and I was loud by her standards — I talk to myself when I'm working through problems, which Rhett says is one of the least endearing things about me, and I play guitar when I can't sleep, which I acknowledge is a character flaw in a shared living situation.
She didn't complain. She put in earbuds and read her books, which were stacked in a tower beside her bed that I could see through the open doorway when I passed, and which were, I noticed, a comprehensive mix: culinary histories, Brazilian literary fiction, one battered copy of a book on marine biology that I never asked about, a worn paperback about the history of coffee cultivation that had sticky notes on half the pages.
I started leaving the door to the hallway open when I played.
If she noticed, she didn't say.
The immigration interview was scheduled for three weeks after the wedding, which gave us an extremely specific and motivating deadline to become convincing as a couple.
Petra had walked us through what to expect — the questions would be detailed, biographical, the kind of thing that tripped up arrangements precisely because no one could manufacture two years of small knowing.
What did he eat for breakfast. What did she do when she couldn't sleep.
What were the first things they'd ever argued about.
We hadn't argued about anything yet, which was its own kind of fiction we'd need to address.
I suggested we spend an evening going over the details.
She came home from the café on a Tuesday with her feet clearly hurting, because I'd learned to read that in the slight adjustment in her walk, and she changed out of her work clothes and came to the living room with her hair loose and a slightly braced expression, as if she was prepared to treat the evening like a study session for an exam she hadn't had time to prepare for.
I'd made food. Too much of it, as usual — I cook the way I do most things, with more enthusiasm than precision, and the pasta dish I'd made had expanded from the original recipe in the way these things do when you're not paying attention.
She sat at the kitchen table and I put a bowl in front of her and she looked at it and said, "You made this? "
"I make food," I said, slightly defensively. "I'm not bad at it."
She ate a bite. She made no particular expression. "It's good," she said, with the considered neutrality of a professional evaluating something that surprised her in a positive direction.
"You don't have to sound shocked."
"I'm not shocked," she said. "I just didn't know."
"There are things you don't know about me," I said. "Which is the point of tonight."
We ate, and then we sat on the couch with the list I'd made — dates, preferences, personal history, the relevant details that a married couple would know about each other — and we went through it.
It started formally. She told me her birthday (March fourth), her mother's name (Beatriz), the neighborhood in S?o Paulo where she'd grown up (Vila Madalena, which she described with a fondness that softened her face).
I told her mine: birthday, mother's name, the small coastal town in North Carolina where I'd grown up before ending up in Anchor Bay by a route that involved a year on the road and a chance meeting with Dominic in a parking lot outside a bar in Savannah, which I explained was a longer story for another time.
"Your father?" she asked.
"Left when I was seven," I said. "He didn't leave a note. He just wasn't there."
She was quiet for a moment. "Mine left when I was ten," she said. "He left a note. I think the note was worse, actually."
We looked at each other across the couch, and something shifted. Not dramatically. Just the almost imperceptible adjustment you feel when a room finds its level.
"What did it say?" I asked.
"That he needed more than this." She said it without visible emotion, the way you say something you've had so long it's stopped being sharp. "I spent a lot of years trying to figure out what more was."
"Did you?"
"I think he didn't know either," she said. "I think he just wanted to want something, and we were too comfortable an excuse to stay."
I thought about that for a while. Then I said, "Favorite food."
She considered. "Moqueca. My grandmother's recipe. It's a fish stew — coconut milk, palm oil, red pepper, slow cooked until the whole thing becomes something different from its parts." She paused. "What about you?"
"My mother's cornbread," I said. "Not the sweet kind. The real kind."
"What's the difference?"
"The real kind has contempt for sugar."
She laughed. It was the first time I'd heard her laugh — not a polite sound or a restrained acknowledgment but an actual laugh, surprised out of her, brief and bright. It did something to the air in the room that I noticed and then carefully did not remark on.
We kept going. First disagreement, we decided, would be the guitar noise in the evenings — she'd told me once, gently, that I played the same chord progression repeatedly when I was stuck on something, which was technically criticism and technically the beginning of an argument.
I pointed out that I'd told her about the guitar and the boundary and she'd agreed to it, so any subsequent frustration was a renegotiation, not an original conflict.
She said that was a very lawyerly reading of the situation.
I said I'd been spending too much time with Petra.
It was midnight before we noticed the time.
The wine was gone. We were sitting with our shoes off, which had happened incrementally over the course of the evening without either of us noting it, and the list was mostly finished, and we were somewhere between the formal version of ourselves and something more unguarded.
"I should sleep," Lucia said. She didn't move.
"Probably," I agreed.
"The interview is Thursday."
"I know."
She looked around the apartment with a different expression than the one she'd had on the first night — not the cataloging look but something more settled, like she was taking inventory of a place she'd started, tentatively, to inhabit. "You left your guitar by the couch," she said.
"I told you that was its spot."
"I know." She stood up. Took her wine glass to the kitchen. Rinsed it, because she always rinsed things before the dishwasher. "Goodnight, Orion."
"Goodnight, Lucia."
She went to her room. I sat on the couch for a while, not playing the guitar, just sitting in the apartment that already felt different than it had two weeks ago, trying to be honest with myself about what that meant.
I was not succeeding.
From my phone, a notification from the language app: Daily streak — Portuguese lesson 14: Expressions of appreciation. Try: "Você foi incrível hoje." You were incredible today.
I stared at it for a long time.
Then I turned out the light and went to bed.