Chapter 36
thirty-six
OLEANDER
I woke up to an elbow in my ribs and someone's knee pressed against the back of my thigh and my left hand completely numb because Rowan's forearm had been cutting off the circulation for what felt like hours.
The bed was never meant for four people.
It was barely meant for two. But we kept ending up in it anyway, a nightly negotiation of limbs and blankets that nobody had figured out and nobody was willing to solve by sleeping somewhere else.
I smiled before I was fully conscious. It was the elbows that did it. The sheer, logistical absurdity of trying to share a queen-sized mattress with four grown men, one of whom slept like he was defending a perimeter and another who migrated toward the warmest body in the bed without fail.
Julian was already awake. He was sitting up against the headboard, his fingertips pressed together in the pattern of invisible keys, working through something in his head.
His face was calm. The ghost note was still there, I knew that, a faint hum beneath everything he played, but he'd stopped fighting it.
He said it was like a scar on a favorite instrument.
You learned to play around it. Sometimes you played through it.
Sometimes it made the music better in ways you couldn't explain.
Rowan was asleep with his hair over his face and one arm thrown across Julian's lap and Theo's ankle simultaneously, a feat of physics I still didn't understand.
He hadn't moved. Rowan slept like the dead and always had, a phrase I could use now without flinching, and that was its own kind of progress.
Theo was drooling on my shoulder. A small, warm patch of damp that I would absolutely tell him about later and that he would absolutely deny.
His camera was on the nightstand where he'd left it last night, lens cap on, strap coiled neatly.
He'd started doing that, putting it away at night instead of sleeping with it beside him.
I hadn't said anything about it. Some changes are better when nobody points them out.
I extracted my dead hand from under Rowan's arm, flexing the pins and needles out of my fingers, and slid out of bed.
The floor was cold. My apartment was gone.
We'd cleaned it out two weeks ago, packed the last of Dominic's things into boxes that Rowan carried to the car without being asked, and I'd turned the key in for the last time without looking back.
I lived here now. The word still felt new in my mouth, like a language I was learning late.
The kitchen was small and the coffee maker was the one reliable appliance in the apartment. I filled it, pressed the button, and stood at the window while it brewed.
Hollow Vale was fogged in. The buildings across the street were crumbling in their slow, spiral way, the ironwork rusting into lace, the brick softening at the edges.
The shadows between the houses were deeper than they should have been.
They always would be. This was not a town that pretended to be normal, and I had stopped wanting it to.
But it looked like a place where people lived. Not a place where people were kept.
My phone buzzed on the counter. Liliana.
Booked a flight. Coming to see you next month. Tell your boyfriends to clean up.
I laughed, quiet enough not to wake anyone, and typed back: No promises.
I poured four mugs of coffee. Black for Rowan, who would drink it whenever he finally surfaced.
A splash of milk for Julian, who was particular about it in a way that made Theo roll his eyes every morning.
Too much sugar for Theo, who claimed he needed it for creative energy and who Julian said was going to lose his teeth by forty.
And mine, plain, in the chipped mug I'd brought from the old apartment because I liked the imperfection of it.
I carried them to the bedroom on a tray I'd found at the back of a cupboard, the kind of small domestic object that suggested someone had once lived here who believed in breakfast in bed.
Julian took his mug without looking, his fingers wrapping around the ceramic while his other hand continued its silent piano.
Theo stirred at the smell, his eyes opening halfway, his face creased with pillow lines.
"Time is it?" he mumbled.
"Early," I said.
"Unacceptable," he said, and closed his eyes again.
Rowan didn't move. His coffee would be cold by the time he woke up. I'd reheat it without being asked, the way Julian reheated it yesterday, the way Theo would reheat it tomorrow. We had a system. It was imperfect and unspoken and it worked.
I sat on the edge of the bed with my mug in both hands and looked at the three of them. Julian reading music in the air with his fingertips. Theo burrowing back into the warmth of the blankets. Rowan, immovable, his breathing deep and even, his hand still resting on Julian's knee even in sleep.
The weight on my chest was still there. It would always be there.
The grief hadn't vanished when the door closed.
It had just changed shape, settling into a place where I could carry it without it carrying me.
Some mornings it was heavier than others, and I'd wake up reaching for the wrong side of the bed before I remembered where I was.
Some mornings the fog looked less like weather and more like a memory pressing against the glass.
But those mornings were getting fewer. And on the mornings that weren't those mornings, I had coffee and three men who slept like a pile of undignified cats and a sister who was booking flights and a town that was strange and broken and mine.
I took a sip of coffee and watched the light shift through the fog. It was grey and thin and uncertain, the way light always was in Hollow Vale, but it was there, and so were we.
The weight was still there. It would always be there. But it was lighter now. It was the weight of shadows, not the weight of the thing that casts them.