She paused. I don't know why I still do that. Pick up the phone when I know what's on the other end. It's like I know the stove is hot. I just sometimes forget I'm allowed to stop touching it.

He sat with that for a beat. You're allowed, he said. She met his eyes. Easy to say, "I know." He held her gaze, but it's still true.

They sat there across the small table, and the city hummed below them, and he could hear distantly someone's television through the wall. ordinary sounds, real sounds, the kind that reminded him he was actually in a room with another person and not just imagining the shape of connection from across an alley. Can I ask you something? Sophia said. Yeah. Do you ever get angry about Denise?

She caught herself. You don't have to answer that. No, it's He turned his own spoon over. Yeah, sometimes. Not at her, just at the fact of it.

The whole stupid unfair fact of it. He exhaled slowly. I was angry for a long time and I didn't have anywhere clean to put it. So I just worked. Just kept working and taking care of Ava and telling myself that was the same as healing.

Is it? No, he said plainly. It's the shape of healing without the inside of it. Sophia looked at him and he could see her absorbing that in a way that felt personal, like it was connecting to something in her own chest. Yeah, she said softly.

I know exactly what that looks like. They stayed another hour. The ice cream was gone by the time Marcus stood up to leave. She walked him to the door. He stepped into the hallway and turned back.

"Don't pick up next time he calls," Marcus said. "Not because you can't handle it, because you don't have to." She held the door and looked at him for a moment. Good night, Marcus. Good night, Sophia.

He walked back down the hall and something in the air between them had changed. Not dramatically, not with any kind of announcement, but the way pressure changes before weather. Barely perceptible, completely real. The next morning, she was on the fire escape when he got to the kitchen window earlier than usual. She looked up before he even had a chance to be standing there for any amount of time.

I didn't pick up, she said. He felt something loosen in his chest. Good, he said. She nodded once and went back to her coffee and he went back to his. But he was smiling at the window glass and he didn't try to stop himself.

For the next two weeks, the small moments stacked the way Sophia had once said they would, not with a plan, just with proximity and honesty and the particular chemistry of two people who were both recovering from something and somehow making each other feel more like themselves in the process. She started texting him small things, a photo of the succulent that had inexplicably started thriving. A voice memo of a chord progression she was working on. a message at 11:15 one night that said, "Only Gerald was right about protein. I had eggs for dinner and I feel like a new person." He had laughed alone in his bedroom at 11:15 at night for the first time in years.

He texted back, "Don't tell Gerald. He'll never let it go." Her response, "The man deserves his moment." Marcus put the phone face down on his nightstand and looked at the ceiling and did the thing he had been carefully not doing for weeks, which was letting himself feel the full weight of what was happening. Not analyze it, not file it, just feel it.

It felt like waking up slowly, like the specific warmth of a room that has been cold for a long time and finally has the heat on. And underneath it, because he was Marcus Reed, and he did not get to feel something uncomplicated underneath it, lived the fear. The clean, cold, familiar fear of a man who knew exactly what it felt like to love someone completely and then have to learn how to exist in a world where she was gone. He lay in the dark and thought about Denise who would have liked Sophia. He thought would have said something precise and affectionate about her the way Denise always identified exactly the right thing about a person within 5 minutes.

He thought about Ava asking, "Do you still dream about her daddy?" He thought about the way loving someone was never just joy. It was also exposure. Radical, terrifying exposure. And then his phone lit up with one more message from across the alley.

Hey, you okay over there? Your light still on. He stared at the ceiling. Then he picked up the phone. Yeah, just thinking.

Three dots. Then about anything good. He considered the question for a long moment. The honest answer was complicated. The simple answer was also honest.

Getting there, he typed. Her response came back in less than 10 seconds. I'll take it. He recognized those words. She'd said them to him on that first rainy Tuesday when he told her he was getting there about being okay.

She had heard him then, and she was hearing him now across a wall and a wire, and the repetition of it, the fact that she'd kept it used it back, hit him somewhere precise and undefended. He turned off the light and for the first time in a very long while, Marcus Reed fell asleep without fighting the dark first. He didn't know that across the alley, Sophia put her own phone down on her nightstand, looked at the ceiling of her new apartment, and pressed her hand flat against her chest like she was checking that something was still there. It was. That was the thing about two people healing in parallel rooms.

The walls between them were thinner than they looked, and sometimes without either of them meaning to, sometimes the warmth came through. 3 weeks after the ice cream and the late night texts, Sophia asked Marcus something that stopped him mid-sentence at the kitchen window. She asked it casually, the way she did most things that weren't casual at all. My sister's engagement party is Saturday night, she said. I know it's short notice and you'd have to find someone for Ava and you can absolutely say no, but I'd like it if you came with me.

Marcus set down his coffee mug. As what? She didn't blink. As Marcus Sophia, as a friend, she said, then quieter. As someone I trust.

He looked at her across the alley for a long moment. He knew what she wasn't saying. He'd known for 2 weeks that Ryan Walker had been escalating. The calls had become more frequent, then the texts, then a voicemail she'd played for him one evening, sitting on his couch with her jaw tight and her eyes very still. While Ryan's voice, smooth and practiced and full of manufactured warmth, came through the phone speaker, asking her to please just give him one conversation, one real conversation, because he missed her, and he knew she missed him, too, and he just wanted her to be happy.

When the voicemail ended, Sophia had looked at Marcus and said, "He always says he wants me to be happy while doing the exact thing that makes me miserable." Marcus had said, "You don't have to respond." She had said, "I know. I know that. I just" and stopped.

He had understood the rest of the sentence without needing to hear it. Some people leave marks that take longer to heal than wounds. Ryan Walker had been pressing on hers for years. So when she asked him to the party, he understood she wasn't asking him to be her date in the simple sense. She was asking him to be a steady presence in a room where she was going to need one.