The radiator knocked twice and went quiet, and Sera Laurent lay on her back in the gray pre-dawn with her phone held above her face, thumb scrolling through a conversation that had stopped moving one day ago.

Monday night, 11:47. Jason: great session. that cliffhanger was evil. in a good way.

Monday night, 11:49. Her: evil is the job description. you brought the whole party to tears, Chance.

Monday night, 11:51. Jason: yeah well. thanks for running it.

Then nothing. No "night." No thumbs up. No Tuesday-morning meme about the paladin's terrible decisions, which he had sent every Tuesday for two years, like a paperboy throwing the same newspaper onto the same porch. She had checked her phone so many times the screen protector had a smudge shaped like her thumbprint, and she had begun to hate the smudge.

She let the phone fall onto her chest. Her glasses were on the nightstand, so the ceiling was a soft blur, which was fine, because the ceiling had nothing to tell her. Down the hall, her roommate's cat yowled at a door that had been closed against it since midnight. Sera understood the cat. She too had spent the last day asking a closed door to open.

At six-forty she gave up and got dressed. Jeans, the gray hoodie with the coffee stain shaped like Michigan, hair shoved back with the plastic clip because the curls had declared war overnight and she was not going to lose an hour to a battle she'd lose anyway. She made coffee, drank half of it standing at the counter, and poured the rest into a travel mug, where it would go cold and be thrown out, which was the lifecycle of forty percent of the coffee she made.

Her phone buzzed against the counter. She lunged for it hard enough to knock the salt shaker over.

An unknown number. Hi, is this Sera? This is Aria. Jason's cousin from Vermont. He told me you two were close. I'm in town and he said I should reach out.

She stared at it long enough that the screen dimmed.

Then she typed: he said that, huh. when?

The reply came fast, like the person on the other end had been holding the phone. Yesterday. He asked me to check in with you since he's dealing with some stuff right now. Family thing.

Sera set the salt shaker upright. She took a slow drink of coffee, made a face at the temperature, drank more anyway, and read the message again. Jason had a cousin. That was possible. Jason also had a habit of going radio silent whenever something was wrong and then reappearing three days later with a joke that didn't quite cover the hole, and there was a version of this where the cousin was real and the "family thing" was real and none of it was her business.

There was also a version where a stranger had gotten her number.

How'd you get my number? she sent.

From him. He said you'd ask that. He said to tell you the paladin has a name and he still can't pronounce it.

Sera's mouth went flat and her chest went tight at the same time.

The paladin's name was Thalassiel Vorr, and it existed in exactly one place on earth: the character sheet Jason had hand-lettered in pencil two years ago and photographed for the group chat, and then never typed into any message because he insisted it be spelled correctly, which he couldn't do. Nobody knew that except the five people at her table. Nobody.

So either this was Jason's cousin, or Jason was in a ditch somewhere and someone had his phone and his memory of an in-joke, and she did not like either of those doors, and she was going to walk through one of them anyway, because the third option was sitting in her apartment doing nothing.

Ok, she sent. You free today? I make a mean grilled cheese and I want to hear about this family thing.

Three dots. Then: Today works. What time?

She looked at the clock. 7:12. She looked at her apartment, which had a laundry basket she had been stepping over for four days and a dining table buried under game books for three weeks. She looked at her hair in the microwave door's reflection and pulled the clip out, and the curls sprang free like they'd been waiting.

Noon, she sent. I'll text the address. Bring nothing. I'm nosy but I'm not a monster.

Then she put the phone down, and picked it up, and pulled up Jason's thread, and typed hey. your cousin found me. you ok? and watched it sit there with no read receipt for eleven minutes before she locked the screen and started cleaning like the apartment had personally insulted her.

By eleven-thirty the dining table was clear, the game books stacked by system and then restacked by size, because stacking by system had looked smug. She had vacuumed, which meant she had found out what the vacuum sounded like, which meant she had stood in the middle of the living room holding it like a question. She had wiped the counters twice. She had changed her shirt once, from gray hoodie to black t-shirt, and then back to the gray hoodie, because the black t-shirt was a decision, and she did not want to have made a decision.

It was not about the cousin. It was not about the cousin at all. It was about the eleven unanswered texts and the possibility that whatever walked through her door at noon would be carrying the answer, and she wanted the apartment, at least, to be a place where answers were welcome.

At 9:52 she texted the Chicago address. At 11:58 she put the kettle on. At 12:01 there was a knock, and it was not the knock she expected, which she realized was a strange thing to expect, because she had never heard this person knock before.

She opened the door.

The woman on the landing was tall, and the first thing Sera's brain did was try to file her, and the filing system broke. Ivory skin with a sheen to it, like the inside of a shell. Silver-blond hair past her waist, loose, the kind of hair that looked like it had never been cut wrong in its life. A smoky purple dress that hung off one shoulder, and the shoulder it hung off was a shoulder Sera's eyes stayed on a beat too long. A straw hat held down at her side, brim pinched between long fingers.

And her face. High cheekbones, a narrow jaw, a mouth that was doing something complicated, and eyes — Sera had to look twice, because the eyes were violet. Not blue, not gray-blue, not the kind of color people call violet when they mean blue. Violet. Like a color that had been invented for her specifically and then discontinued.

Sera had a whole sentence loaded. It had been loaded since 11:59. It was a good sentence, it was so you're the cousin, delivered dry, hand on hip, letting this stranger know she wasn't born yesterday.

What came out was: "Huh."

The woman's mouth twitched, and it was not a smile, it was the shape a smile makes when it's being held down by both hands. "Hi. I'm Aria."

Her voice was high and had a strange music to it, like a flute by way of a violin. "You're Sera. I recognize you from the — from the way he describes you. Curls. Glasses. The look that says you're already three moves ahead."

"He describes me as a look?"

"He describes you a lot," Aria said, and then her face did something — a wince, small, the wince of a person who heard their own sentence land wrong and couldn't call it back. "I mean. He talks about his friends."

Sera stepped back from the door. "You're going to want to come in before the neighbors start taking pictures of you."

Aria came in. She came in the way people come into rooms they've been told about and never seen, head turning slow, taking in the game books on the shelf, the poster over the couch, the coffee maker with the dented carafe. She moved like her weight didn't belong to her. Her hip brushed the doorframe and she flinched at it, a tiny flinch, and corrected, and her next three steps were careful in a way that made Sera's skin prickle, because nobody walked like that unless they were afraid of breaking something, and the something they were afraid of breaking was themselves.

"Sit," Sera said, pointing at the couch. "I'll get the kettle. You want tea or coffee?"

"Tea. Please." A pause. "Thank you. I've been drinking a lot of coffee lately and it's doing something to my hands."

Sera looked at her hands. Long, pale, the fingers flexing and curling against her thighs like they were testing the air. "Tea it is."

In the kitchen, she leaned against the counter and breathed. There was a woman in her living room who looked like a Renaissance painting got a modeling contract, and she had Jason's in-joke in her mouth, and she flinched when she touched a doorframe, and none of it added up to cousin from Vermont. Vermont did not produce this. Vermont produced flannel and sensible boots and people who said ayuh. This was something else, and Sera did not know what, and the not-knowing was a hand in her chest, warm, insistent, curling.

She carried out two mugs and set one on the coaster and sat down at the other end of the couch, angled toward Aria, one knee up, the way she sat when she was about to ask hard questions.

"Okay," she said. "So. Jason's cousin."

"Cousin," Aria said, and drank her tea, and the mug hid most of her face, which Sera suspected was the point.

"From Vermont."

"Doing what in Blue Castle, Indiana."

Aria lowered the mug. "Visiting." A breath. "It's a family thing. I said that."

"You said he's dealing with a family thing. You didn't say what it is." Sera let the silence sit there, the way she did at the table when a player tried to bluff a bad roll. "He's been quiet for a day. He's never quiet for a day. He sent me a meme about the paladin's name every Tuesday for two years and yesterday was Tuesday."

Aria set the mug down on the coaster, carefully, the way you set down something you're afraid of dropping. Her fingers stayed around it. "He's okay."

"You're sure."

"I'm sure."

"Because I've been texting him for a day and he hasn't read any of it, and now his cousin shows up at my door with the one piece of trivia nobody outside the table knows, and I'm supposed to drink my tea and not ask."

Aria looked at her. Up close, in the flat noon light through the gauzy curtains, the violet was less like a color and more like a weather. "You're supposed to ask," she said. "He said you would. He said you wouldn't let it go and you'd be right not to."

"Then where is he?"

"He can't talk right now. Not on the phone. Not in text." Aria's jaw worked. "There's something he has to figure out first. It's not — it's not drugs, it's not jail, it's not a girl. It's just. Something." Her voice had a wobble in it that Sera did not expect, and she covered it by picking up the mug again. "I know how that sounds."

"Sounds like you're reading from his script."

"I am," Aria said. "He wrote it. I'm doing a bad job."

Sera laughed. She didn't mean to. It came out of her sideways, a real laugh, the kind that surprised the room. Aria's head came up and her eyes went wide and then — there — a smile, small and crooked and real, and Sera felt the whole careful scaffolding of her suspicion lean a degree to the left.

"Okay," Sera said, and set her mug down. "New rule. You get one lie per visit. You just spent it."

"That's not—"

"One lie. I'm not saying you have to tell me the truth. I'm saying the script is over. If you're going to sit on my couch and drink my tea and flinch at my doorframe, you're going to do it as whoever you actually are, and I'll decide what I think." She leaned back. "I've babysat worse."

Aria was quiet for a long moment. Her thumb moved against the mug handle, back and forth, wearing a path. Then she said, "You designed the game."

Sera blinked. "What?"

"The campaign. The one he plays in. You wrote it. You wrote the — the sorceress. The elf sorceress with the silver hair." Aria's voice had gone strange, low and careful, like she was walking on ice and listening for cracks. "He told me about it. He said the person who wrote her was the smartest person he knew."

Sera felt her face heat and hated it. "He said that."

"He said a lot of things." Aria set the mug down and her hands went still, one on each knee, and she looked at Sera with those impossible eyes and said, "He said you'd want to know why he's gone. He said you'd be angry and you'd be right. And he said to tell you that he's sorry, and that he didn't choose this, and that when he can explain it, he will, and it won't make sense but it'll be true."

The room was very quiet. The radiator ticked. Somewhere down the block a lawn mower started up and droned, indifferent.

Sera looked at this woman — this tall, pale, violet-eyed woman with the borrowed dress and the borrowed script — and thought, with a clarity that felt like stepping onto solid ground after a long stairwell, something happened to him. Something real. And this person is standing in for him because he can't stand in for himself.

"Okay," she said. "One more question, and then we're done with the interrogation."

Aria's shoulders came down a fraction. "Okay."

"Is he safe?"

Aria looked at her for a long time. Then she said, "He's safe. He's just not — he's not the same. That's all I can say."

"That's a hell of a thing to say and not explain."

"I know."

Sera stood up. She picked up both mugs and carried them to the kitchen, and she stood at the sink with her back to the living room and let her face do whatever it wanted for four seconds, and then she turned around and said, "You hungry? I promised grilled cheese."

Aria blinked. "You don't— you don't have to—"

"I made a promise to a stranger. I'm a woman of my word." Sera pulled the bread out of the fridge and the butter out of the door, and she was aware, the whole time, of Aria watching her from the couch, and she was aware of her own hips against the counter, and she was aware of being aware, which was the worst part, because there was no version of this where she got to pretend she hadn't noticed.

"So," Sera said, buttering bread with more force than bread required. "You play?"

"Play what?"

"The game. Tabletop. Jason's whole thing."

A pause. Then, carefully: "I know the rules."

"That's not what I asked."

"I know the rules very well," Aria said, and there was something in her voice Sera couldn't read, something that sounded almost like grief and almost like a joke. "I know them better than anyone at your table, probably. I just — haven't played."

The pan was hot. Sera laid the sandwiches in and they hissed. "We play Friday," she said. "At Mike's. You should come."

Silence from the couch. Sera turned her head. Aria was staring at her, and the expression on her face was the expression of someone who had just been handed something they didn't know they wanted.

"I shouldn't," Aria said.

"Why not?"

"Because—" Aria stopped. Her hand came up and touched her own ear, through the hair, a quick guilty touch, and then dropped. "Because I don't know anyone there."

"You know me," Sera said. "You know Jason, sort of. Mike's his brother, he's fine, he'll grunt at you for an hour and then decide he likes you." She flipped a sandwich. "And you owe me the truth, and the truth is easier to collect in person, over dice, with snacks. That's just logistics."

Aria laughed. It was the first real laugh Sera had heard from her, low and startled, and it changed her whole face, and Sera filed the change somewhere private and did not look at it directly.

"You're very good at this," Aria said.

"At grilled cheese? I'm a master."

"At making people say yes."

Sera slid the sandwiches onto plates and carried them over, and set one in front of Aria, and the steam came up off the cheese and the bread was a little burnt on one corner and Aria looked at it like it was the first food she'd ever seen.

"Eat," Sera said, sitting down at her end of the couch with her own plate. "Then I'm going to ask you three more questions and you're going to answer at least two of them."

Aria picked up the sandwich. She took a bite, and her eyes closed, and for a second she looked less like a stranger and more like a person who had been hungry for a long time and hadn't noticed.

"Okay," she said, mouth full, and Sera felt something in her chest settle into a new place, a place with weight to it, and she did not know yet what to call it, and she did not look at it directly either.

They ate. The lawn mower droned. The radiator ticked. On the coffee table, Sera's phone lit up once with a notification and went dark, and she did not pick it up, because whatever it was, it could wait, and this — whatever this was, this strange woman with the burnt cheese and the violet eyes and the secrets — this was the thing that was happening now.

Sera was halfway through her second triangle of sandwich when Aria set hers down on the plate, crusts intact, and folded her hands in her lap like a woman about to say grace.

"Can I ask you something first," Aria said. "Before the three. I know that's not the deal. I'm changing the deal."

Sera chewed, swallowed, and licked butter off her thumb. "You're aware I'm holding all the cards here."

"I'm aware."

"And you want to play one anyway."

"One," Aria said. "It's a stupid one."

"Those are usually the interesting ones." Sera set her plate on the coffee table and pulled one knee up onto the cushion. "Go."

Aria looked at the game books stacked on the shelf. She looked at the poster over the couch — a landscape Sera had commissioned off an artist on the internet, the one that had cost more than her car insurance, the one with the tower and the two moons. Then she looked back at Sera, and her hands were folded so still that Sera noticed the stillness, which was its own kind of tell.

"Jason's sorceress," Aria said. "Do you remember her name?"

Sera's first instinct was a laugh. It came up into her throat and died there, because Aria's face wasn't joking. The violet eyes were fixed and flat and waiting, and there was a thin thread of something under the question, something that sounded, if Sera let herself hear it, like a person standing at the edge of a diving board with their toes curled over the lip.

"That's the question," Sera said.

"That's the question."

"Why."

"Because I want to know if you do."

Sera leaned back against the arm of the couch and crossed her arms, which she knew was a posture, and she did it anyway, because the posture bought her four seconds. Aria Silverleaf. Of course she remembered. Sera had built the character herself, two winters ago, back when the campaign was still a document in her drafts folder and Jason was still a voice on a headset at two in the morning saying *I want to play something that isn't me.* She remembered the email he'd sent after session one, three paragraphs long, with a typo in the second sentence, about how he'd never had a character that felt like putting on a coat that fit. She remembered the way he'd say the name in the game — carefully, the way you'd handle something borrowed.

"Aria," Sera said. "Aria Silverleaf."

The room got very quiet. The lawn mower out on the block hit the end of its row and turned, droning back the other way, and the radiator ticked once and held its breath.

Aria's face did something. Sera watched it happen and couldn't name any part of it. The mouth came open a little, and the chin lifted, and the eyes — the eyes went bright, wet-bright, and then Aria blinked and it was gone, packed away, and her hands in her lap had curled into themselves, thumbs pressed against the insides of her fingers, hard enough that the nails went white.

"You remembered," she said.

"You think I'd forget a name I wrote?"

"No." Aria's voice had gone careful and low, walking on ice again. "No, I don't think you would."

Sera uncrossed her arms. Something had shifted in the room and she wasn't sure what or which direction, but the grilled cheese was done and the tea was going cold and the woman on her couch was sitting there like a person who had just heard their own name read out loud at a funeral.

"Okay," Sera said. "You spent your one question. That was a weird one, and I want you to know I clocked that it was weird, and I'm letting it go for now because I said I would."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet. My three questions." Sera held up fingers as she went. "One. Where is he actually. Two. What is he actually. Three — " she stopped, because the third one had been sitting in her mouth since the doorway and she hadn't decided yet whether she was going to say it.

Aria waited. Her hands had uncurled. She picked up her tea and held it without drinking.

"Three," Sera said, and then didn't finish, because the phone on the coffee table lit up again.

They both looked at it. The screen showed a name Sera didn't recognize at first — *Brandon H.* — and a preview line: *hey, weird question, the woman who bought the purple dress today, is she—* and then the screen went dark.

Sera picked it up. She read the notification twice. Somewhere behind her own ribs a small cold thing turned over.

"You know a Brandon?" she said.

Aria set the mug down. She didn't answer right away. When she did, her voice had gone flat and careful in a way Sera hadn't heard from her yet — the voice of someone doing arithmetic in their head and not liking the total.

"The hardware store," Aria said. "The clerk."

"You bought a dress at a hardware store."

"It's a long story."

"Everything about you is a long story." Sera turned the phone in her hand, screen up, like she was offering it across the couch. "He's asking about you. By description. Purple dress." She watched Aria's face — the small tug at the corner of the mouth, the eyes going to the far wall. "You want to tell me how a hardware clerk in Blue Castle got my number to ask about a dress?"

"He didn't get your number from me."

"That's not a no."

Aria picked the mug back up, took a sip, made a face at the temperature, and drank more anyway. It was such a specific, ordinary, *Jason* thing to do that Sera's breath caught somewhere and had to be let out manually.

"You do that," she said.

"Do what."

"Drink it even when it's cold. He does that. He does exactly that."

Aria went still, mug halfway to her mouth. For one second — one second — her face was wide open, and what was in it was not the careful stranger's face she'd been wearing since the door. It was tired. It was *relieved.* Like something she'd been carrying uphill had been set down.

Then it closed. Like a hand closing over a coin.

"Lots of people drink cold tea," she said.

"Sure." Sera set the phone down on the cushion between them, screen up, a small glowing wedge of unfinished business. "Sure they do."

She stood and gathered the plates. In the kitchen, she scraped the burnt corner off the pan and stood at the sink with the water running and her hands not in it, and she said, to the window, quietly: "You're him."

She hadn't meant to say it out loud. She'd meant to hold it, turn it over, look for the seam. But it was out now, in the air over the sink, in a kitchen with a dented carafe and a coffee maker she'd cleaned that morning for a stranger she'd been expecting.

Behind her, the couch creaked.

"I'm not going to answer that," Aria said.

"That's an answer."

"It's not." A pause. "It's a — it's a refusal to answer. There's a difference. I've been told there's a difference."

Sera turned off the water. She dried her hands on the towel with the embroidered rooster, which she hated, which her mother had given her, which she kept anyway. Then she came back and stood at the end of the couch and looked down at Aria, who was looking at her, and neither of them said anything for a while, and the radiator ticked, and the lawn mower had stopped, and the afternoon was just the two of them and the two cold mugs and the phone glowing between them.

"Here's what I know," Sera said. "I know a person who texts me every Tuesday and didn't yesterday. I know his cousin shows up out of nowhere knowing the one thing that isn't public. I know she flinches at doorframes like her body is new. I know you drink cold tea the way he did and you talk about him like he's — " she stopped, hunted for the word, found it, didn't like it — "like he's a country you left."

Aria didn't move.

"And I know," Sera said, "that I asked if he was safe and you said *he's not the same,* which is a sentence about a person who is standing in front of me."

She sat down. Not at her end of the couch — the middle cushion, closer than she'd been all afternoon, close enough to see the faint shine on Aria's cheekbones, close enough to see that the violet eyes had a ring of darker color around the pupil that didn't look like any contact lens she'd ever sold.

"I'm not going to make you say it," Sera said. "I'm going to sit here and eat the rest of my sandwich and you're going to eat yours, and then you're going to tell me whatever you can tell me, and I'm going to decide what I think. That's the whole deal. That's still the deal."

Aria looked at her for a long moment. Then she picked up the sandwich and took a bite, and it was a big bite, and cheese stretched and broke, and she had to catch a strand of it with her finger, and she laughed — a real one, surprised out of her, half a mouthful of bread — and Sera laughed too, and for ten seconds the apartment was just two people eating burnt grilled cheese on a Wednesday, and the enormous thing in the room sat quietly and waited its turn.

They ate. Aria finished first and stacked her plate on the coaster like she'd been raised to do it, and then she sat back and looked at her own hands and said, "You asked where he is."

"I did."

"He's not gone. He's not — he's not hurt. He's not in a hospital and he's not in trouble with anyone and he's not on a bender." Aria's thumb moved along the edge of the plate. "He's here, in Chicago, he was in Blue Castle this morning. He's just — the thing is — " she stopped. Started again. "The thing is, the way he looks now, nobody would recognize him. And he doesn't know how to fix that yet. And he's scared that if he tells people, they'll think he's lying, or sick, or making it up, and then he loses them. So he's — he's buying time. He's buying it with a story about a family thing."

Sera's throat had gone tight. She set her own plate down carefully, because her hands wanted to do something and she wasn't going to let them.

"He's here," she said.

"He's here."

"In Chicago."

"Yes."

"And he's — what. Hiding? From me?"

Aria's jaw worked. "Not from you. From the — " she gestured at her own face, at the room, at the window and the street beyond it — "from all of it. From how it would look. From the part where he has to sit across from someone and watch them decide whether to believe him."

Sera sat with that. The phone between them lit up again, one line, and this time she picked it up and read it with Aria watching, and it was just Brandon: *never mind, sorry, wrong number probably.* She set it face-down.

"Okay," she said. "Here's what I think. I think you're not his cousin. I think you're something he sent, or something that happened, and I think whatever he is, it's connected to why you knew the character's name — " and here she paused, and looked at Aria, and let the pause do its work — "and I think you're going to tell me eventually, because you came here on purpose and you didn't have to."

Aria's eyes had gone bright again. She blinked twice, fast, and looked up at the ceiling, and Sera watched her throat move.

"You're doing that thing he does," Sera said, quieter. "The looking up. When he doesn't want to — " she waved a hand — "leak."

"I know," Aria said, to the ceiling.

Sera leaned forward and put her hand on Aria's knee. Just that. The jeans were thin and the knee was warm and the leg under her palm was very still, and Aria came down off the ceiling and looked at the hand like it was a language she used to speak.

"I'm not going to make you say it today," Sera said. "But I want you to know I already know, and I'm not — I'm not running. I'm sitting here. With my hand on your knee. In my apartment. On a Wednesday."

Aria's mouth moved. Nothing came out. She put her own hand over Sera's, and her fingers were long and cool and they lay over Sera's knuckles without pressing, like she was checking that the hand was really there.

The phone rang.

Not a text. A call. Face-down on the cushion, buzzing against the fabric, and Sera turned it over and the screen said *Jason Chance* and the whole room tilted on its axis.

She looked at Aria. Aria was looking at the phone like it had grown teeth.

"It's him," Sera said. "It's his number."

"Don't—" Aria's hand tightened over Sera's. "Don't answer it."

"Why not."

"Because it's not — because he can't — " Aria's voice cracked, actually cracked, and she pulled her hand back and pressed both palms against her own thighs and stared at the buzzing phone. "Because it's Mike. That's Mike's phone. Mike has his — has the phone, sometimes, and he's calling because I've been gone too long and he's checking. If you answer, he'll — " she stopped. Swallowed. "He'll panic."

Sera watched her. The phone buzzed four more times and stopped. The screen went to a missed-call notification, one line, and then dark.

"His brother," Sera said.

"His brother."

"Mike."

Sera sat back. Her hand was still warm where Aria's had been. She looked at the phone, dark on the cushion between them, and she looked at the woman beside her, who was breathing like someone who had just run up a flight of stairs and was trying to do it quietly.

"Okay," Sera said. "Here's the new deal. You don't have to tell me today. But you're going to call Mike back, right now, from my kitchen, and tell him you're fine and you're with me and you're coming home. Because he's scared and I know what scared looks like and I'm not going to sit here and let it keep going."

Aria's head came up. "You—"

"Kitchen. Now. I'll make more tea." Sera stood and held out her hand, palm up, and waited. "And Aria."

Aria looked at the hand. Then at her face.

"Whatever you are," Sera said, "you're not leaving this apartment without a way to reach me. So you're going to put your number in my phone. And then you're going to come back Friday, and you're going to sit at my table, and you're going to roll a character, and we're going to figure out the rest of it from there."

Aria took the hand. She stood, and she was taller than Sera by a head and a half, and up close the purple dress was too big at the shoulder and too small at the hip, and she smelled like nothing Sera could name — like rain on stone, like the inside of a library, like the moment before a storm.

"Friday," Aria said. "I don't have dice."

"I have dice." Sera turned toward the kitchen and didn't let go of the hand, so Aria came with her, the two of them crossing the little living room together, and the phone that said *Jason Chance* sat dark on the couch behind them, and on the coffee table the missed-call notification glowed once and faded, and outside the lawn mower started up again on the next block over, patient, indifferent, going its slow way down the street.

Sera's kitchen was narrow and bright, the kind of kitchen you got in an old building where everything had been repainted but nothing had been replaced, and she filled the kettle one-handed because her other hand was still holding Aria's. She let go to set the kettle on the burner, and the letting go felt like something — a small ceremony she hadn't planned.

Aria stood where she'd been left, in the middle of the linoleum, looking at the phone in her other hand. Sera's phone. The one she'd been told to put a number into.

"It's going to look weird," Sera said, digging in the cabinet for the tea. "If you save yourself as 'Aria' and then I text you and you don't have a phone."

"I have a phone." A pause. "Somewhere. In a jacket. At Mike's."

"Good. Then this is your number until it isn't." Sera set two mugs down. "Type."

Aria typed. She typed slowly, one thumb, the way people typed who had learned on a keyboard and were still negotiating with touchscreens, and Sera watched her do it and watched her hesitate over the name field and finally leave it blank. She handed the phone back.

The kettle started its low climb toward a whistle. Sera pulled it off early, before it could announce anything, and poured.

"So," she said. "Mike."

Aria took the mug. She looked at the phone on the counter, where the missed call still sat in the log, *Jason Chance*, one line, unanswered.

"He's my brother," she said. "He's — he's older. He's the one who took me in when I came out of the woods."

"Came out of the woods."

"That's the story."

"It's not a story, it's a — " Sera stopped, because the tea was too hot and her mouth was already open and she didn't have the sentence. She tried again. "Where are the woods."

"Outside town. Past the quarry road." Aria's thumb moved along the rim of the mug. "I woke up there. On Monday. I don't remember how I got there. That's not a dodge. I genuinely don't. There's a gap."

Sera counted back. Monday. Which meant the last text she'd gotten from Jason had been Sunday night, which meant — she did the math twice and didn't like it either time.

"Call him," she said. "Kitchen's yours."

Aria looked at the phone. Then at Sera. Then at the phone.

"You're going to stand there," Aria said.

"I'm going to stand at the end of the counter and drink my tea and not listen."

"That's an oxymoron."

"It's a compromise. Take it."

Aria took it. She dialed, and the phone rang out into the little room on speaker by accident — she'd hit the wrong thing, and by the time she found the button to turn it off, it had already connected, and Mike's voice came through the tiny speaker, tight and fast.

"Sera. Hey. Sorry — sorry, I know this is — is Aria there? Is she with you? She left this morning and she hasn't—"

"Mike." Aria's voice did something Sera hadn't heard it do all afternoon. It went low and steady and *known*. "It's me. I'm here."

A long breath came down the line. Sera could hear it — the whole exhale, the way it caught at the top and then let go, the sound of a man who had been holding something for hours and had finally been allowed to put it down.

"Jesus Christ," Mike said. "You couldn't have texted."

"I forgot my phone."

"You forgot your — okay. Okay. Are you okay?"

"I'm okay." Aria glanced at Sera, who was very deliberately looking into her mug. "I'm at Sera's. I'm — we're talking. She knows something's up. Not everything. Something."

Another pause on the line, longer this time. Sera could hear him thinking, the way you could hear some people think, all the way through a phone.

"Does she know about the — " Mike said, and stopped, and Sera understood that he'd stopped because he didn't know what word to use either.

"No," Aria said. "Not that."

"Okay." A beat. "Okay. Come home when you can. I'll be here. I'll — I'm making the pasta thing."

"The one with the — "

"Yeah."

"Okay." Aria's mouth did something that was almost a smile, aimed at the counter. "Okay. I'll be back."

She hung up. She set the phone down on the counter and stood there with both hands flat on the formica, and for a second she was just a person in a kitchen, tired, at the end of a long day, and Sera let her have the second.

"He's a good brother," Sera said, finally.

"He's the best one I've got."

"Low bar."

"There's only one." Aria picked the mug back up. "That's the joke. There's only — "

She stopped. Sera watched her stop, watched her realize she'd walked into something, watched the careful face come back down over the tired one like a hand over a candle.

"There's only one what," Sera said.

"Nothing."

"You were going to say something else."

"I was going to say there's only one of him, and that's true, and it's not a joke, and I'm — " Aria shook her head. "I'm tired. That's all. I've been awake since before the sun and I've been rehearsing sentences in my head all day and I'm running out of them."

Sera set her mug down. She crossed the kitchen — two steps, it was a two-step kitchen — and stood close, close enough that Aria had to look down to meet her eyes, which she did, and held it, which Sera hadn't expected.

"Then stop rehearsing," Sera said. "You called him. You're going home. You put your number in my phone. That's the whole deal and it's done and you did it. You can go."

Aria didn't move.

"Aria."

"I know." She looked at the door, then at Sera, then at the phone on the counter. "I know. I just — "

She reached past Sera, not touching her, and picked up the phone, and turned it over in her hand, and set it back down face-up. Then she looked at Sera again, and there was something in her face that Sera recognized the way you recognize a song playing through a wall — the tune, not the words.

"Thank you," Aria said. "For the sandwich. And the tea. And for not — "

"Don't."

"For not making me say it."

Sera held the look. "I said I wouldn't. I don't say things I don't mean."

"I know." Aria's hand found the counter edge, and then, briefly, Sera's wrist — the same cool, careful fingers, checking that the thing was real — and let go. "Friday."

"Friday."

Aria walked to the door. She had to duck slightly under the frame, which she did with the automatic, unconscious grace of someone who had already learned, in three days, that the world was built for shorter people. She picked up her straw hat from the hook by the door and put it on, and the brim settled, and the pointed ears were gone under it.

"Aria," Sera said, from the kitchen.

Aria turned.

"What's your favorite color."

A beat. Aria's mouth moved, and then she said, "Purple," and it came out like a confession, and she left.

Sera stood in the kitchen and listened to the door close and the footsteps go down the hall and the outer door open and shut, and then she was alone with two mugs and a plate of crumbs and a phone with a new contact in it, unnamed, just a number, and the missed call from *Jason Chance* sitting above it in the log like a question she'd already answered but hadn't yet written down.

She picked up her phone and opened the contact. She looked at the empty name field for a while. Then she typed *Aria,* and then she typed *?* after it, and then she deleted the question mark, and then she typed *Aria* again and left it, and saved it, and set the phone down.

Outside, the lawn mower had finished its row and gone quiet, and the afternoon light had gone the long gold color it got before it started to think about evening, and somewhere down the block a dog was barking at nothing, and Sera Laurent stood in her own kitchen with her hands on the counter and said, out loud, to no one, "Okay."

Then she went and got the game books off the shelf, and sat down at the table, and started, quietly, to build a character.

Sera read the page again. Then a third time, mouthing the words like they might rearrange themselves if she gave them enough attention.

Succubic Restoration: Every time the bearer swallows semen or is anally or vaginally inseminated, restore 15 spell points, heal all wounds, and cure any sickness or disease.

She remembered writing it. Late, a little wine in, Jason typing in the chat what if my sorceress had a way to get spell points back that wasn't a long rest, that's so boring and her, feeling clever, feeling mean, typing back careful what you wish for. She'd put it in as a joke. A nerf. A leash. Something so embarrassing that he'd never, ever, in a hundred sessions, say out loud I use Succubic Restoration. It was the funniest thing she'd ever written.

It was not funny now.

She sat back in the kitchen chair and looked at the ceiling, where a water stain made a shape like Ohio, and did the math she did not want to do. Fifteen points. Twenty-five max at the start. Aria had said — no, Aria hadn't said anything about points. But Sera knew the sheet. She'd built it. She'd watched Jason spend points like a kid with a gift card: five for Shape Shift, five for a disguise, and now he was — she was — walking around Indianapolis with whatever was left, and every hour the clock on that disguise ran down.

Unless.

She made herself put the pencil down. It rolled off the table and she let it.

"Okay," she said, to the empty kitchen, which was becoming a habit. "Okay, Seraphina. Let's just — let's be a person about this."

She got up, poured the last of the tea into the sink, and rinsed both mugs because leaving them felt like leaving evidence. Then she stood at the window with her hands on the sill and watched the street do its evening thing: the neighbor's kid dragging a bike up a driveway, the light going that bruised violet it went before dark, a sedan idling at the corner with its blinker on like it had forgotten where it was going. Her reflection floated over all of it, a ghost in the glass, and she looked at herself and thought, unhelpfully: she has your eyes.

No. Not the eyes. The color was wrong — violet, obviously violet, a color eyes did not come in. But there was something in the way Aria had looked at her, sideways and careful, that Sera had spent two years learning to read through a screen. The pause before the joke. The way she reached for a punchline and then stepped back from it. The way she'd said purple like it cost her something.

Jason's favorite color was green. He'd said so a dozen times. Forest green, obviously, I'm playing an elf.

But Aria's dress was purple. And her eyes were purple. And she'd said the word like a confession.

Sera pressed her forehead against the cool glass. "You absolute idiot," she said, and she wasn't sure which of them she meant.

She went back to the table and opened the character sheet again. Not the backstory page — the mechanics. She'd printed it months ago, before the campaign started, a thick stack that had lived in a folder until tonight. She flipped past the cantrips, past the spell list with its tidy point costs, and found the line she was looking for, the one she'd written herself, in the margin, in pencil:

Max 45 via SR. Hard cap. No cheesing it.

She stared at it. No cheesing it. The words of a DM who wanted her player to suffer in the fun way. Who thought the mechanic was a joke that would never fire.

It was going to fire. It was firing right now, probably, somewhere across town, while Aria sat on Mike's couch in a borrowed shirt and tried to work out how to stay a person in a world that had rules she'd written for fun.

Sera closed the folder. She picked up her phone. The contact sat there — Aria, no question mark, which felt like a decision she'd made and could not unmake. She opened it. She typed hey. She deleted it. She typed you get home ok? and looked at it for a long time, thumb hovering, and then she deleted that too, because it was the kind of thing you sent to a person you were allowed to worry about, and she hadn't earned that yet. Had she? Two years of texts. A sandwich. A cup of tea. A wrist she'd touched for half a second and still felt.

She set the phone face-down and stood up and paced the two-step kitchen, which took four steps if you went around the table, which she did, twice.

Think.

If Jason was Aria — she was going to stop pretending the if — then the thing that had happened was not a costume. It was not a prank. He'd walked into her apartment with a body that fit the sheet exactly: the height, the build, the hair. She'd described that hair. Silver-blond, waist-length, catching the light. She'd written it in a backstory paragraph at two in the morning and now it was in her kitchen, drinking her tea, ducking under her door frame.

Which meant the game was real. Which meant the sheet was real. Which meant — she stopped pacing — which meant everything she'd ever written for that campaign was real, or could be. The NPCs. The locations. The fights she'd sketched out on index cards and never run.

She sat down again, slowly, because her knees had opinions about standing.

If the sheet was real, then Aria had twenty-five points when she started. She'd spent some. She had — Sera did the arithmetic again, faster this time — a disguise that would run out, and a mechanic that would refill her, and the mechanic was the one thing Jason's character would rather die than use, because Sera had built it to be exactly that. A trap with a punchline. A way to make her player squirm.

And now he had to use it. She'd made sure of it. She'd written the leash and the collar and the joke, and the joke had walked out her front door wearing a straw hat.

"Oh, no," she said, and then, again, quieter, "oh, no," because the second thing that arrived, hard on the heels of the first, was the shape of what it would cost him. Her. What it would cost Aria. Sera had spent years learning Jason through a screen — the jokes, the timing, the way he deflected anything real with a callback — and she knew, the way you know the sound of a specific knock, that the last thing in the world he would ever want to do was ask for help with that.

She opened the notes app. She typed spell points: 25 max start. SR = 15. cap 45. She looked at it. She typed don't be a monster about it. Then she deleted the second line, because she didn't know who she was talking to.

The phone buzzed. She lunged for it, which was embarrassing, and it was only a notification from a game she didn't play anymore. She put it down and stood up and made herself a second cup of tea she didn't want, just to have something to do with her hands.

Friday. She'd said Friday. She'd offered him a seat at the table and he'd — she'd — taken it. Sera had done that thinking she was being kind, giving the strange beautiful woman a place to land. Now Friday was a room with her friends in it, and a character sheet she'd have to pretend not to recognize, and a person she'd have to pretend not to know, and she was already lying to everyone and she hadn't even decided to.

She thought about the campaign. The one they'd been playing for a year, the one Jason had built his whole life around, the one that had apparently done this to him. She thought about the DM's screen, the one she kept in the closet, the one with the little dragon on it. She thought about the last session, the one where Jason had rolled a natural twenty on something stupid and laughed so hard he'd had to mute himself.

He wasn't going to laugh like that again. Not for a while.