The pen is still warm where Aria set it down. Dani crosses the linoleum — boots ticking, one lace undone — and stops a foot short of the counter, looking at the clean square of laminate where the notice sat folded for an hour and then didn't. She doesn't touch it. She picks up the pen instead, turns it over once between two fingers like it might be rigged, and sets it back down exactly along the seam of the counter edge, dead parallel to the grain. "So that's it," she says, quiet, careful, the way you say a thing you're not sure you're allowed to say out loud.

Aria's hand is still flat on the cold counter. She looks at it — the long fingers, the faint luminous sheen under the kitchen bulb, the hands of who she has become. "That's the last of him," she says, and hears it come out steady, which surprises her. "Lease, jacket, license, and a signature by the best friend of a guy named Jason Chance who paid his rent and moved out." She pulls her hand off the counter and the laminate holds the shape of her palm for a second before it forgets. "I keep waiting to feel like I killed him."

Dani steps in — one boot, then the other, the ticking gone soft on the linoleum — and stops close enough that Aria can smell the cold air still in her hair, the wet-wool smell of the coat she hasn't taken off. She doesn't reach for her. She just stands there in the space where the envelope used to be, looking at Aria's face the way she looks at a chord she's learning, hunting the shape of it. "You didn't," she says. "You're still here." And she says it plain, no pun in it, no joke to land on, which is how Aria knows she means it — and Aria stands in the middle of Jason Chance's cold kitchen with her hand still tingling from the counter and understands, all at once, that the last of him was never the paperwork. It's this. A room with no him in it, and two people standing in it anyway, deciding what to do with the space.

Aria turns from the counter and her eyes land on the stack of flattened boxes wedged behind the fridge — Jason's, from the move-in two years back, the ones he swore he'd break down and never did. She pulls them out one at a time, shaking off the dust, popping the first one open with a flat crack of cardboard that sounds louder in the empty kitchen than it has any right to. Dani watches from the doorway, coat still on, arms crossed loose over her chest.

"Bedroom first," Aria says, and it comes out like a plan, like a checklist, which is how she knows she's about to do this badly. She walks the hall with the box under one arm and the other hand trailing the wall, and when she reaches Jason's room she stands in the doorway a full five seconds before she steps in. The bed's stripped to the mattress. The dresser drawers hang open like somebody already searched the place. She starts pulling — t-shirts into the box, jeans, the hoodie Mike gave him for his birthday, the one with the oil stain on the cuff — and her hands keep moving past the things that matter to grab the things that don't, and she doesn't catch herself doing it until the box is half full of socks.

Dani leans in the doorframe, quiet, and watches Aria fold a shirt she doesn't need into a box she doesn't want to fill. "You're doing the thing," she says, not unkind. "The numb thing. Same as last night." Aria doesn't answer. She sets the shirt down, picks up Jason's old alarm clock — dead battery, cracked face — and turns it over twice in her hands before she puts it in the box, and her shoulders dip a half inch under the weight of nothing at all.

She sets the alarm clock down in the box and reaches past it for the closet shelf, and her hand finds the shoes. Men's shoes. Brown leather, size eleven, scuffed at the toe — Jason's, the ones he wore to the interview at the call center and never again, because he got the job and then quit it in three weeks. She holds one in each hand, and they are heavy in a way her body keeps forgetting to expect, and she puts them in the box. Then she takes them back out. Sets them on the floor by the door, toes pointed at the wall, the way Jason always left them, and stands there looking down at them like they might explain what she's supposed to do with a dead man's shoes.

"The shoes," Dani says from the doorframe, and doesn't finish it.

"Yeah." Aria picks them up again. This time she walks them to the kitchen and drops them in the trash bag by the fridge — the one with the dead batteries and the takeout containers — and she stands over the bag a second with her hand still in it, fingers curled around the leather heel, and pulls it back out. "I can't," she says. "I keep thinking somebody might need them." She sets them on the counter and looks at them and finally, slowly, turns and carries them back to the box and lays them in the bottom, flat, side by side, the way you lay something in a coffin. "There. That's the last of him too. His shoes."

The bathroom is worse. She finds the razor on the sink ledge, cheap plastic handle, the head clogged with hair that has gone grey at the roots — Jason's hair, the last of it, the thing her own scalp has already forgotten how to make. She holds it up to the light, and Dani, who has followed her the whole way down the hall without a word, takes it out of her hand and drops it in the trash without ceremony. "Razor's trash," she says. "You're not keeping a razor." Aria nods at the wall for a while. Then she opens the medicine cabinet and finds the cologne — the cheap blue bottle with the plastic cap, the one Jason bought at the drugstore because a girl at the bar told him he smelled like a locker room — and the body spray behind it, and she takes both out and sets them on the sink ledge next to where the razor was, and looks at them for a long time before she puts them in the trash bag herself.

"I wore that," she says. "I put that on my neck and went out thinking I was—" She doesn't finish it. She closes the cabinet and catches herself in the mirror, silver hair, violet eyes,

— and the face in the glass finishes the sentence for her. She lets it. She looks at the woman Jason would have called a stranger and she calls herself, and the cologne sits in the bag at her feet like evidence of a crime nobody committed. "I really was just a dude," she says, and it lands somewhere between a confession and a eulogy. Dani's reflection appears behind hers in the mirror, closer than the doorframe, arms still crossed but softer now.

"You were," Dani says. "And now you're a princess from a country that doesn't have a map." She reaches past Aria and pulls the cologne bottle back out of the bag, uncaps it, sniffs it once, and makes a face. "Okay, no. That one stays in the trash. I'm doing the princess a favor." She drops it back in, and Aria laughs — a real one, short and surprised, the kind that comes up through the floor of a bad hour. Then she picks up the box from the bedroom floor and starts putting things back.

The shoes come out first, set on the closet shelf where they were, toes to the wall. The hoodie with the oil stain goes back in the drawer, folded, because it was Mike's before it was Jason's and it can be Mike's again. The alarm clock goes on the nightstand, dead battery and all, because it's not hers to throw away. She moves through the apartment unhurried, returning things to their places with a care that looks less like grief and more like tidying a room before guests — the room of someone who has already left, kept the way he kept it, for no one. When she's done, the box is empty and flattened against the wall behind the fridge, and Jason Chance's apartment looks exactly the way he left it, which is to say it looks like nobody lives here, which is true.

She stands in the middle of the living room with her hands on her hips and her chin up, silver hair falling over one shoulder, and she does not look like a man's ghost in a man's apartment. She looks like the last of a line that never had a first. "All right," she says, to Dani, to the empty room, to the cold linoleum. "Now what do we do with a princess who has nowhere to be?"

Aria finds the number on the fridge door, under a magnet shaped like a fish — a cleaning service, the kind that does move-outs, the kind that comes with a van and a checklist and doesn't ask why the tenant is a woman with silver hair standing in a dead man's kitchen. She calls, and the woman on the other end is bored and efficient and says someone can be there inside the hour. Aria says the address twice. Then she says the rest of it — everything goes, all of it, the furniture, the clothes, the dishes, whatever's in the drawers — and hangs up before the woman can ask the one question Aria doesn't have an answer for. Dani is watching her from the doorway with her coat still on, and Aria can feel the question sitting behind her teeth, so she answers it before it lands. "I'm not keeping a life I'm not living in."

The hour is longer than she expects. She spends the first twenty minutes standing at the window watching the rain do its slow gray work on the parking lot, and then she stops watching and starts moving, and the moving is the only thing that makes the hour pass. There are four things in the apartment that belonged to Jason and not to the apartment — she finds them one at a time, in the back of the closet, under the sink, in a shoebox on the top shelf she has to stand on a chair to reach — and she carries each one out to Dani's car herself, down the stairs, through the wet, and lays them on the back seat in a row. Dani doesn't ask what they are. She just opens the door and holds it and lets Aria do the carrying, which is its own kind of kindness, the kind that doesn't need a pun on the end of it. By the time the van pulls into the lot, the back seat has four things in it and Jason Chance's apartment has nothing left that anyone would recognize as a person.

The van is white and unmarked except for a magnetic sign slapped crooked on the driver's door, and the two women who climb out of it are wearing matching navy polos and the expression of people who have cleaned a hundred dead men's apartments and learned not to look at the photographs. Aria meets them at the bottom of the stairs. She has already decided what she's going to say, and she says it flat, before either of them can get a read on her ears. "Everything goes. Furniture, clothes, dishes, the stuff in the drawers. There's nothing in there anybody wants." The older one — a broad-shouldered woman with a clipboard and a name tag that says Rhonda — looks past Aria at the building, then back at her, and asks the only question that matters. "You want it hauled, or you want it left curbside?"

"Hauled," Aria says. "Take it to the dump. Don't donate it. Don't sort it." She pulls the cash from her hoodie — the envelope is thinner than it was, but there's still enough — and counts out what the woman quoted over the phone, plus a hundred, and holds it out. Rhonda takes it, thumb-fans it once, and doesn't ask why the bills are damp. "Give us two hours," she says, and disappears up the stairs with her partner and a roll of contractor bags, and the door to Jason Chance's apartment swings shut behind them for the last time.

Dani is standing by the car with her arms crossed, watching the van, watching the window of the second-floor unit go bright as the cleaners turn on every light in the place. "You didn't tell them not to touch the shoebox," she says. Aria doesn't look at her. "The shoebox is in your back seat," she says. "The one on the shelf was empty." That's a lie and they both know it — she'd checked it, found three pay stubs and a birthday card from Ellen and a hospital bracelet from the night Jason broke his wrist at fourteen, and she'd put the card in her pocket and left the rest on the shelf for the bags. Dani doesn't call it. She just reaches over and pulls Aria's hood back up over her ears, because a neighbor has come out to check the mail and is standing at the bank of boxes pretending not to stare.

Dani's kitchen smells like butter and onion before the door's even shut behind them — Sera already at the stove, sleeves shoved to her elbows, a wooden spoon in one hand and a glass of red in the other, the two of them conducting some kind of argument that has clearly been going for a while. "You let it go dry," she says to the pot, not to them. "You have to let it go dry. That's the whole point." She tips the wine glass over the rice without measuring and Aria watches the last of the bottle go in and wonders if that's the recipe or the apology. The risotto is good. It's better than good — she's never had it before, not as Jason and not as Aria, and she says so with her mouth full, and Sera looks up from the stove for the first time since they came in and holds her eyes a second longer than the compliment needs.

They eat at the counter, the three of them, no table between them and no ceremony. Dani's cat Pancake sits on the stool Aria's claimed and stares at her with the flat judgment of a creature who knows exactly what she is and has decided not to make it weird. Sera refills their glasses and Dani tells the story of the shoebox three times, each version funnier than the last, and by the third one Aria is laughing with her forehead on the counter and doesn't notice she's doing it until she sits back up. Somewhere in there the conversation goes quiet the way it does — the dishes in the sink, the wine going warm in the glass, Sera's hand finding Aria's knee under the counter like it's a thing she's always done. "Eight-forty," Dani says finally, into the soft middle of the evening. "The office opens at nine. You want to be in line before the door." Aria looks at the two of them, the auburn curls and the brown ones, the kitchen that belongs to neither of them and to all three, and she doesn't say what she's thinking, which is that she'd stand in line for anything if they were standing next to her. She just nods, and finishes her wine, and lets Sera take the glass out of her hand.

Dani's bed is a queen and the three of them fit it the way three people fit one umbrella — technically, with contact, and by morning somebody's elbow is in somebody's ribs. Aria lies on her back between them with her hands folded on her stomach and her eyes shut, doing the trick she has learned to do in the dark: down the inner hallway, the dials dimmed one by one, the body going quiet enough to pass. Sera breathes against her shoulder, slow. Dani's arm is thrown over Aria's hip, heavy and possessive even asleep. Aria keeps her eyes closed and her breathing even and waits out the night the way she waits out everything — which is to say she doesn't, quite, because the elf rest takes her in four hours flat and the rest of the dark is hers to lie in, listening to the two women breathe, running her thumb over the seam of Dani's knuckles without waking her, doing the arithmetic of a life she never expected to be allowed to have.

She's out of the bed before the sky goes grey, sliding her hip out from under Dani's arm in slow increments, and the floor is cold and she doesn't care. The kitchen is a stranger's kitchen in the dark — Dani's, which means the pans are in the wrong cupboard and the salt is in a bowl shaped like a cat — and Aria stands in front of the stove in one of Dani's shirts with her bare feet on the linoleum and her hair down her back, and she decides she is going to make breakfast. This is a mistake. She knows it's a mistake about four seconds in, when the bacon hits the pan and starts screaming, but she has committed now, so she keeps going — eggs cracked into a bowl, shells fished out with a finger, the toast going in dry because she can't find the butter and won't admit it. The bacon goes from pink to grey to black in a way that feels personal. The eggs, which she meant to leave whole, come out in a yellow rubble that looks less like breakfast than like something that happened to a chicken. The toast is a brick. The whole kitchen smells like a house fire that gave up halfway.

The smoke alarm goes off. Not a chirp — a full, keening blare that fills the whole apartment like a foghorn in a closet, and Aria has both hands out toward the stove before she's decided anything, the pan's smoke peeling sideways off the counter as she flattens her palms and reaches for the only cantrip that will save her. Prestidigitation. One breath, and the blackened bacon sloughs its crust and comes back glossy and crisp, laid in neat ribbons beside eggs that have re-firmed into six perfect sunny-side whites, the yolk high and orange as a coin. The toast uncharcoals itself from the center out, curls lifting, edges going gold. The smoke alarm dies mid-wheeze. Aria steps back from the stove, flips her hair over one shoulder, and picks up the spatula like she's been holding it for years.

Dani gets there first, hair going in nine directions, one sock, squinting into the kitchen with the specific disgust of a woman woken by a machine. Sera's behind her, wrapped to the collarbone in a quilt, and neither of them says anything for a second. They just look at the counter. The bacon that was a house fire ninety seconds ago. The eggs that were rubble. The toast that was a brick. Aria plates it with a flourish that is ninety percent bluff and ten percent elf, and slides the plates across the counter like a short-order cook who owns the place. Dani picks up a piece of bacon, holds it to the light, sniffs it, and sets it back down. "Uh huh," she says. "So you cooked this."

"I cooked this." Aria's ears go pink at the tips and she doesn't notice until Dani's eyes flick to them. "The old-fashioned way." Sera takes a bite of egg, chews, and makes the face of a woman choosing mercy over truth. "It's the best eggs I've ever had," she says, "that definitely came out of that pan." She sits down at the counter and eats the whole plate without another word about it, and Dani sits down next to her and eats hers too, and Aria leans against the sink with her own plate and lets the two of them look at her with the long, amused, thoroughly unconvinced look of people who know exactly what she did and have decided it counts as cooking anyway.

The disguise is quick and quiet, the way she's learned to do it — a breath, a dial turned down the inner hallway, and the woman in the glass changes. Blonde. Round ears tucked under a fall of straight hair. Blue eyes, a jaw a little softer, the whole body of her going shorter and broader and unremarkable. She digs through Dani's closet for the clothes and comes out in a thrifted flannel and jeans that hang off the hips she's wearing now, a hoodie zipped to the throat, sneakers with a scuff on the toe. No silver. No violet. Just a woman in her twenties on her way to run an errand, the kind of face nobody looks at twice, which is the whole point of it. She studies herself in the bathroom mirror and pulls the hood up and tilts her chin the way Jason used to tilt his when he was about to lie to somebody, and the gesture lands on a stranger's face and fits.

Dani watches her from the doorway with her coffee mug held against her chest, one eyebrow up. "You wore that into court," she says. "You didn't wear it out." Aria shrugs, zips the hoodie the rest of the way, and pats the pocket where Jason's Social Security card sits flat against her ribs — the number she wrote on the affidavit, the number that has to match the name on the new license before any of it means anything. "Court was one room and one judge," she says. "The Social Security office is a lobby full of bored people with cameras in their pockets. Different math." Sera comes up behind Dani with her arms crossed and her hair still wet, and there's something in the set of her mouth — the look of a woman who has already decided she's coming along and is waiting for the argument. Aria heads it off. "I'll be back this afternoon," she says, and it comes out steadier than she feels, because the truth is she has no idea what a federal clerk is going to do with her. She pulls the door open and the hallway smell of rain comes in, and she doesn't look back at the two of them, because if she looks back she'll stay.

The drive is thirteen minutes of strip-mall and stoplight, and the Social Security Administration office is exactly as advertised — a beige room with a numbered-ticket dispenser, a row of bolted-down chairs, and a wall clock that has been showing the same time since 2019. Aria takes ticket C-47 and sits under the vent. She is, for once, completely unremarkable: a blonde woman in a zipped hoodie, knees together, phone face-down on her thigh. An old man in a VFW cap dozes two chairs down. A mother wrestles a toddler out of her purse. Nobody looks at her twice. She has never been so anonymous in her life and it feels like a stolen afternoon.

Ten-thirty. "C-47, window three." The clerk is a soft-faced man in his fifties with a wedding band and a screen he's been staring at all morning, and Aria slides the court order and the corrected birth certificate across the counter and waits for him to frown. He doesn't. He types. He reads the order twice, hums at something, types again. "Mithlass," he says, to the screen. "Aria. And you've got the old record here under Chance." He scrolls. "Okay — I'm linking the number now. This is permanent, understand. That number's going to say Aria Mithlass for the rest of your life. No going back." He looks up for the first time. "You want to change anything else while I've got it open?"

"No," Aria says, and her voice comes out clean. He hits enter. The printer whirs, and he slides a receipt across the counter, and she reads her own name on it — Aria Mithlass — printed in the flat black font of the federal government, and something in her chest goes quiet and settles. She folds the receipt into her pocket next to Jason's card and walks out into the rain with her hood up, and the bank is two blocks over, and she is still smiling when she pushes through the glass door.

Two blocks from the bank the sidewalk empties out the way it does between office buildings at eleven in the morning — a gap in the foot traffic, nobody behind her, nobody ahead but a crossing signal counting down. Aria stops under the awning of a shuttered dry cleaner's and stands in the little pocket of quiet with her hands at her sides. She doesn't hurry it. She turns the dial the way she's learned to turn it, one notch, and feels the blonde hair pull back up into her scalp like water going home, feels the round of her ears sharpen and lift, feels the whole borrowed body she's been wearing shrug off like a coat she never liked. The hoodie goes slack and wrong on her — too wide across the shoulders, too short in the sleeve — and she strips it off one arm at a time, drops it in a heap on the dry cleaner's step, and stands in the wet air in nothing but the jeans and a tank top she made this morning, silver hair down her back, ears bare, violet eyes open. The crossing signal ticks to zero and a woman with a grocery bag comes around the corner and stops dead. Aria doesn't look at her. She reaches for the dress the way she reaches for any spell — the shape already in her head, white silk and gold thread and violet at the hem — and the air over her skin goes warm and bright for half a second, and then the silk is on her, and the sandals are on her feet, and the gold is warm against her ankles like something that has been sitting in the sun all afternoon, and she is, at last, the whole person, all of her, on a public sidewalk in the middle of the day.

The woman with the grocery bag doesn't move. Neither does the man who's stopped at the corner with his phone half-raised, thumb frozen over the shutter button, and neither does the kid in the delivery vest who has let his bike coast to a wobbling halt against the curb. Aria turns her head slowly, taking them in one at a time, and the crossing signal starts its countdown again and nobody crosses. Rain beads on the silk and slides off. She lifts one arm and the sleeve falls back and the whole length of her forearm catches the grey light, ivory and gold and the serpent inked dark along the bone, and the kid in the vest says "holy shit" out loud and doesn't apologize for it. Aria tips her chin down at him — a small bow, the elven kind, the kind she's been practicing in bathroom mirrors — and walks on.

The bank is glass and brass and climate control, and the security guard at the door has his hand on the strap of his holster before the automatic doors have finished opening, because a woman in a white silk dress with pointed ears is not a thing that walks into a Merrillville branch on a Wednesday. Aria stops three feet inside, lets the doors breathe shut behind her, and does the thing she's spent a month learning to do in rooms full of people who have already decided what she is. She smiles. Not the elf smile — the other one, the ordinary one, the one Jason used on landlords and DMV clerks and his mother when he'd wrecked the car. "I'm here to open an account," she says, and her voice is steady, and the guard's hand comes off the strap. "I have a court order, a corrected birth certificate, and a Social Security number that says my name as of forty minutes ago." The teller line has gone quiet. Every head in the lobby is turned. Aria pulls the receipt from her pocket and lays it on the counter like a card trick she's already won, and the woman behind the glass — name tag DIANE, reading glasses pushed up into her hair — looks at the receipt, then at Aria's ears, then at the receipt again, and reaches for the phone on the desk without ever taking her eyes off her.

"I'm going to need my manager," Diane says, and Aria leans an elbow on the counter and lets the whole lobby watch her do it, and for the first time since she walked out of the Social Security office she is not smiling to put anyone at ease — she is smiling because she means it. "Take your time," she says. "I've got nowhere else to be."

Diane comes back with a man in a grey suit — name tag MARTIN, MANAGER, the kind of tag that has a title printed on it because he wants you to read it — and Martin does not look at Aria's ears. He looks at the receipt, the court order, the corrected birth certificate, the Social Security card she sets down one at a time like a poker hand she's been holding all morning. He reads the order twice. He holds the birth certificate up to the light the way a teller checks a fifty. Then he puts all four documents flat on the counter, squares them with two fingers, and says, "We'll need a second form of ID." Aria pulls Jason's old credit card from her pocket, the one she's been carrying since the hardware store — JASON R CHANCE, embossed, expired last month — and Martin looks at it, then at her, then at the court order, and something in his face decides not to make this his problem. "That'll do," he says. "Diane, open a checking account. No overdraft. No debit card until the card comes in the mail."

The paperwork is fifteen minutes of signing her name in a loop — Aria Mithlass, Aria Mithlass, Aria Mithlass — until the letters stop meaning anything and start meaning everything. Diane types, slides, stamps, and hands her a temporary checkbook with her new name printed on it in a font that looks like it belongs to someone who has a lawn and a dog. Aria counts out ten thousand from the envelope under the counter's lip — hundred after hundred, damp at the corners, the smell of Ernie Vasquez's rain-soaked field still in the paper — and Diane's eyes go wide for exactly one second before she feeds the bills into the machine and doesn't ask. The receipt prints. Aria folds it into her pocket next to the other one, the Social Security receipt, and for a moment she is a person with two receipts and a checkbook and a name the government agrees to, and the lobby light coming through the glass doors is the plain grey light of a Wednesday in Merrillville, and she is standing in it, and it is enough.

Martin counts the bills once, wetting his thumb, and then counts them again, and the second count is the one he believes. He writes the deposit slip himself, in pen, and slides the carbon across for her signature, and when Aria signs it the pen skips on the wet spot and she signs again, slower. "Ten thousand even," Martin says, and he says it the way a man says a number he has decided not to be curious about. "Your account's open. Funds available in twenty-four hours. Diane will walk you through the app." Diane, who has been watching Aria's ears the whole time and has decided to keep watching them, hands over a folder with a debit card application and a lollipop that has gone soft in the wrapper, and Aria takes both because a woman with a new checking account takes what she's handed.

The little girl is six, maybe seven, in a yellow raincoat with the hood down and a plastic pony clutched in one fist, and she has been standing by the potted ficus since Aria walked in — her mother's hand on her shoulder, the mother's face doing the arithmetic of whether to leave. Aria is halfway to the doors when the girl breaks loose. She crosses the lobby at a dead run, rain boots squeaking on the tile, and stops a foot short with her chin up and her whole face open. "Are you the angel from the football game," she says, and it isn't a question, the way kids don't ask questions. Aria crouches down to her level — the silk pooling on the floor, the serpent armband catching the lobby light — and the mother is behind her now, saying *Sadie, I'm so sorry,* hand out, and Aria waves her off without looking away from the girl. "I'm an elf," she says. "Angels have different insurance." Sadie doesn't laugh. She just holds up the pony. "Can I have a picture with you. For my teacher."

Aria wraps her arm around Sadie's shoulders — the raincoat crinkling under her palm, the girl small and solid and smelling faintly of peanut butter — and turns her face toward the mother's phone. Sadie holds the pony up between them like a flag. The mother snaps the picture twice, then a third time because her thumb slipped, murmuring *sorry, sorry* the whole way, and Aria keeps smiling until the shutter stops clicking. When she lets go, Sadie steps back and looks at her with the flat, appraising stare of a child filing something away for later, and Aria has the sudden sense that in twenty years some woman will be telling a story about the elf in the bank.

She cups her hands at her chest, the way you'd hold a bird, and closes her fingers around nothing. The cantrip moves through her like a breath held and released — a flicker of violet light, a faint cold against her palms — and when she opens her hands there's a flower in them. Small. A violet, stem and all, the petals glass-clear and threaded with light, faceted like something that grew in a cave instead of a garden. Not a real flower. A pretty one. She holds it out to Sadie, who takes it with both hands and goes completely silent, and the mother's phone comes up again, and Aria is already standing. "Keep it out of the sun," she says, which is not true, because it will never wilt, and she is gone through the glass doors before anyone can ask her how she did it.

The rain has thinned to a spitting mist by the time she reaches the car, and the grocery store is six minutes up Broadway — a Jewel-Osco with a wet parking lot and a cart with the one good wheel. She walks the wine aisle twice, silver hair dripping down the back of the silk, pointed ears bare to every shopper who glances and every shopper who deliberately doesn't, and she settles on a bottle of cabernet and a bottle of something white she can't pronounce, because Ellen drinks red and Mike drinks whatever's open and Aria has no idea what she likes yet. She pays in cash. The kid at the register rings her up without looking up from the belt, and Aria carries the bag out into the grey afternoon, and somewhere between the sliding doors and the car she realizes she's already thinking of tomorrow as a place she's going, not a thing she's dreading — and that her mother's house, off Route 6, with the cracked driveway and the screen door that never latched, is a place she has a seat at the table now, and she is bringing the wine.