The studio smells like it always smells — ink and citrus solvent and, underneath that, the ghost of every bag of weed Simone's ex-boyfriend ever smoked in the back room before she kicked him and the smell both out in the same week. Sunday, one o'clock, and Wickenden Street outside the window is doing its lazy September thing, families with strollers, a guy selling kombucha out of a cooler, nothing that has anything to do with me.

"You're late," Simone says, not looking up from the screen she's got clamped to the exposure table. "Two hundred bags due Tuesday morning and I have exactly one pair of hands."

"You have two pairs of hands. You're just choosing to only use one because you're being dramatic about it."

"I'm being efficient. Drama is when I start crying." She squints at the screen, at some logo I can't read upside down from here — a farmers' market thing, a sunflower, the kind of clip-art sunflower that makes me want to redesign it for free just so it stops existing in this state. "Grab an apron. You're on squeegee."

I grab an apron. It says ADEYEMI SCREENPRINT across the chest in her own hand-cut stencil, half worn away from washing, and it hangs on me the way everything of Simone's hangs on me, because she is five inches taller and built like a coat rack and I am built like a woman who eats her feelings, which today, apparently, are going to be plantain.

"Coffee," she says, gesturing at the machine in the corner without looking, "is made. I take no responsibility."

The machine is from another century. It might actually be haunted. It produces, into two mason jars that have definitely held photo emulsion at some point in their lives and have not been washed with what I would call rigor, a liquid the color of a puddle that's decided it wants more out of life. I drink it anyway. It tastes like a puddle with ambitions — thin, bitter, faintly of plastic — and it is, God help me, better than nothing, because nothing is what I've been running on since I walked out of the Bellini three days ago with eleven unsaid words still stuck behind my teeth.

"This is genuinely terrible," I tell her.

"I know. Drink it faster, it's worse when it's warm."

—

We fall into rhythm the way we always do, the way we've done since the first week of design school eleven years ago when we got put at adjacent light tables and she looked at my kerning and said, out loud, in front of the professor, "Who hurt you," meaning the letterforms, and I laughed so hard I knocked over my inkwell and we've been inseparable since. She loads the screen, I pull the squeegee, one long even stroke, flip, back again, and the sunflower blooms yellow onto forty, then sixty, then a hundred tote bags in a stack that smells like plastisol curing under the dryer's heat lamps.

"Eleven years," she says at one point, apropos of nothing, holding up her jar of terrible coffee like it's champagne. "To design school. To me putting up with you."

"To you putting up with me," I agree, and clink my jar against hers, and the plantain — cold now, from the place on the corner, wrapped in foil that's gone soft and sweaty — tastes like the best thing I have eaten all week, which it is, sugar and grease gone tacky at the edges, and I eat it standing at the ink table with my fingers because Simone doesn't own a fork that isn't currently propping open a paint can somewhere.

"So," Simone says, in the voice she uses right before an ambush. "Thursday night. Friday. You didn't answer your phone either night."

"I was dealing with a thing."

"What thing."

"Plumbing thing. The bathtub — you know the bathtub's in the kitchen, it does this thing where—"

"You told me that story in June. The pipe thing was June."

"It happened again."

"Uh huh." She doesn't look up from the screen she's cleaning, which is worse than if she did. "And Friday?"

"Dentist."

"On a Friday night."

"Emergency dentist."

"You don't have dental insurance, Maya, you told me that in April when you cried about the cracked molar you never got fixed."

"It resolved on its own."

"Teeth don't resolve on their own, they're not a rash." She sets down the squeegee, picks up a stub of grease pencil, and writes, on a scrap of newsprint pulled off the roll, in block letters: PLUMBING (JUNE) → PLUMBING (THURSDAY) → EMERGENCY DENTIST (NO INSURANCE) (FRIDAY). She holds it up like an exhibit. "This is what a timeline looks like when someone's lying to their best friend."

"I'm not lying, I'm — economizing on detail."

"That's the same thing with better lighting."

I laugh, because it's true and because the alternative is not laughing, and the plantain is sticking to my back teeth in a way I can feel with my tongue, sweet going stale.

"Fine," Simone says, setting the newsprint down, rolling her shoulders back like a boxer resetting between rounds. "New tactic. Twenty questions. Is he married."

"No."

"Is he a cop."

The laugh comes out sharper than I mean it to, a bark, and I have to set my jar down before I slop the puddle-coffee onto a wet screen. "God, no. Absolutely not."

"Is he in a band."

"He is not in a band."

"Is he in witness protection."

"Simone."

"Is he," she says, gravely, squeegee held like a scepter, "secretly the guy who does the voice for the Rhode Island lottery commercials, because I have always found that voice weirdly compelling and I need to know if you've solved that mystery for me—"

"He is not the lottery voice guy," I say, and I am laughing now in the full unlovely way, the kind that comes up from the stomach, and my hand slips on the squeegee and drags a long unintended smear of yellow ink diagonally across a bag that was, thirty seconds ago, a perfectly good sunflower, and now looks like the sunflower has been in a car accident.

"You ruined a bag."

"You ruined my composure, this is a fair trade."

"It is not a fair trade, plastisol is eleven dollars a quart." But she's laughing too, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist, careful not to touch her face with ink-black fingers, and we spend a full minute just standing there wheezing at each other over a ruined tote bag, and it is, without question, the lightest my chest has felt in ten days.

I reprint it. New bag, new pull, sunflower blooming clean this time.

—

The laughing runs out the way it always does, leaving a kind of quiet with edges on it, and Simone uses the quiet the way she always has — like a scalpel, not a sledgehammer, the same way she's done it since we were twenty-two and she figured out, faster than I did, what Trevor actually was.

"It's been five years since the frame," she says. Not really a question. "You know that?"

I go still over the ink table. I didn't do the math. I never do the math on purpose — it arrives, the way the number seven arrived unbidden at four-forty this morning, but I hadn't clocked how long it had actually been, and hearing her say it flat like that, five years since the frame, lands somewhere under my ribs I wasn't braced for.

"You called it a stupid accident," Simone says, not looking at me, wiping down the squeegee blade with a rag that's more ink than cotton at this point. "For two years. 'It was a stupid accident, Simone, I was reaching for it, it just — fell wrong.' You said that so many times I think you started believing your own copy."

"Simone—"

"He never had to hit you," she says, and this is the sentence, I know it before she finishes it because she's said some version of it three or four times over the years and it always lands the same way, flat and correct and unanswerable. "He just narrated you. Every room you walked into, every sentence you said, he had a little director's commentary running, and you spent four years thinking that wasn't violence because there wasn't a mark on you most days. There was one day there was a mark. One. And you called it an accident for two years because the four years of narration didn't leave anything you could point to."

I don't say anything. I pick at the dried ink under my thumbnail, a crescent of ochre that won't come out no matter how hard I dig, and the plantain sits heavy and sweet at the bottom of my stomach, and I think about the way Trevor's voice still runs unbidden in my head sometimes — you stare, people notice — and how I have never once told Simone that it still does that, three years on, because I don't want her to have been right about quite that much.

"I know," I say, finally. Just that. It's the most honest thing I've said all week and it costs me nothing to say it here, in a room that smells like solvent and cold plantain, which is exactly why I can say it here and nowhere else.

—

I don't plan the next part. It comes out of me the way things come out when I've stopped guarding the door — sideways, while I'm sitting up on the ink table with my heels knocking against the metal leg, not looking at her, looking instead at the drying rack where sunflowers are curing gold under the heat lamps in identical rows.

"Somebody put a GPS tracker in my wheel well," I say. "Magnet mount. Blue electrical tape."

I say it light. I say it like a bit, like the setup to a joke, the way I said the bathtub's in the kitchen, if you're taking notes to Dominic across a whole room of strangers, because that's the register I have for things that are actually unbearable — I make them funny before anyone else can make them tragic.

It doesn't land as a joke. I can hear it not land, the second it's out of my mouth, in the sudden absence of the squeegee sound.

Simone puts the squeegee down. All the way down, flat on the table, both hands flat beside it, like she needs the table to hold her up for a second.

"Say that again."

"It's not — it's handled, it was in the wheel well, I pulled it out on Sunday, it's not a whole—"

"Maya. Say it again. Slowly."

So I say it again, slowly, and this time I don't dress it up: found it Sunday morning, black plastic, the size of a deck of cards, magnetic, wrapped in blue electrical tape folded into a little tab, the fold Trevor does on every cord in every apartment he's ever lived in, lamp cords and router cords and the picture frame's own backing, and how it was crusted with a whole winter's worth of road grime like it had been there since I signed the lease.

Simone's face does something I don't have a word for. Not shock — she doesn't do shock, she does something colder and faster than that, something that looks almost like triage.

"How long," she says.

"I don't know exactly. Since the lease, maybe. Three and a half years."

"What did you do with it."

"Threw it in a storm drain on Doyle Ave."

"You threw it in a storm drain." She says this like I've told her I set fire to a subpoena. "Did you photograph it first?"

"...No."

"Do you still have the — Maya. When he set up your laptop for you, back when you two lived together, did you keep any of the receipts, the boxes, the login information, anything—"

"That was six years ago, Simone, I didn't keep the box for a router."

She closes her eyes for a second, like she's praying, or counting to ten, or both, and when she opens them she's got the look she gets when a print job comes back misregistered and there's no time to reshoot it — not panic, just a very fast recalculation of what can still be salvaged.

"Okay," she says. "Okay. You're staying in my spare room tonight. Not asking. Telling."

"I'm not staying in your spare room."

"It has a mattress and a working radiator and a door that locks from the inside, which is more than your kitchen bathtub apartment can say—"

"Simone."

"My cousin Adaeze is a lawyer. Not this kind of lawyer, she does contracts, but she'll know somebody who does this kind of lawyer, and it costs you a phone call, that's it, one phone call—"

"I'm not taking your spare room and I'm not taking your cousin's number," I say, and it comes out harder than I mean it to, hard enough that she stops. "I can't — Simone, I have forty dollars and a coffee order I don't have the sixteen dollars for anymore. If I take your spare room I owe you a spare room. If I take your cousin's number I owe her a favor I can't pay. I can't add one more person I owe something to. I'm at capacity. I'm over capacity."

She looks at me for a long second, and I can see her deciding not to fight me on it, which is its own kind of mercy, because Simone fighting me on something is usually the correct move and both of us know it.

"Fine," she says. "But I'm paying you double for today."

"You are not."

"I am. It's the rate."

"It is not the rate, the rate is fifteen an hour and you know it, you've been paying me fifteen an hour since 2019—"

"The rate went up," she says, already at the register, already counting twenties out of the till with the flat, unbothered face of someone who has decided a lie is going to be told and told well. "Inflation. Ink's expensive. Sunflowers are expensive. You're getting thirty an hour, that's the rate, don't argue with the rate."

I don't argue with the rate. I take the money, because I need the money more than I need my pride today, and I hate — actually hate, a real small hot hatred, low in my chest — how easy it is to let her do this for me, how it feels like being handed something through a window I didn't know was open.

—

By the time the light outside the studio window goes soft and orange, all two hundred bags are drying on the racks in neat gold rows, sunflowers on cotton canvas, tomorrow's farmers' market solved. We sit on the loading step out back with the roll-up door half up, splitting what's left of the plantain — one piece, cold now to the point of being almost candy, sugar crystallized at the cut edges — passing it back and forth with our fingers because neither of us has washed the ink off properly and neither of us cares.

"Whoever he is," Simone says, not looking at me, looking instead at the alley, at a cat working its way along a fence top with the unbothered confidence of something that owns the block. "The new one. Does he make you smaller or bigger?"

I think about it. Really think about it, the way I haven't let myself think about it in the ten days since the storeroom, in the seven days since the wheel well, in the three days since a man remade my coffee badly and told me things about my own mother's hydrangeas that he had no business knowing.

I think about how I used to bite the inside of my cheek to fill a silence, and how I haven't done that once this week, not once, because the silences with Dominic don't need filling, they just need surviving, and I have found — God help me — that I am good at surviving them, better than I've been at anything in three years.

"Neither," I say, finally. "Louder."

Simone turns that over for a second, the way she turns over a bad proof before deciding whether to reprint it or run with it.

"Louder's not nothing," she says.

"No," I agree. "It's not nothing."

She doesn't push past that. She lets it sit there on the step between us, unfinished, unresolved, the exact shape of the truth I actually have to give her today, and she picks up the last scrap of plantain and eats it herself without offering, which is its own kind of forgiveness, the kind that doesn't need a speech.

—

We lock up in the almost-dark, Simone rattling the roll-up door twice to make sure the chain's caught, and I walk home up Wickenden with ink black under three of my fingernails and forty dollars in my pocket I didn't have this morning and the first clean hour of my month sitting warm in my chest where the cold usually lives.

The street lights are just starting to come on, buzzing faintly, one at a time, like the block is waking up in installments. Somewhere behind me a screen door bangs. Somewhere ahead of me is Doyle Avenue, the radiator, the bathtub in the kitchen, all of it waiting exactly where I left it.

I don't think about the tracker. I don't think about eleven words unsaid, or a man remaking a cortado badly, or a grey car I still haven't stopped looking for out of the corner of my eye.

I think, for one whole walk home, about nothing at all — just ink under my nails, and plantain going stale and sweet on my tongue, and a friend who has known me for eleven years and still, after everything, bothers to ask the right question.