Simone has the door propped with a paint can and her hair pulled back with a bandana that used to be red and is now the color of a stop sign left out in weather, and she takes one look at me coming up the ramp and doesn't even let me get both feet inside.

"There she is," she says, not warm, holding a squeegee like she might use it on me. "The ghost of Christmas past-caring. You know what today is? It's the sixth of January. Last time I laid eyes on your actual face was before Thanksgiving. That's — " she does the math out loud, the way she does everything out loud, "— that's like two months, Maya. I've had shorter relationships."

"I know."

"You don't know. If you knew you'd have brought bagels." She steps back to let me in anyway, because Simone has never once in eleven years failed to let me in, whatever the opening line. "Squeegee's on the third table. You're pulling prints. I don't do reunions, I do labor. Get in here before you let the heat out."

The studio smells the way it's always smelled — plastisol ink, hot dryer belt, the particular burnt-sugar smell of a heat gun running too close to fabric — and something in my chest unclenches at the smell of it before I've even taken my coat off, the way a body remembers a place is safe faster than the mind agrees to.

She hands me an apron without asking if I want one. I put it on.

The pizza is on the drying rack, which should bother me more than it does — a flattened box balanced on a wire shelf six inches above four hundred sunflower tote bags curing under heat lamps — but Simone flips the lid open with one finger and says, "Eat," and I realize, reaching for a cold slice with a triangle of congealed cheese sliding sideways off it, that I am starving. Not hungry. Starving, in the specific hollow-elevator way where my stomach seems to drop out from under the rest of me and I have to eat something immediately or feel the whole floor go with it.

I haven't eaten a full meal since Christmas Eve. I know this the way you know a fact you've been avoiding — all at once, with your mouth already full.

"Slow down," Simone says, not looking up from the screen she's re-taping. "Nobody's coming to take it."

"Sorry."

"Don't apologize to pizza." She squints at the frame in front of her, holds it up to the light, and her whole face does something complicated and furious. "Oh, for — Dahlia. DAHLIA." A girl with purple-tipped hair and ink to the elbow pokes her head out of the back room. "Did you register the second color on the sunflower run or did you eyeball it like it's 2003 and we're all just vibing?"

"I registered it," Dahlia says, in the tone of someone who did not register it.

"Four hundred bags," Simone says to me, conversationally, like she's reading a eulogy, lifting one off the rack to show me the sunflower's yellow petals sitting a full quarter-inch off from the green center, so the whole flower looks like it's trying to walk away from itself. "Four hundred. Gone. We're not selling these, we're donating these to a school for the visually impaired, because that's the only demographic that won't file a complaint." She sets it down like a body at a wake. "Pull the next color for me. Yellow. Don't breathe on it."

I pull the squeegee down the screen — flood, then the real stroke, the motion so old in my hands it happens without instruction — and the ink lays down clean and I feel a small, absurd pride at doing one single thing correctly today.

"So," Simone says, over the next screen, timing it so the question lands exactly as I'm mid-stroke and can't look at her. "You disappear for two months, and I hear through my cousin who heard through a girl who does nails on Atwells that you've been seen going into a house on Federal Hill that doesn't have a name on the mailbox."

"Simone."

"I'm not accusing you of anything, I'm establishing facts for the record." She flips the screen, lines up the registration pins, taps them twice like she's squaring a folder. "Next color. Ink's the cornflower, second bin."

I load the squeegee. Pull. The blue goes down over the yellow, a shadow now instead of a flower.

"How is he," she says, light, too light, the twelve-second gap of a color change apparently the exact amount of room she's decided this conversation gets.

"Fine."

"Fine like a man is fine, or fine like you've decided you're not going to tell me anything and 'fine' is the flag you're flying instead?"

I don't answer that one. I pull the print instead, harder than I mean to, and the ink skips a little at the corner where I lean too much weight into it.

"Careful," Simone says, but she's not talking about the ink.

She notices my hand on the next lift — the right one, palm-up for a second while I reposition the frame, the pink scar seam catching the fluorescent light in a way it doesn't catch daylight, and her eyes go to it and stay there half a beat too long.

"What happened there."

"Broken glass," I say. Fast. The lie comes out of me smooth as anything, no hitch in it at all, which is its own small horror — that I've gotten good at this, that the lie doesn't even cost me a stumble anymore.

Simone doesn't call it. That's the worst part. She looks at me for a second, and something moves behind her face — not surprise, not the sharp intake of someone catching a liar, just a kind of tired recognition, like watching a rerun of a show she already knows the ending to — and then she goes back to the screen.

"You used to lie to me about Trevor with the exact same face," she says, quietly, not looking up. "Same little pause before the word. Same eyes going to the frame instead of me. You'd think after five years you'd have workshopped a new one."

Heat comes up the back of my neck under my hair before it reaches my cheeks, the way it always does, thirty seconds ahead of the blush itself, and I busy my hands with the squeegee so I don't have to answer with my face doing whatever it's doing.

"He's never raised his voice at me," I say, and I hear how it sounds even as it's leaving my mouth, defensive, rehearsed, a brief I'm filing on my own behalf. "He's never corrected me. He's never once timed how long I take in a bathroom or counted what I eat at dinner or told me a story didn't happen the way I remember it happening. He's not — Simone, he's not Trevor."

Simone sets down the squeegee. All the way down, flat on the table, both hands flat beside it, which from Simone is the equivalent of another person standing up and clearing their throat.

"Baby," she says. "That's the floor. You're describing the floor to me like it's the ceiling. Not hitting you, not gaslighting you, not running a stopwatch on your bathroom breaks — that's the floor. That's the bare minimum a grown man owes a grown woman just by existing in the same room as her. You don't get a medal for clearing the floor." She picks the squeegee back up, because Simone cannot stay still with her hands empty for longer than four seconds, but her eyes stay on me. "What's above the floor. That's the question I'm actually asking."

I don't have an answer that doesn't require explaining a floor safe and a green notebook and a plan that ends with a man dead in a Boca Raton hospice room, so I say nothing, and she lets the nothing sit there while Dahlia runs the dryer belt in the back and the smell of hot ink fills the twelve seconds between us.

"You know I was right about him," Simone says. Not gloating. Almost gentle, for her. "Trevor. I said it in 2019 when you had fourteen stitches and a story about a shelf that didn't hold up to one single follow-up question. I said it again in 2020 before you finally left. You didn't believe me either time." She wipes ink off her thumb with a rag that's more ink than rag at this point. "So all I'm saying — purely on a batting-average basis — is maybe when I have a bad feeling about a man, you consider factoring that in before month three instead of month fourteen."

"It's not the same," I say, quiet.

"I didn't say it was the same. I said consider the batting average." She flips the frame, lines the pins, doesn't look up. "Next color's the black outline, last pass. Pull it clean, I don't want to redo four hundred bags twice in one week, my liver can't take it."

I pull it clean. The sunflower comes together under my hands, yellow and blue and black stacking into something that finally looks like the thing it's supposed to be, and there's a stupid, disproportionate satisfaction in that — one flower, correctly registered, in a run of four hundred that got it wrong.

"Can I ask you something," I say, to the screen, not to her.

"You're going to anyway."

"Do you think a person can be — " I stop, start again, because there isn't a clean way into this. "Do you think somebody can be the best thing that's happening to you and also the worst thing. At the same time. Not one after the other. Both."

Simone doesn't even pause to consider it, which surprises me more than an answer would have.

"Yeah," she says. "Obviously. That's most things. That's most people, if you leave them in long enough." She sets the frame down and finally looks straight at me, squeegee forgotten in her hand, ink dripping a slow black bead onto the concrete floor that neither of us moves to catch. "But I'm not asking you a riddle, Maya. I'm asking you a yes-or-no. Are you safe."

"From him?" My voice comes out steadier than I expect. "Yes."

I mean it when I say it. I don't say from what comes after that sentence, because the what is a man in Florida and a floor safe and a plan with no exit built into it, and none of that is a thing Simone can be handed without it becoming her problem too, and I have exactly one friend left who doesn't already carry some piece of this, and I am not going to be the one who hands her the rest of it over cold pizza.

"Okay," Simone says, and something in her shoulders comes down half an inch, like she's been holding a weight since I walked in and just set part of it on a shelf. "Okay. I believe you." A beat. "I still hate the whole shape of it. I want that on the record too."

"Noted."

She goes back to the screens, and I think that's the end of it, the closest thing to absolution I'm going to get today, but then I hear myself talking — not deciding to, just talking, the way the confession slips out sideways when your hands are busy with something else and your mouth finally has room to move on its own.

I tell her about the apartment. The laptop that wasn't the way I'd left it. The cabinet squared too neatly. The elbow-shaped clean patch on the dusty tub edge. The dry-cleaner's tag from Boston, tucked at the back of a drawer under the microwave, and the smell that came with it — eucalyptus, faint, the exact scent that used to hang in a bathroom I haven't lived in for four years. And then, because I've already said the hard part, I tell her about September too, the tracker, the blue tape folded into a tab I recognized before I let myself recognize it.

Simone stops the press mid-motion. Doesn't set the frame down carefully this time — just lets it drop flat, ink and all, and stands there with both hands empty at her sides, completely still, which from a woman who has not stopped moving once in the eleven years I've known her is its own kind of alarm bell.

"He was in your apartment," she says. Flat. "Trevor. He was physically inside your apartment."

"I think so. I can't prove it."

"You don't need to prove it, you need to not be there." She's already talking fast, ticking things off on her fingers the way she squares a folder, two taps and move on. "You stay with me. I have the room over the kiln, it's small but it locks, it's got a space heater. Or here — I've got a cot in the back office, you could sleep here half the week and nobody would think twice, half my interns basically live in this building already. Or we go to the police, right now, today, I will drive you myself, I still have Adaeze's number, she'll put us onto somebody whose firm does exactly this—"

"Simone."

"I'm not finished."

"I know. I love you for not being finished." I put my hand over hers, ink and all, and feel the cold of the concrete floor coming up through both our shoes. "I can't take any of those. Not right now."

She looks at me for a long second, and I watch her do the thing she's always done better than anyone I've ever met — take a fact that doesn't add up and, instead of demanding the missing piece, just quietly build a shape around the hole where it should be.

"You're protecting somebody," she says. Not a question.

I don't answer, which is its own kind of answer, and she nods slowly, like she's filing it the way Dominic files things, without writing it down.

"I'm not going to ask who," she says. "I'm not going to ask from what. I've got exactly enough left in me today to hope to God he's worth whatever this is costing you, and then I'm going to change the subject, because if I keep looking at your face I'm going to start crying on four hundred sunflowers and ruin the one batch that finally came out right."

She turns around, wipes her hands on her apron, and when she turns back she has her business face on, which is somehow more comforting than her worried one.

"I've got work for you," she says. "Real work. Paying work, not squeegee-for-pizza work." She digs a card out of the pocket of her overalls, creased at one corner, a phone number in her own handwriting on the back. "Guy makes hot sauce out of a commercial kitchen in Olneyville, sells at three farmers markets and wants to look like he sells at thirty. Needs a label. Four hundred dollars, three weeks, and he already likes the mock-up you did for Rita's board because I showed it to him without asking you, so don't yell at me."

"Four hundred dollars," I say, and something in my throat does a thing I don't authorize, closes up fast and hot, and before I can stop it there are tears running down over the dried ink on my hands, stupid, disproportionate tears over four hundred dollars from a hot sauce guy in Olneyville, except they're not disproportionate at all, because I haven't had a single dollar that was mine — earned by my own hand, owed to no one, explainable to anyone who asked — since the first of December, and I didn't know until this exact second how much that particular kind of poverty had been sitting on my chest.

"Oh, don't," Simone says, alarmed, grabbing a shop rag that's cleaner than the others and pressing it into my hand instead of my face, because she knows me well enough to know I'd rather wipe my own eyes than have someone do it for me. "Don't you dare cry on my clean rags, I only have the one clean rag left this week."

"I'm not crying."

"You're crying."

"I'm not crying about the money."

"I know exactly what you're crying about," Simone says, quieter now, and doesn't make me say the rest of it out loud.

---

She walks me to the corner when the light starts going, both of us in coats too thin for the wind coming up off the water, breath showing white between us. The hot sauce guy's number is folded into my coat pocket next to a receipt I don't remember putting there. Four hundred dollars and three weeks and a deadline I'll actually make.

"One thing," Simone says, stopping me with a hand flat on my sleeve, the way you'd stop someone from stepping into traffic. "One thing, and then I'll let you go back to Federal Hill or wherever it is you disappear to."

"Okay."

"You call me. Ninth of every month. Doesn't matter what you say, doesn't matter if it's thirty seconds, doesn't matter if all you say is 'hydrangea' and hang up." Her eyes are doing something fierce and unglamorous, the cold making them water at the corners, or maybe that's not the cold. "You miss it, I come looking. I don't call first. I don't text. I show up at that house without a name on the mailbox and I bang on the door until somebody opens it. Are we clear."

"We're clear."

"Say it back."

"Ninth of every month," I say. "Or you come looking."

"Good." She hugs me, quick and hard, smelling of ink and cold air and, underneath both, the same drugstore shampoo she's used since design school, and then she's walking back toward the studio with her hands jammed in her pockets and her shoulders up around her ears, not looking back, because Simone has never once needed to look back to know I'm still standing there.

I stand on the corner a minute longer than I need to. The wind coming up College Hill goes straight through my coat, and my hands smell like ink under the hand cream, and there's a card in my pocket with a man's name on it who owes me four hundred dollars for a job I haven't started yet, and somewhere under all of it — under the lie about broken glass, under the thing I didn't tell her, under all the numbers I'm still not doing out loud — there is a small, stubborn fact taking up space in my chest for the first time since the alley:

I have a job. I have a friend who will come looking. I have a date circled on a calendar that has nothing to do with anyone's death.

For the first time in five weeks, I feel like a person with edges — not something poured into whatever shape the day requires of her, but a shape of my own, holding.

I start walking up the hill toward the bus stop, hands in my pockets, breath fogging, and I don't look back either.