The orange rolls the whole way to the far wall before I even get my hand out to stop it, picks up speed on the sloped floor like it's got somewhere to be, and taps the baseboard with a sound like a knock at a very small door.

"Rude," I tell it, and go get it, because in this kitchen you learn to go get things rather than trust them to stay where you put them down.

Twelve months in this flat, less six days. I know the number the way I know all my numbers now — not because anyone's making me count anymore, but because counting is a thing my brain does the way other people's brains hum a song stuck from the radio. Rent is nineteen hundred, due in seventeen days, and it is, as of this morning, covered, which is the kind of sentence I used to say to myself like a prayer and now say like a weather report.

The stroller is jammed sideways in the hall where it lives, one wheel permanently canted from the day Junie insisted on pushing it herself into the doorframe, and I step around it the way I step around everything in this apartment — with the specific fondness you develop for objects that have survived being yours.

Junie is on the kitchen floor in her pajamas, using the low cabinet handle to haul herself upright, fourteen months and fifteen days old, and she takes four steps toward me with the terrible confidence of someone who has fallen down about four hundred times and learned nothing useful from any of it.

"Mama," she says. Or something that wants to be Mama and doesn't quite land, more like mmna, and then, much more clearly, unmistakably, with the triumph of a woman closing a deal —

"More."

"More what," I say, though I already know, because there is exactly one food group in this house she petitions for by name and it is toast, cut into strips, no butter because she throws the buttered pieces on the floor out of what I choose to interpret as principle rather than mess.

She laughs. It's an unreasonable laugh — Priya's word for it, and it's the correct one — too big for a body that size, a laugh that starts in her stomach and comes out through her whole chest like something escaping custody, and it does the thing it always does to me, which is turn my ribs to something soft and useless for about four full seconds.

Kai comes in a little after eight, cold coming off his jacket in a wave, smelling of crushed mint and machine oil and, underneath that, the specific human smell of a rented rowing hall in Fruitvale where forty other people's sweat has been circulating through the same HVAC system since five a.m. He rows there now instead of on the machine by a window with the bridge in it, because the machine by the window belonged to an apartment that belongs to somebody else's bank now, and this is a fact we have stopped saying out loud to each other, the way you stop mentioning a scar once it's healed enough that pointing at it feels like reopening it for no reason.

"May I," he says, at the door, not moving yet, looking at me and not at Junie, which took me the better part of a year to understand was the actual question — not can I hold her but is this still a house where I get to walk in and be wanted — and I used to find it unbearable, being asked, and now I find it unbearable in the other direction, the direction where if he stopped asking I think I'd miss it like a tooth.

"You may."

He picks her up off the floor mid-laugh, and she transfers her whole unreasonable joy directly onto him without missing a beat, patting his wet hair with both hands like she's checking it for something.

"You're disgusting," I tell him.

"I'm efficient," he says. "Shower's after breakfast in this economy."

Breakfast is toast — hers in strips, mine standing at the counter out of eleven years of habit even though I have, for exactly one year, had a kitchen table I could sit at if I wanted to — and I do the thing I cannot stop doing, which is itemize, out loud, while he eats.

"Six hundred a month from downstairs bookkeeping." I tick it on my fingers, the way I used to tick line items in a model nobody else could find the error in. "Three cash clients, call it call it eleven, twelve hundred combined, month depending. A hundred eighty-four out the other side to restitution, which is—" I do the arithmetic I've done every month for a year, and it still produces the same faint bitter taste at the back of my throat, "—leaves eighty-one thousand, seven hundred and something, owed. Twelve months in on thirty-six." I look at him. "I have thirty-seven years left."

"You don't," he says. "You have two."

"On probation, two. On the number, decades at this rate, unless one of the clients turns into two clients."

"One of the clients is going to turn into two clients," Kai says, not looking up from the toast, in the flat unbothered voice of a man who used to run forty-one hundred employees and now runs, as far as I can tell, a spreadsheet and a rowing habit. "The Fruitvale place wants their books done properly. I told the owner you'd call her."

"You told her, or you told her about me?"

"I told her the truth. Ten years an analyst, one federal case, does the best reconciliation I've ever seen, doesn't do securities work anymore because she legally can't." He shrugs, entirely unembarrassed, in the way that used to scare me and now just sounds like him. "She didn't blink."

I don't say anything to that for a second, because the sentence doesn't do securities work anymore because she legally can't still lands somewhere under my sternum every time, a flat spreading warmth that isn't shame exactly, just the physical fact of a door that used to be there and now permanently isn't.

Then I check in with the probation office on my phone calendar — Thursday, eleven a.m., same officer I've had since March, a soft-spoken man named Priest of all things who stopped calling me ma'am around September and started just calling me Mei-Lin, no ceremony about it, the way you'd correct a typo and move on.

"He asked about Junie last time," I tell Kai. "Wanted to see a picture. I think he's bored of the actual felons."

"You're not a felon anymore, technically. Post-plea it's just—"

"I know what it is, Kai."

"I know you know." He looks up. "I like saying it out loud sometimes. The specific words. Feels different from thinking them."

I understand that better than I let on.

Priya arrives at noon with a cake box balanced on one flat palm the way a waiter carries a tray, and a bag of samosas in the other hand out of what I think is now just muscle memory, whether or not the occasion calls for samosas.

"Happy birthday," she says, setting the box on the counter and opening it with a flourish, and then stops, looking down into it, and starts laughing before she's even gotten a word out.

The cake is a sheet cake, supermarket white frosting, blue piped letters, and it says, in full, cheerful, permanent icing script:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAYLYN

"They asked how to spell it," Priya says, wheezing slightly, "and I said Mei-Lin, and apparently what they heard was — I don't even know what they heard. Maylyn. Like a Southern grandmother."

"It's not the worst thing anyone's called me."

"It is objectively very close to the worst thing anyone's called you, given the field."

"We're eating it anyway," I say, and I mean it as a joke and it comes out true, because we are, in fact, going to eat a cake with a stranger's approximation of my name on it, in a kitchen with a floor that rolls oranges into the wall, and there's something in that I don't have a word for yet except that it doesn't hurt, which a year ago would have been the whole headline.

"To Maylyn," Priya says, holding up a plastic fork like a toast, and Kai, God help him, actually raises his mug of coffee to match her, completely straight-faced.

"To Maylyn," he says.

"I hate both of you specifically," I say, and cut the first slice.

The tea I make is bad, the way it's always bad — a chipped pot I bought for four dollars at the hardware store downstairs, leaves steeped a minute too long because I always get distracted at the exact wrong moment — and I drink it anyway, green and a little bitter, and somewhere in the middle of the second cup I notice, the way you notice a sound has stopped rather than a sound that's started, that I don't smell like printer toner anymore. Haven't in a year and a half. It used to be load-bearing, that smell — green tea and drugstore aloe and the flat dry smell of a machine running all day six feet from my desk — and I didn't know until just now, cake fork halfway to my mouth in a kitchen in Alameda, that some part of me had been waiting to miss it.

I don't. That's the whole discovery. I just don't.

Priya, cross-legged on the floor with Junie attempting to climb her like furniture, delivers the news in the register she's always delivered news in — gossip, dry, a little merciless, because that's the only way either of us can stand to hear any of it anymore.

"Gerald's still inside," she says. "Sloane sent Kai a Christmas card, by the way, did he tell you that?"

"He told me," I say. "Two months late, opened in February."

"It said 'thinking of you' and nothing else," Kai says, from the floor, where Junie has abandoned Priya to inspect his shirt collar instead. "I don't know what to do with 'thinking of you' from a person who negotiated me out of my own company weeks before the grand jury even convened."

"You don't do anything with it," I say. "You just know it happened."

"Richard's on bond in Pacific Heights," Priya goes on, ticking through it like a weather report of her own, "no contact, obviously, trial's set for the fall. Fairweather's cooperating fully, apparently gave them boxes. Tobias got caught taking money from both sides so nobody believes a word out of his mouth anymore, which — good, frankly, long overdue. And the heir thing—" she says it lightly, the way you'd mention a rained-out picnic, "—got thrown out thirteen months ago. February. You were there for that part."

"I was there for that part," I agree.

Junie, satisfied with Kai's collar, turns and offers me the chewed corner of a board book instead, which I take with the gravity it deserves.

"I have to testify again," I say, to no one specifically, to the room, watching Junie lose interest in the book the second I hold it. "This fall. In front of him this time. Not a jury room. His actual face."

"You scared?" Priya asks, not gently, which is the correct way to ask me anything.

"No," I say, and it's true, and then, because it's my birthday and apparently the one day a year I tell myself the whole truth without editing, "I'm scared that I'm not scared. That feels like the part I should be worried about."

Nobody argues with that. Kai just looks at me for a second, the specific look he gets when he's deciding whether to write something down, and doesn't reach for his phone, which is its own small mercy.

Priya leaves around three with an empty cake box and Junie asleep against her shoulder for the transfer to the crib, and once the door clicks I find Kai out on the fire escape with two mugs, because the fire escape is the only place in this apartment that counts as a view, four feet of rusted iron over an alley that smells faintly of the hardware store's paint thinner.

"I keep thinking about it," he says, handing me a mug, not looking at me, looking at the alley instead. "The ring thing. I had one. Did you know that? I had one for months, back in the — before. I kept it in a drawer at the penthouse and then the penthouse wasn't mine anymore and I don't actually know what happened to it. Sloane's forfeiture people probably itemized it. Schedule B or something."

"Kai—"

"I'm not asking," he says, quickly, and turns to look at me now, and there's something almost like relief in his face saying it, like a man setting down a bag he's been carrying so long his shoulder forgot it was heavy. "I stopped needing the paper. That's what I came out here to say, and I've been building up to it since the cake, so let me say it badly instead of not at all. I put everything in writing my whole life because I thought a thing wasn't real until it was documented. That's — that's basically the reason my father's confession is on federal record instead of in a grave with him, so I'm not saying it's a bad instinct across the board. But you." He shakes his head. "You I don't need a document for. I know what you are to me the way I know the tide's coming in. Doesn't need a lawyer to notarize it."

I look at him for a second, tea going cool in my hands, and I feel the flat spreading warmth again, low across my chest this time, visible probably above the collar of the shirt I've had since before Junie, and I let him see it, because that's the whole difference now, letting things be seen.

"I'm not marrying you," I say.

"I know."

"I might in five years."

"I know that too," he says, and he says it like a man reading back a fact he already checked twice, not like a man hoping. "Okay."

And it is, actually, okay. That's the strange part. It sits in the air between us the size it actually is, instead of the size fear would make it, and neither of us reaches to make it bigger.

Later, with Junie asleep behind a door that doesn't quite latch and the radiator ticking through its one working setting, we end up on the mattress on the floor of the second room — we never did get a real bed frame, there wasn't money and then there wasn't the will, same as the dress — and it isn't urgent, the way it used to be urgent in a bathroom with radiant heat and a view of a bridge that belonged to somebody else now. It's slow in the specific way that only happens when nobody's listening at a door and nobody's due anywhere.

He touches the two-inch scar at my hairline first, the way he does now without thinking about it, not asking, because that particular question got answered a long time ago and doesn't need repeating, and then he stops at my mouth to ask the only thing he still always asks.

"May I."

"You may," I say, and the floor under the mattress groans — an old, specific, house-settling groan, the exact sound the whole building makes whenever anyone shifts weight near the middle of the room — and we both go still at the same second, listening for Junie, and when nothing follows it we start laughing instead, quiet, into each other's necks, the kind of laughing that isn't really about the noise at all.

"This apartment," he says, into my hair, "has opinions."

"This apartment," I say, "is the first thing I've ever owned the paperwork on honestly. Let it have opinions."

We don't finish anything, exactly. We just lie there afterward with the radiator ticking and his hand flat on my stomach the way it used to rest there before there was anyone to protect under it, and it is, entirely, enough.

The phone rings at four, the landline the hardware store insisted I get for the bookkeeping clients who don't trust a cell number, and I pick it up still half in the doorway between the two rooms, tea cold in the pot behind me, cake box flattened in the recycling, Junie stirring faintly through the wall.

"Hello?"

"Hi — sorry, is this the bookkeeper Marisol at the hardware store mentioned? We're a small nonprofit, literacy program, our books are a genuine disaster, I'm told you untangle disasters."

"That's me."

"Great — sorry, who am I speaking to?"

There is a pause. I feel it happen before I choose it, one full second, no more — not the four-second pause from a folding chair in a corridor sixteen months ago, not the pause before a name I used to have to build up to like a diving board. Just one second, the ordinary kind, the kind anyone takes before answering a stranger on a phone.

"Mei-Lin Zhao," I say.

No spelling it out. No résumé stapled to the back of it. No smaller name offered first as a decoy.

"Great, Mei-Lin, thanks — can we set up a time this week?"

"Thursday afternoon works," I say, and it does, and we set it, and I hang up, and stand there for a second with the receiver still warm in my hand.

I go to the wall calendar taped crooked by the fridge — the one with Junie's fourteen-month checkup circled in red and Priest's Thursday appointment already in blue — and I write it in my own handwriting, unhurried, no hedge in the letters:

Thurs 2pm — literacy nonprofit — Mei-Lin

I look at it a second. Then I go back to the kitchen, cut myself the last slice of a cake with the wrong name iced on it in blue, and sit down — actually sit, at the small table by the sloped wall, not standing — and eat it while Kai comes in from checking on Junie and steals a bite off my fork without asking, which is the one thing in this house he's never once asked permission for, and I let him have it, thirty-eight years old, worth exactly nothing on paper, entirely known.