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Dom showed up on the porch the night after the funeral, the way that Mia had known he would. She opened the door and fell into his arms, and wished that he was there for any other reason at all.
*
He knew. He had to have thought about it. It had to have crossed his mind.
Mia had been thinking about it for three days. Not since the moment she had heard; in that moment, she hadn’t been able to think at all. She had felt the blood drain from her face, and from her body, and it had left her empty - there would have been no magic to reach for. She’d stood in the kitchen, holding the phone in her hand, and felt it leave her. Something dark and sharp-edged had taken its place, twisting under her ribs and low in her stomach.
She had stood in the kitchen, and then she had called Dom. That had been worse, almost, to have to say it.
He was sitting on the couch, and she was in the kitchen. It was so strange to see him through the doorway, the silhouette of his back in the lamplight. They could have been twenty and twenty-three; they could have been twelve and fifteen.
They weren’t. She knew he wouldn’t have eaten, wouldn’t have slept. She knew, because she hadn’t, either. She only brought him a glass of water, and he looked at it, confused, for a moment before he drained it.
“I could try,” she said. She laced her fingers together, and waited for him to figure out what she meant.
She didn’t know whether he was going to agree. If he could have done it, she thought, he would have tried, but he had never had that kind of magic. He couldn’t control it, couldn’t direct it; it lay dormant or it came bursting out of him, behind his fists, or pushing the car past two hundred. He didn’t understand it, and he hadn’t tried to. They were not the same, in that way.
He might have tried anyway, she thought. He might have tried something, without even knowing he was doing it. She wasn’t going to ask.
Anyway, that would have been different – his life on the line. It was dangerous magic; it was death magic, and he had never been good at letting her make her own choices. They had talked about it loosely, talked in circles around it, when she had slit her palm open before the jobs. He had never wanted to accept the sigil, to let her leave a bloody thumbprint in the hollow at the base of his throat. Letty hadn’t, either. It had been so little, and they had always thought it had been too much.
Dom took a shuddering breath, and said, “Okay.” That was all.
There were so many things they had thought they’d never do. It was different, now, because they were older. It was different, now, because it was Letty.
They were not the same in so many ways. Sometimes she forgot that in others, they were.
“The next full moon, then,” Mia said, and her words lingered in the air after, and it was sealed.
*
He drove. She sat in the passenger seat, arms full of flowers and pine boughs, and let him take her out north, out of the city, past the desert, until everything went flat and agricultural.
“Wait in the car,” Mia said, when he had pulled over and parked at the edge of a field. It was what she needed, green and empty, and she slipped her shoes off. She expected him to protest, but he only nodded, then reached over and opened the door for her.
*
She had woven a wreath from arborvitae. She laid it on the ground and struck a match, and stared into the blue heart of the flame before she dropped it. The resin burned fast and hot; it caught, and she coaxed it up and out with her fingers until it was a crackling blaze, throwing flickering shadows across the field. The grass was wet, too wet to kindle; the fire would not spread; she had been careful.
She had brought roses and red carnations – gas station flowers, but they were still flowers. The carnations were wrong; they were too bright, too perfect; something caught her hand above the bowl. The roses had been stuffed into the back of the display case and forgotten, and they were darker, half-dried, heads drooping. She pinched the petals between her thumb and finger and left bruises, then tore them into pieces and crumbled the edges, and threw them onto the fire.
It flared bright for a moment. It had been the right choice.
There were dandelions scattered across the grass, and she plucked the stems and the split leaves and added them, leaving the yellow tops behind. The honeysuckle mingled with the scent of the roses, and she had brought chamomile and rosemary and hyssop, and it all blurred together into something more, hot and sharp and bittersweet, perfume and creosote. She tore the orange with her hands and squeezed it out into the bowl, the juice and the pulp and the seeds all together, and then she tossed the peel into the blaze and watched it ignite.
Mia held her wrist above the bowl and cut deep - across, not down; deep enough to scar. The pain was delayed by a moment, but then it came, and she gritted her teeth and pressed down on either side of the wound so the blood bubbled up and came spilling out, turning the clear juice red in the firelight, black in the night.
It hissed and foamed, and she raised the bowl, and poured it out in one motion over the fire. It should have put it out, but it fueled it; the sparks shot up into the night. She circled the blaze, letting the blood drip freely; it stained the grass dark. and then she reached down deep inside for her magic, and let it expand and uncoil and bloom, and brought it up.
When she closed her eyes, she could still see the fire, the shapes of the flames, the shadows dancing behind her eyelids.
When she closed her eyes, her legs gave out beneath her, and she fell back, and the earth rose up and swallowed her.
*
She was alone, and there was no grass and no fire, no moon above her, no sky and no stars. Only darkness, stretching infinite in every direction. She raised her hand and saw it pale and ghostly, lit by nothing, lit from within.
She waited. There was nothing else to do.
It could have been minutes, or it could have been hours, and then a voice came out of the darkness. It came from all sides, from all around her, and she froze, but there was nothing there. It did not come from the darkness; it was the darkness, and it said, slow and quiet, hello, little sister.
Mia bristled at that for a moment. She couldn’t help it. But it hadn’t been talking about Dom.
She took a step, and that meant nothing, in this void, but she moved one foot forward, into the black. She told it what she had come to do, knowing that it already knew.
Then. An eye for an eye, little sister, said the darkness. It had not hesitated; it had not had to think it over. But Mia flinched, and it made a noise like a sigh, and asked, did you really think it would be that easy?
It had been a mistake, then, to use her own blood – to use her blood alone. To offer herself.
It was a mistake she would not make again. When she reached into Han and reached out for Gisele, the fingerprints on the backs of her hands would be goat’s blood; she would slit its throat; its blood would come splashing dark into the bowl. When she did this for Gisele, her magic would be stronger; she would have done this once; she would have felt it grow with the child in her. She would have Letty and Brian to bind her and Han to guide her; she would feel the earth beneath her feet; she would stay under the sky.
She didn’t know that, yet. She had promised Dom. It would have been so easy to break it, but she had promised.
“I can’t do that,” she said.
Then we are finished here, said the darkness. Its voice was fading into the distance, and there was nothing for Mia to grab, to cling to, no way to keep it with her.
“Wait,” she said desperately. “Wait,” racking her brain, but there was no spell, nothing, and all she could think of was Letty. Letty, and the phone call, and that scorched patch of pavement, and then it came to her.
She had no way of knowing whether it would work, but she asked, “If – if there were two lives, if I lived twice, could I offer one?”
One life, the darkness said. The body and the light around the body, one, and the voice was still receding, echoing in the distance. I cannot help you, and Mia swallowed, and said, “I’m not talking about the magic.”
Oh, said the darkness, sounding – impossibly - surprised. Interesting. Perhaps, and for a split second, there was a touch of Jesse in it, the way his voice used to go right before he solved a problem. Hold on. What if – but she couldn’t think about it. Something came around her neck and cupped her head and tipped it back. It came flooding in through her nose, through her mouth, and she fought it for a moment before she understood and went limp. She let it in, and it went searching, probing into the corners of her mind, the barest touch of a hundred fingers.
Show me, said the darkness, and Mia thought, we were kids; we were little kids; we grew up together. Kickball in the lot after dark in the summer, and Letty had sent it flying high and clean over the chain-link. The tile had been cold under her knees, and Letty had held her hair back, while Mia said, desperately, it was just supposed to be a charm; it was nothing. She’d leaned over and thrown up again, shoulders shaking, and Letty had winced, but said, hey. I’ve got you, and only asked later, this isn’t that Wicca shit, right? They had watched that episode of Dateline together. She had been twelve and sixteen and twenty-one, and Letty had pulled herself up onto the counter at the market and said, okay, if you had to fuck one of the guys in line right now. Mia had sat cross-legged in the doorway to the garage, and Letty had rolled out on the creeper and said, pass me that lug wrench.
Good, said the darkness. Show me- and Mia thought, we were kids; we were drunk; we were at a house party. Dom had been gone, and it hadn’t been anything, but it had been something. Dom had always been gone. Dom had gotten himself sent to Lompoc; Dom had taken off towards Venice with Tran on his ass, a long gouge from Letty’s keys across his drivers-side door. Dom had left her with ten grand and taken off from Puerto Plata; she had come back. They had fought for a week, real knock-down drag-out fights, Mia crying and Letty yelling and storming off, then turning around in the doorway to yell some more. They had needed it, needed to burn themselves out. Mia had felt more tired than she’d ever felt in her life, and she’d just cut herself off mid-sentence and laid down on the floor. Letty had hesitated, and then sighed, and slid down to sit with her back against the cabinets.
Your brother’s a goddamn – bastard, she had said. They’d been able to agree on that. They hadn’t really meant it.
But that wasn’t what she had meant. It was just what was easy to think about. The darkness was still in her mind, waiting, and Mia breathed in shakily and went back, and went deeper.
Ah, said the darkness. I see. It was silent for a moment, considering. Only a half-life, little sister, almost gentle. It will be harder this way.
Mia said, “It can’t be harder.” She thought she meant it.
Very well, said the darkness. Go.
A million stars burst into being at once, a billion stars, a hundred billion stars, shining in the dome of blackness above her, a hundred billion pinpricks of light. Mia was frozen for a moment, disoriented, blinking in the light, and then she steeled herself.
She pictured Letty, as clearly as she could: Letty at nine and sixteen and twenty-five; her face and her voice and her low, throaty laugh. She took a deep breath and sent her mind wandering, searching, reaching out through the void. And there she was, far away and fading but there, and Mia found her and held tight, and pulled.
And she was cupping the spark that was Letty in her hands, and the stars vanished, and there was only blackness.
It’s a shame, you know, the darkness said, sounding thoughtful. You could have been a very good witch.
Like Mia didn’t know that, like she hadn’t read the grimoire, like she didn’t know it was strong in her. There were things she shouldn’t have been able to do: plant magic and blood magic and death magic, things she had never been taught, had only practiced.
And she could have been, if everything was different, if there hadn’t been school and the market and the mortgage. If Linder’s bumper had swung wider, if she had known her mother, if there had been no Dom, and no Letty, and even no Brian. There had always been too many distractions. She had always let herself be distracted.
She had made her choice, and looked back, and made it again.
"Give me a moment," she said. "I just - I need a second, before-" but that had never been part of the bargain. She had been careful, but not careful enough.
The darkness came again, all-encompassing, and this time, she didn’t have to show it.
She was fourteen, and she had a math test; her notes were spread across her desk. Letty was lying on her bed, complaining, saying, Jesus, hurry up. She had just gotten her full license; she wanted to go driving – and Mia forced her eyes open.
“That wasn’t part of it,” she said. “We were kids. That was before,” and the darkness sounded almost apologetic when it said, oh, but you felt it, little sister. But you wanted it. It came down over her eyelids and closed them, and it went deeper. Mia looked up and saw her sprawled across the mattress, and her shirt was riding up – and the tendrils touched the memory and turned it over and it was gone, and she didn’t know why she’d been protesting.
She was fifteen and Dom was gone, and her dad was gone, and Letty had taken her to her first house party, because they hadn’t known what else to do. She had driven her home afterwards, and they were both drunk – all the way home, the car had been swerving, and Mia had been laughing, getting thrown back against the headrest. Letty was stumbling, coming through the door, but she made Mia drink from the tap and climbed into bed with her. All night long, she’d been looking so guilty, and Mia wanted to tell her that it wasn’t her fault, but instead, she had tipped forward and turned her jaw with two fingers -
And she was eighteen, and Letty was sitting at the edge of her bed, arms around her knees, and she said, Mia, we can’t keep doing this. Mia said, why not; she said, Letty; she reached for her. She was twenty, and they were at the beach, drinking cheap tequila and getting tan, and Mia was trying not to think about things, because she knew how it ended when Letty got that one look. She was twenty-one, and she knew it was the last time, knew that Letty was leaving, and Letty was being too gentle, too slow -
And Letty was back; after everything, she had come back, like Mia had known she would, and they sat facing each other on the kitchen floor. Letty’s voice was hoarse from yelling, and Mia’s eyes were swollen, and she felt the last of the fight drain out of her. She sighed and pushed her hair out of her face and said, come here, and Letty crawled across the tile, into her arms –
And it went faster, a thousand disconnected fragments. Letty said, your brother’s hot, and Mia laughed, but there had been something bitter behind it; she was jealous; he could have had her if he’d wanted. Her own voice: I don’t want to think about Brian. Fuck Brian. Her door creaking open after midnight, the mattress dipping. The sound of sirens in the distance, and they startled awake; Letty’s breathing was still ragged when they faded, and she held her; she said, it’s okay. You’re okay. One by one, they were there, and they were gone. Letty rose up from between her legs, eyes dark; her hands were on Letty’s thighs; she was pushing her up onto the kitchen counter. And the feelings faded, until there was nothing behind it; she stared uncomprehendingly at the silver line of Letty’s back in the moonlight, wondering why she would have seen that, and it was gone.
It is one thing to have the body, said the darkness. The body, and the light around it – and it took the touch; it lifted her up and cradled her; and there were lips against her neck, someone’s lips, along her collarbone, between her breasts and down her stomach, and she felt it and did not understand. Someone’s hands on her back, on her thighs, in her hair; the darkness was between her thighs, circling her wrists. She was touching someone; there was soft skin under her fingers, against her tongue, and she clung fast to the spark that was Letty. The darkness filled her mouth and dipped her into cold fire, and she would have screamed, but before she could, it was over. Every inch of her was raw and bare and stinging, everything blurry, but the darkness held her fast and waited, until she stopped shivering, until she remembered who she was, and where she was, and what she had come to do. The spark that was Letty was still in her hands, hot against her palms, and it was done. The darkness let her go, and said, until we meet again, Mia-mine.
“Not like this,” Mia said, meaning, please, meaning, tell me, and the darkness was quiet for a long moment, and then it said, no. No, not like this.
There, in the distance, high above, there was a light – a faint golden glow, flickering gently like an ember, like a heartbeat, lulling her, drawing her closer, beckoning her home. She could feel its warmth, could feel it calling to her, and she wanted more than anything to go to it, to fall into it, to let it take her –
And she turned and went further into the black. It was solid under her feet, but it was thick, and it wrapped itself around her ankles and pulled her down. She stumbled and fell and caught herself; and it would have been so easy to turn to the light, but she shoved down the instinct and pushed on and fought past it. She closed her eyes and threw herself against it, and finally, it gave, and let her go on.
Clever girl, Mia-mine, said the darkness, and Mia opened her eyes to the sky.
To the sky, and to Dom’s face, swimming over her, blurry – he was talking, and she couldn’t understand, but she caught I couldn’t and passed out and the fire. His hands were on her head, under her shoulders, pulling her up.
“No,” she said weakly. “No, Dom, the moonlight-” and he understood and let her go, and she collapsed back against the grass and felt it damp against her back. Against her back, against the backs of her legs, against her cheek, soaking through her dress and wetting her hair. It was cold, but the fire was still burning, and it warmed her. The flames were dancing at the edges of her vision, flickering, crackling. The air smelled like roses.
Oh, it was pretty. It was so pretty. But her eyelids were heavy, and she couldn’t keep them open, couldn’t lift her head. She was tired, dead tired, and her wrist was still bleeding, but the moon was high and it was beating down on her. She let the light flood into her, and felt it fill her. She might have slept, or just closed her eyes.
*
The flames burned low, and then they burned out. She heard a final hiss from the dying coals, almost a sigh. When she opened her eyes, the clouds had covered the moon, and Dom was kneeling beside her.
She sat up and took his hand, and let him pull her to her feet, let him pick her up and carry her across the meadow to the road, let him set her down in the passenger seat.
He wanted to ask her, wanted it more than anything; she could see him straining with the effort of not asking. He had never understood her kind of magic, a kind where things revealed themselves slowly, and if you weren’t watching, it was easy to miss them. He liked a decisive finish. Still, all he said was, “You scared the shit out of me,” knuckles white, pulling out, taking them back.
“I’ll be okay,” Mia said, not really sure. But there was magic in the air, and she could feel it - not the fragmented pieces of a spell gone wrong, but the thin veil of magic that always lingered after. It was draped around them, around the car, dispersing into the night. “Dom, it worked. I mean, I think it worked.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said roughly. “God, Mia,” and then he was silent, but she heard him breathe out. His hands went slack on the wheel for a moment, and then he turned, and turned again, and they were home.
He took her up the stairs; she leaned on him. The house was quiet, dark and empty, and she looked at his face and saw that part of him had expected Letty to be there, waiting.
Maybe part of Mia had, too. A lifetime ago, she had driven home from her lecture, and Letty had been there, sitting on the steps, waiting. Looking spent and a little pissed-off, looking older; she’d been stuck at twenty-three in Mia’s mind for three years. Mia had gotten out of the car, and Letty had looked up and said – what had she said? It was hazy. Mia was so tired.
What happened to leaving a key in the drainpipe? She knew it had been something like that.
“It’s going to take time,” Mia said, and she tried her best to keep her voice steady, to keep it gentle.
He asked, hoarsely, “What do we do now?”
“We wait.”
She had known from the start that he wouldn’t be staying. She watched him pull away, then closed the door; before she slept, she flicked on the porch light. She slept for a very, very long time, and when she woke up, the sheets were stained with blood.
*
They waited. In Rio, on Tenerife, they left the light on.
She almost told Brian when she told him the rest of it, ankle-deep in the reservoir mouth of the Acari. She knew that later, she would need his blood, to mix with hers and milk and crushed chrysanthemums. She knew that he wouldn’t have asked her to prove it; he would have had questions, but he would have believed her. But it was too much, and it stuck in her mouth. She took it while he slept, from the back of his hand, and sealed it after, and felt achingly guilty even when it didn’t scar.
He would have believed her, and done it for her; he would have let her split his palm open. But it was a dangerous kind of magic, and he was so worried at first, so careful after, until she threw the car keys at his chest and locked the door behind him – it was too beautiful; the sky was too blue; he needed to bear down hard on the accelerator and watch the needle tick up and not think about things for a while.
That helped, or maybe Dom said something to him. Maybe it was both. It didn’t matter.
On Tenerife, her magic was stronger. In Rio, they had been on the run; there was no time – she cut a shallow line along her wrist with someone’s jackknife, let it drip, lit a match, and pressed her palm to Brian’s forehead. It was all that she could do. On Tenerife, there was black sand and jacaranda, tarajal and sweet tabaiba, and she touched its branches and felt its petals. She broke a sprig off and rolled it between her palms, and licked the sap from her fingers, and understood it.
It was growing in her; it was roaring in her ears. It had been beneath her skin all those years, in her veins, but she had always had to call it to the surface. The baby moved, and it sparked from her fingers. Brian, whose hands had been on her shoulders, cursed, then shot a guilty look at her stomach. He thought it had been static.
Maybe she understood Dom better – what it was like to feel it coursing through you, to be helpless, to be controlled by it. She planted jasmine and canarina and low-growing lotuses, and pierced her thumb and held it above the soil. They grew lush and wild along the walls, across the lawn; she breathed in the scent and exhaled, deep, slow breaths. The magic drained from her feet into the earth, and the vines uncurled, and the flowers opened – they were as big as her hand, white and pink and sunset orange, and Brian kept making jokes about green thumbs and county fairs. When he touched her belly, the magic pulsed, but didn’t hurt him.
“I felt him kick,” he said, wide-eyed. It could have been that. Sometimes it even was.
Maybe she couldn’t understand Dom. He came and went and came back again, always tired, always alone, and she fumbled for Brian in the dark and felt the warmth of him – even in his sleep, he reached for her. It had been bad enough when she had loved her - if she had loved her, if it had been Brian - and she couldn’t imagine it; she couldn’t think about it, not with the baby, not with him pressed solid and breathing against her back.
When she brought Gisele back, she would know new tricks – the blood on the map, and the blood in the water. At night, she laid in bed and reached out beyond the walls, but that was far removed from her kind of magic. She could never go very far.
There was nothing; there would have been an ocean between them. But there was something on the mountain road, coming closer, and Mia stood up and padded out into the kitchen. Sure enough, there was the purr of the engine. Dom came through the door, alone, exhausted, and she put her arms around his neck.
*
(In a DSS outpost in Madrid, Monica Fuentes slid a manila envelope across a desk, and asked Hobbs if he believed in ghosts.
She didn’t, but she should have - she was a daughter of Mbói Tu'ĩ; fifty generations removed, diluted, but there were traces of it that lingered in her blood. She did not know, and she would never know, and she and Mia would never meet, but a tension would have stretched and crackled between them: fire and water, the earth and the sky.
They might have come to an understanding. Lilies grew in the wetlands. Lilies grew in the valley.
Brian had touched her, once; he might have felt it. He might have felt it beneath her skin and been reminded; he never would have been able to say of what. Maybe that was why he’d trusted her; maybe that was why he hadn’t. He would have recognized it, just a shadow, just an echo, but he would have craved it, before he knew what it was.
It was a hard thing to come back from, that touch of magic. To be close to it, to feel it under you. Letty had known that, too.
Monica Fuentes was not the first to see the photo, but she was the first to realise what it meant. She was not as surprised as she should have been, and she would never really understand why.)
*
It went like this: Dom left, and Brian followed, and Mia let them go, hugged them and kissed them and told them not to be fucking stupid, and watched from the driveway as their headlights disappeared. She had done the rites over them, but it would fade; they would be too far away, all of them. She stayed clear-headed; she insisted – Brian would have stayed, and she knew the way it had to be.
She stood in the garden with Jack in her arms, and the vines came crawling along the trellis, touching her shoulders; circling her arms. The grass came up until it was knee-high and wrapped itself around her ankles, and for a moment, she tried to fight it, but it was gentle. The jasmine came around her and brushed Jack’s head, held him in its leaves, its sweet-smelling flowers.
Mia put her hand over her mouth and cried, standing outside this house that wasn’t hers, where all the walls were the wrong shade of white. Where all the furniture was too expensive, and too clean, and she still came out from the bedroom in the morning and turned right and found herself staring at the wall.
Then she wiped her eyes dry and went inside, and nursed Jack and put him to sleep and washed the dishes.
When Shaw’s men came, she bit the back of her hand, and dragged it across Jack’s forehead, down his chest. There was no time; there was nothing else to do. He screamed, but she pressed him into someone else’s arms and let them take her.
*
She was in the passenger seat, and the tires hit the runway; Letty was behind them; Dom came stumbling out of the smoke. The first thing she felt when the adrenaline wore off, when her heart stopped pounding and her legs stopped trembling, was pure, delicious relief. She had Brian; his chest was solid under her cheek, and she slumped against him, against Dom, and felt their pulses. She pulled back and looked into Letty’s eyes, and what was behind them was not the same, but it was Letty, beaten and bruised and disheveled, boots planted firmly against the tarmac.
*
“Mia,” Letty said, like she was testing it out. It was a little awkward coming off her tongue. “You’re the sister.”
“More than that,” Mia said lightly. It should have bothered her more than it did. Dom had been the brother, a long time ago, as in: your brother’s hot, and Mia had laughed and swatted at her – that was gross, it was Dom, but things had worked out.
Letty was sitting on the edge of the bathtub. She held out her arm, and let Mia look at the cut running down it. It was long, but not deep enough to need stitches; it would heal; it might not even scar. She wiped the crusted blood from around the edges and wrapped it in new, clean bandages.
It was strange. It felt wrong to have Letty sit there, for her to quietly hold out her arm, for her to let Mia roll up the hem of her shirt, and press her fingers lightly to the bruise across her ribcage. She had never been like that, before. She had iced her own knuckles; she had scowled and sucked at her wounds while Mia had hovered and worried about sepsis. She had never taken the sigil before, and she had never let Mia stitch her up after. When she had come back, she had spent all her time in the garage; Mia had watched from the doorway and seen her staring at the Charger.
Eventually, they’d started talking again. Mia had known her better than anyone else in the world – that was, anyone besides Dom. She had known to let her go, and to wait.
It was strange, too, to have to treat her like this. She had gotten used to healing Dom in the open, to running her fingers over Brian in his sleep, when he couldn’t feel it. With Letty, she had to hide the magic behind the iodine – it burned, and Letty felt that and missed the warmth, missed the way the edges of the cuts drew closer.
It burned, and Letty hissed, but didn’t curse.
That didn’t matter. She was still Letty. Mia wasn’t who she’d been at sixteen, either.
*
“You and I got along,” Letty said, not really a question. “We were friends.” She was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea and grimacing. Mia had been trying not to tell her what she hated.
“More than that,” she said again, and Letty’s eyes darted up – and Mia guessed it was a little corny; maybe it was the kind of thing she would have elbowed Dom for, once, but it was true. “We grew up together,” and that was true. “We were family. We were sisters.” The whole truth, all of it.
Letty tilted her head, and then nodded. Mia let herself believe that she believed it.
It was easy, sometimes, or it was easier. Brian came from the hallway with Jack in his arms, grinned at her tiredly, and kissed the top of her head. Dom woke up and made coffee and grumbled when nothing came out of the milk carton. They were going through groceries fast again, with six people.
Han pushed through all of them, heading for the driveway. Mia watched him go, and worried at the inside of her lip.
It had been worth it, and it hadn’t been. She had learned that some things could be both at the same time.
Sometimes, she found Dom asleep in the hallway, his back to Letty’s door, where he could hear her breathing. She gently shook him awake by the shoulder, before Letty could find him. She tried to wake up early.
But they were all together in the kitchen for a moment, before Dom stood up to leave and Letty hesitated and then followed, before Brian went to the grocery store, asking Jack if he wanted to go for a drive, shaking the keys until he laughed and reached for them.
He stacked their plates before he left. Mia drank the last of Letty’s cold tea, and put the mug in the dishwasher.
Maybe, she thought. Maybe, maybe, maybe.