Chapter Text
The numbers never lied to Abigail Brooks, and that was precisely why she loved them.
At 9:47 p.m., she sat cross-legged on her kitchen floor — not because her small apartment lacked a table, but because the linoleum was cool against her legs and the laptop balanced better on her knees this way, reconciling a client's quarterly expenses. Column after column, each cell falling into place like a key finding its lock. There was a lemon loaf cooling on the counter above her, the smell of it settling into the walls how it always did on tuesdays, and somewhere outside a dog was barking at nothing in particular.
She liked her life small. She liked it quiet. People who met her assumed a twenty-one-year-old accountant with a one-bedroom apartment and a spreadsheet open past ten o'clock must be missing something. Some spark, some risk, some story worth telling at parties. But Abigail had never understood the assumption that safety was the same thing as emptiness. She thought, if anything, it was the opposite. Safety was where things got to grow. You didn't plant a lemon tree in a hurricane.
She closed the laptop at 10:15, dusted the powdered sugar off her chin - she always ate the corner piece first, the one with the most caramelized edge - and pulled her hoodie off the back of the chair.
This was the part of the night that belonged only to her.
---
Three blocks over, past the shuttered laundromat and the church with the broken steeple light, stood the old Wexler Textile building. Six stories of brick that the city had been "deciding what to do with" for as long as Abigail had lived here. The chain-link fence around it had a gap wide enough for someone thin and unafraid of tetanus, and Abigail was both.
She came here maybe twice a month. Not to vandalize, not even really to explore - she'd been through every floor a dozen times and knew where the joists were soft and where the pigeons nested. She came because there was a particular kind of quiet in a building that used to be loud. Machines that used to hum sat silent under dust. Offices where people used to argue about deadlines held nothing now but the moonlight coming through broken windows in long silver bars.
She climbed to the fourth floor, to the spot by the east window where the floor was solid and the view stretched out over the rooftops toward the highway, and she sat down against the wall, knees to her chest, and just breathed.
It should have felt eerie. Suzie certainly thought it did. Her best friend had informed her on multiple occasions that "wandering into a haunted death-trap alone at night" was not, in fact, a personality trait, it was a horror movie setup. But to Abigail it felt like the opposite of danger. It felt like the world had exhaled. Nothing here needed anything from her. Nothing here was going to leave.
She stayed until nearly midnight, watched a single light blink on and off in a distant apartment window, and then walked home the long way, hands in her pockets, humming something she couldn't name.
---
Leeroy Mateo stood on the sidewalk outside his mother's house with a garbage bag in each hand and nowhere in particular to go.
The bags weren't even that heavy. That was the part that kept snagging in his chest as he stood there under the orange sodium streetlight. Nineteen years, and it all fit into two bags and a backpack. His step-father hadn't yelled, in the end. That was almost worse. He'd just stood in the doorway with his arms crossed and said, "You're old enough now. Figure it out" like Leeroy was a lease that had expired, and then the door had shut with a sound so ordinary it didn't seem to match what had just happened.
He didn't cry. He'd stopped expecting himself to, a long time ago, for things like this. Crying was for surprises, and this hadn't been a surprise. This had been the ending of a sentence he'd been reading for years.
He called Riley because Riley was the only number in his phone he trusted not to ask questions he didn't have answers to yet.
"Say less," Riley had said, after about four seconds of silence on the line, which was as close as Riley ever came to "I've got you." "Couch is yours. Don't touch my good whiskey, and if you eat my leftover pad thai I will actually end our friendship."
Now Leeroy sat on that couch, bags still packed by the door like he hadn't quite committed to unpacking them, staring at the ceiling of Riley's apartment above the bar. Riley was downstairs closing up — Leeroy could hear the muffled thud of stools being flipped onto tables, the scrape of the register drawer — and the apartment was dim except for the blue wash of a streetlight through the blinds.
He didn't know what he liked. The thought arrived sideways, the way thoughts did when he was too tired to keep them out. He was nineteen and he genuinely did not know what music he liked, because the radio in his house had always been tuned to his mother's station. He didn't know what food he liked beyond what had been put in front of him. He didn't know if he liked mornings or nights, cities or quiet, because nobody had ever asked, and he had never had the room to find out on his own.
He'd spent his whole life making himself small enough not to be a problem, and he'd still ended up on a sidewalk with two garbage bags.
The door downstairs banged, and boots came up the stairs two at a time. Riley appeared in the doorway, hair still damp from being shoved under a faucet, smelling like well liquor and hand sanitizer.
"You're doing the thing," Riley said, dropping into the armchair across from him.
"What thing."
"The thousand-yard-stare-at-my-ceiling thing. You've been doing it since I got here. My ceiling's not that interesting, man, I promise you, I've looked at it a lot."
Leeroy didn't answer right away. Riley didn't push. That was the thing about Riley, underneath all the sarcasm and the eyeliner and the "*I will end our friendship*" threats over pad thai, they knew exactly how long to let a silence sit before it turned into something a person could actually talk through.
"I don't know what I'm supposed to do," Leeroy finally said. "Like — long term. I don't know what I want. I don't know what I like. I'm nineteen and I don't know anything about myself except what I'm not supposed to do."
Riley considered this for a second, then reached over and grabbed the ancient TV remote off the coffee table, tossing it into Leeroy's lap.
"Cool. Then we start there. Blank slate. You've got a couch, a job starting Monday, and zero data points on what Leeroy Mateo actually likes." Riley shrugged, already standing, already heading toward the fridge like this was a perfectly reasonable plan and not something being invented in real time. "Guess we're just gonna have to find out."
Leeroy looked down at the remote in his hands like it was a foreign object. It kind of was. Nobody had ever handed him the remote and meant it as an offer before.
"Delivery job starts Monday," he said quietly, mostly to himself.
"Delivery job starts Monday," Riley agreed, popping open two sodas and setting one down in front of him without asking if he wanted it, another quiet kind of offer. "Which means for tonight, you don't have to figure out your whole life. You just have to pick something to watch."
It wasn't much. It wasn't safety, he'd learned a long time ago that trust was a door you left open for people to walk through and hurt you, and he intended to keep his firmly shut. But it was a couch that was his for now, and a friend who didn't need explanations, and a small, stupid decision about a remote control that somehow felt like the first thing in weeks that was actually his to make.
He picked something. He didn't even really watch it. But he stayed on the couch instead of staring at the ceiling, and that, for tonight, was enough.
---
Across town, Abigail let herself into her apartment, kicked off her shoes, and cut herself a slice of the lemon loaf before finally heading to bed. She didn't know, as she pulled her blanket up and let the quiet hum of her building lull her toward sleep, that three blocks and one bar away, a boy who didn't know what he liked was about to start a delivery route that would, in a handful of weeks, put him on her doorstep with a box addressed in her own careful handwriting.
She only knew that tomorrow was Wednesday, that the Hendersons' tax documents were due by Friday, and that the moon tonight had looked especially bright over the Wexler building's broken windows.
It was, all things considered, a good, quiet life.
She had no idea it was about to get louder.