Almost Her

Morning After

I didn’t sleep until four in the morning.

Not because I wasn’t tired. My body was done. But every time I got close to sleep Reign shifted in her bed across the room and I snapped back awake, just listening. Making sure the shift was just her body and not something else.

Around two she cried.

Not loud. Reign never cried loud. She cried compressed — like she was rationing it, like giving it too much space would cost her something she couldn’t get back. I heard it anyway through the dark. I didn’t say anything. Didn’t move. Sometimes speaking is the exact wrong thing and you have to know the difference. I just lay there and let her have it without making her perform being okay for my comfort.

I stared at the ceiling and thought about Marcus.

I had met him once. Two Saturdays ago. He came to pick Reign up and she introduced us in the hallway — quick, casual, the way you introduce someone you expect will still be around. He shook my hand. Looked me straight in the eye. Said nice to meet you like he meant it.

I thought about that handshake for a long time in the dark.

How a man can grip your hand and hold eye contact and have that same hand put your best friend’s eye halfway shut three weeks later. I kept turning it over. Kept arriving at the same place — that there was no version of Marcus that gave itself away that Saturday in the hallway. No signal. No tell. He just looked like a man who was going to be good to somebody.

And then he wasn’t.

I fell asleep around four and Ms. Carol’s television woke me at eight-fifteen.

She watched the morning news at full volume every single day. It came straight through the shared wall, anchors talking over each other, theme music, weather. It had annoyed me every morning for eight months. That morning I was almost grateful for it. It meant the outside world was still running the way it always did. Traffic and weather and other people’s problems. Ordinary things.

Reign was still asleep. Back toward me, comforter pulled up past her shoulder. The edge of her swollen eye was visible from across the room. Even unconscious, her face looked like it was holding something.

I got up without making noise. Pulled on a hoodie and went to the kitchen.

I made eggs. Not out of hunger — out of the need to do something with my hands that wasn’t just sitting with what happened. I scrambled them in butter with black pepper, made toast, set water to boil for tea. I covered Reign’s plate and left it on the counter and ate mine standing at the window.

The block was waking up slow. A man walked his dog past the building, the dog driving its nose into something on the curb while the man pulled the leash and looked at his phone. A woman in scrubs came out of the rowhouse directly across the street, got into a gray Civic, and pulled off without glancing up once. A kid cut through the intersection on a bike, going the wrong direction, completely unbothered.

Philadelphia mornings didn’t ease into themselves. The city just started — mid-sentence, already moving, no introduction.

My phone was face down on the counter.

I flipped it over.

Damon had texted at eleven forty-seven the night before.

Hope everything is okay. Get some rest.

No follow-up after it. No second text checking if I’d seen the first one. Just that, sitting there since last night, not asking for anything back.

I typed: She’s okay. Thank you for last night. Sorry I had to leave like that.

Sent it before I rewrote it into something worse.

Two minutes later — Don’t apologize. How are YOU.

The emphasis on the last word. Not — how is she, how did the night end, what happened after you left. How are YOU. The question aimed directly at me, not at the situation around me.

I put the phone down and finished my eggs standing at the window.

Reign came out of the bedroom at ten-thirty.

She had washed her face. Changed into gray sweats. Hair pulled back tight. Without all of it — the makeup, the clothes, the specific way she carried herself in public — she looked like the girl I met at sixteen in a classroom we both hated. Young. Unguarded. A little raw around the edges.

The swollen eye was darker in the morning light than it had been the night before. The purple had deepened, spread slightly toward her cheekbone. Looking at it made something in my jaw tighten.

She spotted the covered plate without me saying anything.

“You made food.”

“Eggs are cold.”

“I’ll eat them cold.” She pulled the paper towel off and picked up the fork and stood at the counter and ate. I poured the tea and pushed it next to her plate.

After a few bites — “I need to get my things from his apartment.”

I looked at her.

“Not today. But I left my good perfume and my —”

“I’ll go with you,” I said.

“I know.” She lifted the tea. Made a face at it immediately. “No sugar.”

“You don’t take sugar.”

“I take sugar when my eye looks like this.”

I put the sugar jar on the counter in front of her without a word.

The left side of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile. The shape of one.

We stayed in the apartment the whole day.

That was not us. Reign and I did not sit still — we moved, made plans, found somewhere to be. Staying inside from morning to night felt like something that had been done to us. But neither of us had it in us to walk outside and perform normal, and we both understood that without saying it.

Reign watched a court show in the living room that she claimed to despise but knew every case of. I sat at the vanity in the bedroom and did my face slowly, going nowhere, no reason except that the ritual settled something in me. Foundation worked into my skin in small circles. Contour built back up from nothing. The same movements every morning that meant — I’m still here. Still her. Nothing that happened last night reached this.

At two I called Damon back.

He picked up on the second ring.

“Hey.”

“Hey.” I looked at my reflection — face half finished, the other side still bare. “She’s okay. It was a bad situation with someone she was seeing.”

“She need anything.”

Not — what happened. Not — how bad was it. Just that. Practical and immediate, like he was already trying to solve the closest problem.

“No,” I said. “We’re good.”

A short pause. Then — “I want to see you again.”

“After last night?”

“Last night was the best dinner I’ve had in a long time,” he said. “You left early. That means you owe me the rest of it.”

I put my brush down on the vanity. Looked at my half-finished face in the mirror.

“Give me a few days,” I said.

“Take what you need.” No hesitation. “I’m not going anywhere.”

I held the phone against my ear after we hung up. Sitting in those four words. Turning them over. Trying to find the angle where they stopped meaning what they sounded like they meant.

I couldn’t find it.

Reign’s voice came from the living room.

Not her regular voice. Not the court show voice or the cold eggs voice. The voice she used when something shifted and she hadn’t finished deciding what it meant.

“Nova.”

I walked out of the bedroom.

She was standing at the window with her back to me, phone in her hand, completely still. Reign was never completely still. She talked with her hands, shifted her weight, always some small motion running through her. This stillness was wrong.

“Reign. What.”

She turned around. Her face was the specific kind of blank that meant she was holding something in place by force.

She held the phone out.

A text. Unknown number. Sent eighteen minutes ago while we were both in separate rooms thinking the worst of the day was already behind us.

Ten words.

I know what you are. Tell your friend I know too.

I read it twice.

The court show played on behind us. The radiator knocked against the wall. Outside, Philadelphia kept moving the way it always did — loud, indifferent, not slowing down for anybody.

I looked up from the phone and found Reign’s face.

And the question sitting between us was not who sent it.

We already knew who sent it.

The question was what Marcus planned to do next.