Inside, I went straight for the couch. The cushions welcomed me like an old, shitty friend. I dropped down with a grunt, leg screaming, hip throbbing in time with my heartbeat.
Clara didn’t hover. She just moved through the living room like a quiet storm.
She picked up the empty pill bottles and half-full ones, set the current prescriptions into a small ceramic dish she’d grabbed from the kitchen, and left the expired ones in a separate pile. She gathered two clearly fossilized take-out containers, popped them open just enough to confirm their level of horror, then snapped them shut again and carried them to the trash.
She didn’t sigh. Didn’t make a face. Didn’t give me the “this isn’t healthy” talk I could practically recite from memory.
She just . . . triaged.
A glass appeared on the coffee table within reach—clean, full of water, the condensation already beading on the side. She didn’t saydrink this. She didn’t say anything at all.
To her, it was probably just basic living. Clearing surfaces. Making sure I wouldn’t accidentally poison myself with bad lo mein.
To me, it felt like she was rearranging my failure. Putting it into neater piles so it looked a little less pathetic.
My house had been my cave. My evidence. The mess, the bottles, the couch groove—they all told the story of a guy who’d earned the right to be left alone. Watching her quietly dismantle that story one crusty container at a time made my skin itch.
“Clara,” I said, sharper than I meant to.
She glanced over from inside the kitchen, where she was rinsing out one of the containers. “Yeah?”
Before I could decide what I wanted to say, she disappeared down the hall. I heard her door open, then close.
Good. Fine. I could breathe better with her out of sight.
I let my head tip back against the couch and stared at the ceiling. The house was quiet again, minus the hum of the fridge and the occasional creak of old wood. I tried to let the familiar emptiness settle over me. Tried to sink back into the numbness that had carried me through the last few months.
It didn’t take.
A few minutes later, her door opened again.
I looked up without meaning to.
She grabbed her coat off the hook and shrugged into it, fingers working the buttons.
“You heading out?” I asked, the words out before I could stop them.
“Yeah.” She didn’t look at me as she dug in her bag for her keys. “Meeting Kit in town.”
Kit. Right. It could’ve been true. Might have been a date. Might have been anything.
The fact that I cared at all sent a hot, ugly spike of something through my chest.
Jealousy.
There was no other name for it, and I hated it.
I had no right to it. She was my best friend’s little sister and, more importantly, a grown woman doing me a favor I’d made as unpleasant as possible. She could go out with whomever she wanted. Fill her nights with drinks and laughter and men who didn’t need a prosthetic to get up a flight of stairs.
Still, the idea of some guy I didn’t know being brought back here—to this house, this couch, this tiny, fragile routine we’d barely started—made my hackles rise.
“We need some rules,” I said.
Clara paused mid-zip, her brows lifting as she turned to face me fully. Hands went to her hips, a spark of defiance in her gray-blue eyes. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s hear them.”
Shit.
I hadn’t actually thought that far ahead. I just knew the sight of her all put together and ready to walk out of my front door had flipped some switch I hadn’t known was there.