Four Of A Kind

Chapter 119: [3.21] Maximum Capacity

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She looked back at the box. I looked at it with her.

Outside, the bird in the Japanese garden kept going. The curtains moved slightly where a window was cracked. The room felt very still.

“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” I said. “About the letters.”

“I know.”

“But I’ll sit here while you think about it.”

Sabrina didn’t respond immediately. Then she reached into the box and took out one of the letters, a folded piece of cream paper with a name written on the outside in careful handwriting.

She held it without opening it.

“He knew me better than anyone,” she said, so quietly I almost missed it. “Better than I knew myself, maybe.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m scared,” Sabrina said, “that reading his words again will make him real again. And then I’ll have to lose him again.”

The room was very quiet.

“Or,” I said, “it’ll make him real again. And you’ll get to have him for a few minutes.”

Sabrina stared at the letter in her hands.

Her jaw shifted. Something moved through her expression that had no name I could put to it.

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“It’s also exactly right.”

She didn’t open the letter. She just held it, and I sat on the floor beside her, and outside the bird in the Japanese garden eventually stopped singing and the room stayed quiet and neither of us moved for a long time.

My phone buzzed.

Harlow: WE BUILT A BLANKET FORT!! Iris is a GENIUS with spatial architecture!! She says hi!!

Beneath it, a photo. Iris and Harlow side by side inside a blanket construction of impressive scale, both of them grinning at the camera. Iris was wearing one of Harlow’s star-shaped hair clips.

I showed it to Sabrina without comment.

She looked at it for a moment.

“Your sister,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“She has your eyes.”

“People keep saying that.”

Sabrina handed the phone back. She looked at the letter in her hands one more time, then carefully placed it back in the box, closed the lid, and set it on the floor between us.

“Not today,” she said.

“Okay.”

“But soon.”

“Okay.”

She leaned her head back against the mattress and looked at the ceiling. After a moment, I leaned my head back against the wall across from her and looked at it too.

“Isaiah,” she said.

“Hmm.”

“Thank you for coming.”

“You said emergency.”

“I know.” A pause. “It was.”

I was genuinely considering the ceiling as a career. Just staring at it professionally. Getting paid for it somehow.

Sabrina shifted beside me.

Then her head found my shoulder, slow and deliberate, the way she did everything. No accident. No stumble. A choice, placed there like a period at the end of a sentence.

My internal monologue, which had been running a steady commentary on ceiling architecture, went completely offline.

She smelled like black tea and something faintly floral. Her hair was cool against my jaw. I did not move. I was not going to move. Moving would acknowledge the situation, and acknowledging the situation would require me to have thoughts about it, and I was currently at maximum capacity.

“You’re very tense,” Sabrina said.

“I’m fine.”

“Your shoulder is basically a rock.”

“That’s just my natural composition.”

She made a small sound that was almost, almost a laugh.

I stayed completely still and ran a professional assessment of my options. Option one: move. Option two: don’t move. Option one would be the professionally responsible choice. Option two was what I was currently doing.

I was clearly excellent at my job.

The light through the cracked curtain had gone amber, late afternoon bleeding toward evening. The shoebox sat on the floor between us, closed now, patient in the way that important things are patient. We hadn’t spoken in a few minutes. That was fine. Sabrina didn’t fill silences, and I’d stopped being uncomfortable in them around week two.

Then she turned her head slightly.

Not much. Just enough that her gaze came up, and she was looking at my face from about four inches away.

I noticed because my peripheral vision is excellent and also because every nerve in my body reported it simultaneously.

I looked down.

That was my first mistake.

Sabrina was watching me with those purple eyes, half-lidded and unhurried, studying my face the way she studied everything else in her life. Like I was a passage in a book she hadn’t decided whether to underline yet.

Then she went still.

“Your eyes,” she said.

“Still in my head, last I checked.”

“They have green in them.”

I blinked. “What?”

“Flecks.” She didn’t look away. “In the irises. Green, catching the light just now.”

I had no idea what to do with that information. Nobody had ever looked at my eyes long enough to notice the green. My eyes were dark. That was the whole summary. Dark, tired, and pointed at whatever problem needed solving next.

“Huh,” I said.

Extremely articulate.

Sabrina kept looking. Her expression hadn’t changed exactly, but something in it had settled, the way a room settles when the last person stops moving. She was close enough that I could see the faint smudge of ink on her index finger, a detail she’d had every day since I met her.

“I’ve been looking at you for three weeks,” she said quietly. “I didn’t notice.”

“Easy to miss.”

“I miss nothing.”

She said it without ego. Just fact. And the fact clearly bothered her, from the slight pull at the corner of her mouth.

The distance between us had not changed. The distance between us felt completely different from what it was two minutes ago.

My brain, which had been uncharacteristically quiet, chose this moment to reboot and immediately present me with a seventeen-point list of reasons this was dangerous territory. Employer. Contract. Probation. Camille Valentine, who probably had sensors installed in the floorboards.

Iris, two floors up, currently learning origami from Harlow and completely unaware that her brother was sitting on a bedroom floor having some kind of moment with the most unreadable person he’d ever met.

Sabrina’s gaze dropped, just for a second, and then came back up.

My list of seventeen reasons dissolved somewhere around reason four.

“Sabrina,” I said.

“Mm.”

“I need you to tell me what’s happening right now.”

She considered that for a moment. Her voice, when it came, was quiet.

“I’m deciding something.”

“About the letters?”

“No.”

The room was very still.

“About you,” she said.