Sia's POV

  The rain started before I woke up.

  I know because when I opened my eyes the sound was already there, already settled, like it had been going for a long time and hadn't needed me to notice. A low, continuous sound against the window. Against the roof. Against everything. The kind of rain that doesn't arrive dramatically. That just appears, and stays, and makes the whole world feel smaller and grayer and further away.

  I looked at the clock.

  7 a.m.

  I y there for a moment and listened to the house.

  Two months.

  It had been almost two months since that night and the house had never gone back to what it was before it. I don't think houses do that. I think something happens in a house and the house remembers it, holds the shape of it in its walls and its silences, and from then on everything that happens inside it happens in the presence of that thing whether you acknowledge it or not.

  I got up. The floorboards were cold under my feet. Thunder moved through the sky somewhere outside, low and rolling, and I felt it in my chest more than I heard it.

  I stood in the hallway for a moment and looked at his door.

  Closed. The way it had been closed every morning for two months. The way it would be closed when I went downstairs and when I came back up and when I pressed my ear against it at night and heard nothing and tried to convince myself that nothing was okay.

  Another day.

  I went downstairs.

  Mom was in the kitchen.

  Two months ago this would have been unusual. She used to leave for work before I came down, the apartment still carrying the warmth of her presence but her already gone, already out in the city doing whatever it was the world needed from her that day. That was the shape of our mornings. That was who she was.

  Now she was here. Every morning. Moving quietly around the kitchen in the way of someone who needs their hands to be doing something because the alternative is standing still and standing still is not something she can afford right now.

  She looked up when I came in. Something moved across her face. The thing that moved across her face every morning when she saw me, that brief complicated thing I had stopped trying to read.

  "Here." She set a bowl in front of my chair. "Have your breakfast."

  "Okay."

  I sat down. She moved back to the counter. The rain pressed against the kitchen window, steady and indifferent, turning the gss into something blurred and gray.

  We didn't say anything else.

  This was also who we had become. Two people sitting in the same silence, each carrying our version of the same thing, neither of us knowing how to put it down or hand it to the other. She had always been loud. That was the word I would have used for her before. Loud in the way that fills rooms, that makes people feel like the space they're in is inhabited and warm. That loudness was gone. What was left was a woman who moved carefully through her own kitchen like she was afraid of disturbing something.

  I ate without tasting anything.

  He still hasn't come out.

  The thought arrived the way it arrived every morning. Quietly. With the particur weight of something that has been true for too long.

  Not for food. Not for school. Not even for Arya's burial, which happened on a gray Tuesday three weeks ago and which I attended alone and stood at the back of and left before it finished because I couldn't be there and I couldn't expin why and I didn't try to.

  He had sealed himself inside that room and the Rio inside it was not the Rio I knew. The Rio I knew ughed easily and smiled at strangers and clung to my sleeve on the way to school. The Rio inside that room was something smaller. Something that had been made smaller by what happened to it.

  I should have kept him with me.

  The thought arrived next, the way it always did. Following the first one like a shadow.

  I should never have let him go. If I had just said no. If I had just held on. If I had just kept him close the way I knew how to keep him close, the way I have always known how to do, none of this would have happened. He would be here. He would be whole. He would be mine.

  Mine.

  The word sat in the center of me and didn't move.

  Mom took my bowl when I finished. I put on my shoes. I left.

  The street was dark with rain, the pavement wet and reflective, every streetmp throwing a trembling copy of itself down into the puddles. I walked with my head down and my shoulders pulled in and the rain found me anyway. Found the back of my neck. Found the gaps between my fingers.

  If he had never left with that girl.

  If I had stopped him at the gate.

  If I had just said no, you're not going, you're staying with me where I can see you.

  I knew these thoughts were useless. I knew they were the kind of thoughts that only existed to torture you, scenarios that couldn't be changed, doors that were already closed. I had them anyway. Every day. Every morning on this walk, every night lying in the dark, every moment in between when I wasn't actively stopping myself.

  If I had kept him to myself.

  If he had just been mine the way he was supposed to be.

  None of this would have happened.

  The rain came down harder. I didn't speed up.

  The people who did this were never found. The police looked for a few weeks, following threads that led nowhere, filling in forms that got filed and forgotten. After a while the case went quiet in the way cases go quiet when no one pushes hard enough to keep them loud. I had gone to the station twice. The second time the officer who spoke to me had the specific tired expression of someone who has already decided something isn't going to be solved and is waiting for everyone else to arrive at the same conclusion.

  I walked home from that station in the rain too.

  Some things never change.

  Weeks passed.

  The rain eventually stopped. The sky went back to being the ordinary sky, pale and unremarkable, and the mornings went back to being mornings. The routine settled into its new shape. Mom in the kitchen. His door closed. Me in the hallway between them, belonging to neither.

  It was a weekend morning when I finally couldn't take it anymore.

  The sun was out. Genuinely out, the kind of morning that had no business existing in the house we were living in, light coming through the windows and nding on the floors and the walls as if it hadn't gotten the message. I stood in the hallway outside his door and looked at the grain of the wood and listened.

  Nothing.

  I knocked.

  "Rio." I kept my voice steady. I had practiced keeping it steady. "Do you want to come downstairs? We could watch something together. Whatever you want. Something you like."

  Silence.

  The specific silence of a room that has someone in it. The silence of someone choosing not to answer, which is different from the silence of an empty room, which is different again from the silence of someone who didn't hear you. I knew this silence. I had learned to recognize every variation of it over the past two months.

  "Rio."

  My hand found the door handle. I didn't turn it.

  "Please." My voice came out differently than I meant it to. Smaller. "Just for a minute. You don't have to talk. You don't have to do anything. I just want to see your face. I just." I stopped. Pressed my lips together. "I miss you. I miss you so much and you're right there and I still miss you and I don't know what to do with that."

  Nothing.

  The tears arrived without warning, the way they always did, cutting through whatever composure I had managed to assemble. I didn't wipe them. What was the point.

  "I'm not going anywhere." My voice was shaking badly now and I had stopped trying to hide it. "I'll stay right here. I'll wait. However long it takes. I'm not leaving this door." I pressed my palm ft against the wood. "Please Rio. I know what happened to you. I know I can't fix it. I know there's nothing I can say that makes it smaller. But I'm here. I'm right here. I have always been right here and I am not going to stop being here just because you need me to wait."

  I slid down the door.

  My back against the wood, knees pulled to my chest, arms wrapped around them. My forehead dropped forward. The carpet was soft under me and the hallway was quiet and the sunlight coming through the window at the end of the hall nded somewhere to my left, not quite reaching me.

  "Please," I said, very quietly, to the door. "Just let me see your face. Just once. Just so I know you're still in there. Just so I know there's still something of you left to come back."

  Silence.

  Then.

  Footsteps.

  Soft. Hesitant. The footsteps of someone who has forgotten how to move through their own room, how much weight their own body carries, how far it is from the bed to the door. Weak footsteps. Careful ones.

  I stopped breathing.

  The click of the tch. The slow movement of the door opening, pulling away from my back, and I had to put my hand down to keep from falling. I scrambled to my feet.

  He was standing in the doorway.

  Thin. So much thinner than two months ago, the kind of thin that happens when a body stops being taken care of, when the person inside it has stopped bothering with the basics of existing. Dark circles under his eyes so deep they looked like bruises. His lips dry and cracked. His eyes shallow in a way I didn't have a word for, like something behind them had gone very far away and wasn't sure yet whether it was coming back.

  It felt like someone else wearing the skin of Rio.

  I didn't think. I crossed the distance between us in one movement and put my arms around him, pulling him in with everything I had, my face against his shoulder, my arms tight around him, holding on the way you hold something you came very close to losing and have not yet finished being afraid of.

  He was so thin. I could feel it. I could feel the difference between the body I was holding and the body I remembered holding and the difference was the worst thing I had felt since the hospital.

  He was shaking. Small, continuous shaking, barely perceptible, the kind that lives deep in a person and doesn't stop even when everything on the surface is still.

  I held him tighter. I pressed my cheek against the top of his head. His warmth. His breathing. The specific weight of him in my arms.

  Mine, something said, very quietly, from the part of me that never stopped saying it.

  Mine. Still mine. Still here.

  And then, so quietly it almost didn't arrive, his voice.

  Thin. Scraped raw. The voice of someone who hadn't used it in a very long time and wasn't sure it still worked.

  "Help me, Sia." A pause. Just long enough to feel every word of what came next. "I can't live like this."

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