Emma showed up at my building unannounced on a Thursday evening, which had never happened before, and I knew something was wrong the second I saw her face through the peephole — not angry, exactly, more like a person standing at the edge of a decision she hadn't fully made yet.
"Hey," I said, opening the door. "This is a surprise."
"Can we talk? Not on the phone. In person."
I let her in, aware of my mom's voice calling a greeting from the kitchen and Emma's polite, distracted response to it — the two of them exchanging maybe fifteen seconds of easy small talk, my mom clearly delighted at the surprise appearance of a girl she'd only heard about secondhand, entirely unaware that the visit had nothing to do with the kind of teenage drama she was already, visibly, preparing to tease me about later. I felt a small, familiar pang watching that exchange — my mother's genuine warmth, offered freely to someone she had no reason to distrust, while I stood a few feet away carrying enough secrets to make that warmth feel almost obscene in its innocence.
I led Emma to my room, closing the door most of the way — enough for privacy, not enough to look like something my parents would need to comment on later.
The walk down the hallway felt longer than it had any right to be, the two of us silent past Santiago's closed door, past the family photos my mother insisted on hanging despite my father's ongoing campaign to replace at least a few of them with something "less nineteen-nineties," past the particular quiet of a house that had no idea what was about to happen in one of its bedrooms. I found myself cataloguing all of it with the same reflexive attention I gave everything lately — exits, witnesses, what could be overheard through what wall — and hated, faintly, that some part of my mind never fully stopped running that calculation even here, even now, even with a girl I actually cared about walking silently beside me.
She sat on the edge of my bed, hands folded in her lap, and didn't say anything for a long moment, which was unlike her. Emma filled silences by instinct, the way some people filled rooms. Watching her sit inside one instead told me more than whatever she said next was likely to.
I stood by the door a moment longer than necessary, watching her, running through every possible version of what came next and finding none of them comfortable. Part of me — the old part, the part that still occasionally thought in spreadsheets and risk matrices — was already calculating how to contain this, how to smooth it over with the smallest possible lie. The rest of me, the part that had apparently been growing louder without my quite noticing, wanted, badly, to just sit down next to her and tell her something true for once.
"I saw you Tuesday night," she said finally. "By accident. My mom was driving me home from my aunt's and we passed that street by the old textile district, and I saw you getting out of a car near some warehouse. Alone. Like, ten at night, alone, coming out of a car that definitely wasn't a bus or a cab."
My stomach went cold and still in the specific way it always did when a piece of the machinery slipped somewhere I hadn't checked closely enough. "I was meeting someone about the business."
"At ten at night. By yourself. In a car that looked like it belonged to someone with actual money." She looked up at me, and there was nothing accusatory in her expression, which somehow made it worse — just tired, and a little scared, in the way you get scared for someone you care about instead of scared of them. "Damian, I'm not stupid. I know something's going on that you're not telling me. I don't need to know everything. I'm not asking you to hand me some big secret. But I need you to at least tell me it's not something that's gonna get you hurt. Or arrested. Or worse."
I stood there a long moment, running the same calculation I'd run in Ashford's basement, in Yankovic's warehouse, at my parents' dinner table — how much truth a given room could survive, weighed against how much a lie would cost if it ever came apart at the seams. Emma's room, I understood with a clarity that felt almost physically painful, could survive less truth than almost any room I'd been in for months. She wasn't Ashford, testing me for sport. She wasn't Yankovic, calculating risk in dollars. She was a fifteen-year-old girl sitting on the edge of my bed, genuinely afraid for someone she'd decided, somewhere along the way, that she cared about, and every part of me that still remembered being thirty-one years old understood exactly how much that kind of fear cost a person to voice out loud.
I could have hypnotized her. The thought arrived, unbidden, the way it always did now whenever a conversation threatened to go somewhere inconvenient — a clean, easy solution, purple flicker, forget you saw the car, forget you asked the question, sleep easy tonight. I looked at her face, at the specific, unguarded worry sitting there without armor around it, and found, for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit, that I didn't want to.
Not out of guilt. Out of something closer to preservation — a small, stubborn instinct that whatever this was between us, whatever it might eventually become, was worth more intact and imperfect than smoothed over and hollow.
"It's not drugs," I said carefully. "It's not anything that's going to get me arrested in a way that traces back to anything you'd ever have to answer for. I have some business partners who aren't exactly... conventional. It's genuinely dangerous in ways I can't fully explain, and the less you know about the specifics, the safer you actually are. That's not me blowing you off. That's the truth."
She was quiet a moment, studying my face the way she always did when she suspected there was more underneath a sentence than the sentence itself let on. "You're being careful with your words right now. I can tell. You do this thing with your voice when you're picking each one on purpose instead of just talking."
"I didn't know I did that."
"You do. It's kind of unsettling, honestly, now that I'm paying attention to it." She shook her head slightly, like she was trying to shake the observation loose from whatever it was starting to mean. "Anyway. Keep going." She wrapped her arms a little tighter around herself, watching me with the specific patience of someone determined to hear the rest of it, whatever the rest of it turned out to be.
"That's supposed to make me feel better?"
"No. It's supposed to be honest, since you asked for that instead of comfort." I sat down beside her, close but not touching, giving her the space to close the distance herself if she wanted to. "I'm careful, Emma. More careful than you'd believe if I told you everything. I'm not going to let anything happen to me that I can help. But I'm not going to lie to you and tell you it's nothing, either, because you'd figure that out eventually and it'd cost us more than the truth is costing us right now."
"Do your parents know? Whatever this is?"
"They know a version of it. A safer version than the real one."
"How do you even manage that? Keeping two different stories straight for two different sets of people who both love you and would both lose their minds if they knew the real one?"
The question landed harder than she probably intended it to, mostly because I'd never once heard it phrased quite that plainly before, not even inside my own head. "Carefully," I said, after a moment. "And it costs more than you'd think, keeping it straight. Some nights I lie awake just running through who knows what, making sure I haven't crossed a wire somewhere."
"That sounds like a horrible way to live."
"It's the way I've got," I said, and something in my own voice surprised me — not defensive, exactly, just tired in a way I hadn't let myself sound in front of her before.
"So I'm getting an even less safe version than the one your own parents get." She said it without real anger, more like she was testing the weight of the sentence out loud to see how it landed. "That's supposed to reassure me how, exactly?"
"It's not supposed to reassure you. It's supposed to be honest about where you actually stand, instead of pretending you're closer to the middle of this than you are." I held her gaze, careful, aware of exactly how easy it would be right now to fix this the fast way, and aware, just as clearly, that I didn't want to. "I know that's not fair to you. None of this is fair to you. You didn't sign up for any of it, and the honest version of me telling you that is worth more than a comfortable lie telling you it's nothing."
She was quiet a long moment, turning something over behind her eyes that I couldn't fully read, arms wrapped loosely around herself in a posture that read less like defense and more like someone holding herself together through sheer will. "You know what the worst part is?" she said finally. "I believe you. That you're being careful. That you're not lying about the big stuff. And I still feel like I'm dating a stranger half the time, and I don't know what to do with that."
"I don't know what to do with it either," I admitted, and meant it, and something in her shoulders eased, fractionally, at the admission — not because it fixed anything, but because it was, apparently, the first time in weeks I'd told her something true that cost me to say.
She was quiet a long moment, studying me with an expression I couldn't fully read — not satisfied, not reassured, but something that had, at least, stopped being purely afraid. "Okay," she said finally. "I'm not gonna pretend that's enough. But it's more than you usually give me, so. I'll take it."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet. I said I'd take it, not that I was happy about it." A ghost of a smile crossed her face despite everything, the first sign of the Emma I actually recognized showing through the careful composure she'd worn through the whole conversation. "Don't make me regret not pushing harder." She stood, smoothing her jacket, composure visibly reassembling itself piece by piece. "And Damian — whatever this is. Whoever Annabelle is to you. I need you to actually tell me, eventually. Not tonight. But eventually. I'm not the kind of person who does well with half of somebody."
She left before I could answer that, and I sat alone in my room a long while after the door closed downstairs, running her last sentence over and over, understanding, with a clarity I hadn't wanted, that I had just bought myself time with something other than a lie for the first time in months — and that the time I'd bought was going to run out eventually, one way or another, no matter how carefully I managed everything else.
I heard my mother's voice drift up the stairs a few minutes later, asking, lightly, whether everything was okay, whether Emma wanted to stay for dinner, entirely oblivious to the fact that her question had arrived several minutes too late to catch anything worth catching. I told her Emma had to get home, and my mother accepted it without suspicion, the same easy trust she extended to almost everything I told her these days, and I sat with the specific, familiar guilt of watching that trust do exactly what I needed it to do without ever once deserving it.