Chapter 5: The First Week

The house smelled like her childhood and nothing like her adulthood, which made it difficult to know what register to be in. Mara arrived on a Sunday with two suitcases and a medical bag she'd learned to pack efficiently — the things you needed for daily management of a body that was operating on borrowed time, organized so that none of it was visible at a glance. A private courtesy she extended to herself. Her brother Theo was already there. And Theo's contractor, who was loading supplies from a truck in the driveway, who didn't hear her arrive, and who Mara therefore had a full ten seconds to observe before the situation became real. Justin Cole had been twenty-eight when she'd left him. He was thirty-eight now, which meant a decade of small changes accumulated into a different version of the person she'd known — broader, quieter in the way people get when they've settled into themselves, with the particular posture of someone who spent a lot of time using his hands and body rather than thinking of them as transportation for his head. He looked up when she reached the end of the drive. Ten seconds of stillness. The specific stillness of two people who share a history and are recalibrating to being in the same spatial reality. "Mara," he said. "Justin," she said. That was the whole of it. Theo appeared from the front door at exactly the wrong moment, too relieved at seeing them both to notice the quality of silence he'd interrupted. "Great, you're both here," he said. "Cole, this is my sister. Mara, Cole. He's been — okay, you know each other. I forgot you knew each other. Is this weird?" "No," Mara said, at the same moment Justin said, "Nope." They did not look at each other when they said it.