“Fuck!” Jules shouted, colliding with modular shelves stacked with Camus and Palahniuk novels. “What the hell! Why are you screaming at me?”

“Sorry!” Ava said. Her fright was quickly transmuting to irritation, as all her feelings seemed to do when Jules was concerned. “You startled me.”

“I startled you?” they asked incredulously. “I’m not the one sneaking up behind people and screaming like a Nazgûl. God, I almost pissed myself.”

They had a fist pressed to their chest, like enough pressure would slow down their pulse.

“Sorry,” Ava said again, the word sour in her mouth. Seemed like too many of her conversations with Jules had required apologies. “Did Tricia send you to look for the missing grandmother?”

“I volunteered. A soccer mom enlisted me to help harangue her husband into shelling out money for a new bathroom vanity. She managed to misgender me four times in two minutes,” Jules said. They bent down to pick up the books they’d knocked off the shelf. “Two different pronouns, completely ignored my nametag, eventually settled on calling me ‘the kid.’”

“Have you seen the old woman?” Ava asked, cutting off Jules’s nervous rambling. “The granddaughter says she disappeared around here.”

Jules shook their head. “I’ve been through all the rooms back there,” they said, waving their hand the opposite way Ava had come. “Didn’t see anything.”

“Shit,” Ava said. Where could an old woman escape to in a furniture store? She leaned against a showroom wall to think.

“I still think this is the most depressing showroom,” Jules said conversationally. “It reeks of misogyny and sadness.”

The Nihilist Bachelor’s room was one of the smallest show apartments. Tiny kitchenette, a fold-out desk beneath a loft bed, fake exposed brick along the walls. A single brown leather chair in front of a flatscreen TV. Ava thought briefly of Jules’s studio, which wasn’t much bigger, but was infinitely more comfortable. Jules had refused to buy anything except a set of plates from LitenVärld, and had furnished it from estate sales and Goodwill trips instead. Everything at work is part of a set with everything else, they’d explained. I don’t fit into any of those sets.

Ava realized that they’d been standing and staring at each other. She turned on her heel and said, “Maybe she wandered into housewares.”

“Am I that awful to be around?” Jules asked. There was something raw in their question; something flushed and bruised, radiating hurt. “You can’t even stand being in the same room as me. I thought you wanted to be friends.”

Had she said that? Probably. That’s what you were supposed to say when you ended a relationship with someone you couldn’t hate, but didn’t know how to love, either.

“Please don’t be so dramatic about this,” Ava said, trying to keep her voice cool.