Scarlett scoops up the cups and napkins and walks them over to the trash. I follow her to her car, a black Prius with a series of tarot card bumper stickers. The image of the moon card catches me. Two dogs bark at a stern moon; behind them, what’s maybe a scorpion emerges from a river. I stop to study it further, and an invisible nail drags itself up my spine. I shiver.

“Coming?” Scarlett calls to me from the driver’s seat.

“Yep.”

We stop at the grocery store for ingredients, and when we get home, I sit at the kitchen island as Scarlett makes bread.

“You should be lying down,” she says, violently kneading a pale slab of dough.

“I like watching,” I say. “It’s relaxing.”

“You know what’s relaxing?”

“Lying down.”

“Very good.”

I draw a smiley face in the flour on the countertop.

“Helpful,” she says. “You know, you don’t have to hang out for my sake. I don’t need constant supervision. You being here is enough. Just knowing you’re here. I’ve never lived alone. It was . . . I don’t know. It was weird.”

When Scarlett was eight, mom accidentally crushed her fingers in the car door without realizing. Scarlett cried quietly the entire drive to the mall, not saying a thing about it, cradling her injured fingers in her lap. I noticed only as we pulled up to Macy’s. She’d spent twenty minutes suffering in silence.

Had I woken up alone in the woods this morning, and had I been physically able to get up and walk, I would have walked home instead of calling for help. It’s how we are. I assume it’s a trait inherited from our father, because it’s certainly not from Mom, but it’s not something I’ve ever been able to confirm since he fucked off to Florida when we were toddlers.

For Scarlett to call and ask me to come here and live with her for the next six months, I knew she must really need me. But I haven’t seen any hint of need from her since I arrived.

I don’t know why I thought I would. She, like me, suspects that exhibiting a sliver of vulnerability will cause the universe to implode.

“I haven’t been here for that long,” I tell her. “It won’t be like this all the time. I’ll figure out my own things to do. But it’s been fun to hang out. I missed you. Missed this. We should get bunk beds. I feel like the time is right.”

“Finally,” she says. “I’m not trying to get rid of you. I’m just saying you’re free to do what you want. You’re not beholden to me.”

“I’m here because I want to be here,” I say. “That fast city life wears you down. I needed a break. Change of pace. This is as good for me as it is for you.”

“Stars aligned,” she says, smiling like she doesn’t believe me.

She shouldn’t. I’m not telling the truth. I love my life in the city. I love my job. I love business-development consulting, putting on suits and walking into posh conference rooms and telling C suite executives everything they’re doing wrong. I love my apartment: a prewar walk-up with a beautiful but useless fireplace and a cute, pathetic little kitchen. I love staying out until four a.m. and doing karaoke in Midtown with tourists. I love trying trendy new restaurants and getting handsy with strangers in the bathroom of a seedy Lower East Side bar. I love complaining about the subway and brunch at Balthazar and the Union Square farmers market and the occasional trip to Coney Island to ride the Cyclone and cheat death.