I owned exactly four shirts.

One was the collar shirt, white, slightly yellowed at the cuffs because I was bad at laundry. The other three were t-shirts with various stages of fading. My pants situation was worse. I had jeans, jeans, and a pair of black slacks I’d bought for a relative’s funeral five years ago and hadn’t worn since.

I went with the collar shirt and the funeral slacks.

Standing in front of the cracked mirror in my bathroom, I looked like exactly what I was: a man who lived alone in a small apartment in a forgotten building and didn’t have a single piece of clothing that cost more than a takeout meal.

’Mira’s going to take one look at me and have a stroke.’

I tried to flatten my hair. It didn’t work. I tried again. It still didn’t work. Damn you, hair!

Whatever. She was the one picking me up. It wasn’t like she didn’t know what she was getting.

My apartment was on the fourth floor of a five-story building on the rougher edge of the city, with a neighbourhood where you saw people sleeping on cardboard one block over and people scraping rent together one block the other way. I belonged to the second group, barely.

It hadn’t always been like this, actually.

My parents had money. Real money where you don’t really think about prices, you just buy the thing. My father ran some import business and my mother had inherited from her side as her family was involved in some political thing. We’d lived in a glass house on a hill, with a pool that nobody ever swam in because we were all too busy hating each other.

When they finally divorced, when I was nineteen, both of them had wanted me in their own broken ways. My mother offered the inheritance, the contacts, the entire prepared life. My father offered the business, the legacy, the whole prepared empire.

They’d both meant it. I knew it because they both loved me. It just turned out that being loved by them was the most exhausting thing on Earth, because love came with conditions and surveillance and constant tug-of-war and weekly arguments about whose side I was on this week.

So I’d taken nothing and simply walked out with a duffel bag and a laptop and the small savings I’d built from internet writing during high school, and I’d never asked them for a cent since.

They still tried, sometimes. Texts. Birthday transfers I sent back. My mother once stood outside this building in a four hundred dollar coat trying to convince me to come home. I’d told her, calmly, that I was already home.

I think she’d cried in the car after. I felt bad about it for about a week. Then I went back to writing.

My phone buzzed.

Aunt Mira ❤: outside.

I locked up and headed down.

...

The first thing I noticed when I stepped out of the building was the car.

The second thing I noticed was the small crowd it had attracted.

It was a Vellanti Auriga. Matte black, low and sleek, a car that cost more than my building. Vellanti made maybe fifty Aurigas a year and you had to be on a list just to get one. I knew this because I’d written a side character once who drove one and I’d researched obsessively.

Yup. I’m that writer.

People had stopped on the sidewalk. A couple of kids on bikes were trying to take pictures with their phones from across the street. An old man with a shopping bag was just standing there, openly staring.

I guess, even when men get old, their love for bikes and cars remains the same.

And leaning against the driver’s side, arms folded, sunglasses on, was Mira.

She was dressed like she was about to take a meeting that decided someone’s whole future. Black coat, tailored, falling clean to her knees. A blouse the colour of dark wine underneath. Heels that probably cost what I made in a month or a year. Her dark hair was pulled back into something that took a stylist forty minutes to make look casual.

She was thirty-six. But she didn’t look thirty-six. She looked like time had taken one good look at her and decided not to bother.

But the part that scared me wasn’t the clothes or the car. It was her face.

Cold. Completely cold. Sharp at the edges. Her mouth set into a thin straight line, her eyes hidden behind the sunglasses but clearly scanning the street, and every single person who’d been staring suddenly remembered they had somewhere else to be. The crowd thinned in about ten seconds. The kid with the phone put it away. The old man pretended he’d been walking the whole time.

I’d never seen her like that.

I hesitated on the front step.

Then she turned her head and saw me, and the whole thing dropped, as if a switch flipped. The cold vanished, the line of her mouth softened, the corners crinkled, and behind the sunglasses I could see her eyes light up.

"Lukas."

She pushed off the car and started toward me, fast, and for one second her arms came up like she was going to grab me into a hug and then they stopped, halfway, and dropped back to her sides.

She remembered.

She remembered I’d flinched away from hugs as a kid. Every single time. She remembered without thinking and stopped without thinking and stood there with this small careful smile, holding the air between us instead.

Something in my chest cracked clean down the middle.

I closed the distance and hugged her, properly with both arms around her tightly.

She froze for a full second, I felt it, the shock going through her. Then her arms came up and wrapped around me and she squeezed me so hard my ribs creaked, and she made this small sound into my shoulder that wasn’t quite a sob but wasn’t quite anything else either.

"Oh," she whispered. "Oh, sweetheart."

"Hi, Aunty."

"You hugged me."

"Yeah."

"You hugged me."

"I know."

She pulled back, both hands going to my face, her sunglasses sliding up onto her hair. Her eyes were wet. She was fighting it, and losing.

She looked at me and said, "Look at you. Skin and bones. What are you eating? Is that your shirt? Lukas, your cuffs."

"I know."

"You are wearing funeral pants."

"I’m aware."

"And you live here?" She gestured at my building like it had personally offended her. "Sweetheart. Lukas. Honey. I have asked you, I have begged you, every year for a decade—"

"I know, Aunty."

"You let me send you a blanket once. One blanket. In ten years."

I smiled thinking of that. "It was a really nice blanket."

"It was cashmere, Lukas, it was supposed to be the gateway blanket."

She shook me.

I laughed, and it surprised even me.

She softened immediately at the sound of it, like she’d been waiting a long time to hear it. She brushed her thumb across my cheek and shook her head slowly.

"You stubborn, stupid boy. You couldn’t have called me five years ago?"

"I’m sorry."

"Don’t be sorry. Just get in the car. I’m taking you somewhere with actual food."