The Uber smelled like pine air freshener and someone else's fast food. Dani sat in the back with her bag on her lap and her forehead almost touching the window, watching Chicago slide past in the dark.

The driver had the radio on low. Some late night talk show. She didn't listen.

Her leg hurt. It always hurt after a long night; not the leg she still had, but the one she didn't. The phantom kind of hurt, the one the doctors had explained to her three times in three different ways and that she still couldn't fully describe to anyone who hadn't felt it. Like something was there and also wasn't. Like her body hadn't finished updating its own map.

She shifted in the seat and didn't say anything about it. There was nothing to say.

Outside, the city was doing its city thing; lights and movement and people who had somewhere to be at two in the morning. She watched a group spill out of a bar, laughing at something, their breath visible in the cold air. Normal Thursday. Nothing had happened to them tonight.

Her phone was in her pocket. She didn't take it out.

She already knew if she opened Instagram she'd see the Fighter's live clipped and reposted forty different ways by now. She'd seen enough of it in the parking lot; just those few seconds before she locked her screen and got in the car. The ugly room. His face. Elena's hand going up in that small tired wave.

She hadn't expected to feel anything about it. She'd gone to the fight because Emil had asked her three times and the third time she'd run out of reasons to say no. She wasn't a boxing person. She wasn't even really a sports person. She'd spent most of the night standing in VIP seats that cost Emil more than she wanted to think about, in shoes that were slightly wrong for the prosthetic socket, trying to follow something she didn't fully understand.

And then the broadcast had gone wrong. And then the boy in the press pit with the camera had looked at her like he was trying to say something. And then Emil had been smiling in a way that made her stomach turn.

And then she'd come home. Or was coming home. The Uber had another twelve minutes according to the app.

She thought about Emil's face when he didn't remember smiling. The genuine blankness of it. That was almost worse than if he'd been defensive; he'd just looked confused, like she was describing something that had happened to a different person. Maybe for him it had. The thing had been going on long enough now that she wasn't always sure which version of her brother she was talking to.

She didn't know exactly what he'd done. She suspected some of it. There had been a consultation appointment he'd mentioned once and then never mentioned again. There had been a week where he'd been cagey about money in a way that was different from his usual cagey about money. There had been a photo on his phone she'd seen by accident; a reference photo, the kind you'd take to a stylist or a..

She'd stopped looking.

It was easier not to know the full shape of it. Knowing the full shape of it would require her to do something about it, and she didn't know what that something was yet.

The Uber turned onto her street. The house was dark except for the kitchen light, which meant her mother had left it on for her and gone to bed. She did that always — left the kitchen light on, never the porch light, the kitchen light specifically, like the point was that there was warmth inside rather than just visibility outside. Dani had never said anything about it but she noticed it every time.

She paid the driver and got out carefully, the way she always did when she was tired; weight on the right side first, hand on the door frame, the small automatic calculations she'd done so many times they barely registered as calculations anymore.

The night air was cold. The street was quiet.

She stood on the pavement for a second before going in, her bag over one shoulder, looking at nothing in particular. Down the street a porch light clicked off on a timer. A car somewhere. The usual sounds.

She thought about the Fighter saying it worked a little without any shame in it. Just saying it like it was a fact he'd decided not to be embarrassed about. She didn't know many people who could do that; say the thing that made them look smaller and somehow not look smaller for saying it.

She thought about Emil, still out there somewhere in the parking lot, ring light on, talking to his chat about narratives.

She went inside. The kitchen light was warm and yellow and the house smelled like the dinner her mother had made hours ago. She put her bag down on the chair by the door; her chair, it had been her chair since she was twelve, and stood in the kitchen for a moment without turning on any other lights.

The house had its late-night sounds. The particular creak of the second stair that meant someone was awake upstairs, but when she listened again there was nothing; just the settle of the walls, the low hum of the refrigerator. With seven of them the house was never entirely still, even in the middle of the night. There was always a charger left plugged in, a light on somewhere at the end of a hallway, a pair of shoes that didn't belong to you in the middle of a floor. You learned to read the quiet as its own kind of full. Her youngest brother slept with his door cracked. Noé always left the bathroom tap slightly dripping. Someone had left a bowl in the drying rack that wasn't there when Dani left this evening. She didn't try to account for all of it. You couldn't, with this many people. You just moved through the house the way you moved through water, aware of everything without needing to name it.

She didn't check Instagram.

She got a glass of water and stood at the sink and didn't drink it right away. The window above the sink looked out onto the backyard and there was nothing to see; just the dark shape of the fence, the outline of the old table no one had brought in yet for winter. She'd been meaning to remind someone about that table for three weeks.

The portfolio deadline was in eleven days.

She'd been counting for longer than she'd admitted to anyone. Not in the obsessive way, not like she was watching it shrink; more the way you were aware of a flight time even when you weren't going anywhere near the airport yet. Central Saint Martins wanted twenty pieces with a written statement. The School of the Art Institute wanted fifteen, but she'd have to reformat everything for their submission portal which she'd been putting off because the portal was genuinely badly designed and every time she opened it something had reset. Parsons wanted a physical portfolio for the final round, which meant if she got that far she'd have to figure out printing, which meant she'd have to figure out money, which was a separate problem she was not solving tonight.

The statement was the part she kept rewriting. Not because she didn't know what to say but because she knew exactly what to say and couldn't figure out how much of it was allowed to be true. The question was why fashion and the answer was long and not entirely neat and involved things she didn't usually hand to strangers. It involved the year after the accident when she'd had to relearn what her body looked like in clothes and had found, unexpectedly, that she was good at it; not just managing it but actually thinking about it, the geometry of it, the way fabric moved differently when you had a different relationship with your own weight. It involved the sketchbooks she'd been keeping for four years that lived in a box under her bed and that no one in her family had seen except Emil, once, when he'd found one by accident and had been quiet about it in a way that meant he'd looked through the whole thing. It involved the fact that she'd been deferring on this for two years now and she was twenty-three and there was a version of her life where she kept deferring and she'd looked at that version recently and decided she didn't want it.

She was going to submit. She'd decided that. She was in the part that came after deciding and before anyone else knew about it.

She drank the rest of the water and set the glass in the rack next to the bowl that wasn't hers.

The second stair creaked again and this time it was real; she heard the weight of it, the way someone paused at the bottom. Then nothing. Whoever it was had heard her moving around and decided not to come in. That was how you lived in a house like this: you learned to read each other's sounds as either come find me or I'm fine, keep going. She'd been making the second kind of sound. They'd heard it.

She turned off the kitchen light and went to bed.