Page 6 of Ignition Rites

I tell myself I don’t believe that.

Upstairs, my room is exactly as I left it — spare, precise, nothing out of place, because disorder is the one thing I’ve never been able to tolerate in a space I control.

I sit on the edge of the bed without turning on the light.

Two weeks until the opener. I know what happens there, what it’s for, who watches, who gets watched. I’ve overseen enough of them to know exactly how it goes.

What I don’t know is what I’m going to do when I see her standing at the rail in the floodlights, watching something she doesn’t understand yet while every man in that crowd decides what she’s worth to him.

I can call it doctrine, positioning, strategy.

I’m not sure I believe that either.

Chapter four

Morning Aches

Lorelei

The house doesn’t creak. That’s the first thing I notice on my first morning waking up here — no settling, no groan of old wood, nothing. Just a silence so complete it feels engineered, like even the building learned somewhere along the way not to make a sound it wasn’t asked to make.

I make my own noise instead, letting my bare feet slap the marble a little harder than they need to on my way down to the kitchen just to hear something answer back.

My mother’s already there, apron over yesterday’s blouse, humming something under her breath that used to play on the radio in our old apartment, back before our meant three people instead of nine. She doesn’t hear me come in. I watch her for a moment, the particular way she moves through this kitchen, careful, like she’s still cataloguing where the sharp corners are even after two years of living here.

“Morning, Ma.”

She startles, hand flying to her chest before she recovers so quickly I almost convince myself I imagined it.

“Mija.” The smile that follows is real — I know her real smile, I’ve had twenty years of study — but it arrives slightly late, like she has to build it before she can wear it. “You scared me.”

“Sorry. You want help?”

“Sit, sit.” She’s already plating something, huevos and something that smells like home in a kitchen that doesn’t feel like it belongs to either of us yet. “¿Cómo dormiste?”

“Fine.”

It’s a lie. The mattress is probably more expensive than my entire old bedroom, but I spent half the night listening to every shift of the sheets and every sound beyond the door like the house might eventually explain itself if I stayed awake long enough.

My mother probably knows I’m lying anyway.

“You’ll adjust,” she says, setting the plate in front of me. The way she says adjust makes the word carry more than it should. Her hand lingers on my shoulder. “This family takes some — understanding.”

“Is that what we’re calling it?”

“Lorelei.”

Just my name, delivered gently enough to tell me I’ve reached the edge of whatever she’s willing to discuss.

I let it go because pushing gets me nowhere with her lately, not since the wedding, not since she started measuring her sentences like they might be repeated back to her.

I’m three bites into breakfast when Rafe wanders in, shirtless, hair a disaster, looking like a man who’s never once in his life worried about how a room perceives him.

“There she is. Staying here now, huh?” He drops into the chair across from me like no time has passed at all, which — for him — it hasn’t. Two years of Thanksgivings and one deeply regrettable Fourth of July, and he still greets me like we saw each other last week. “Try to contain your excitement.”

“I’m thrilled. Can’t you tell?”

“I know. Everyone knows. You’ve had that face since the wedding.” He steals a piece of toast off my plate without asking, same as he’s done since I was eighteen, and something about the ease of it — the total lack of performance, the fact that he still doesn’t ask — makes me laugh before I can stop myself.