Sunday mornings in my apartment were supposed to sound like the hiss of my espresso machine, the low crackle of jazz from the kitchen speaker, and the distant softened hum of Chicago waking up twenty-eight floors below me. That morning, the sound was hard-shell luggage slamming against marble.
The first suitcase hit so hard it knocked against the entry table and rattled the bowl where I dropped my keys every night. The second landed with a scraping thud. By the time the third and fourth came down, I was already standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, coffee mug in hand, watching my boyfriend rearrange the center of my home like he was staging a takeover.
Derek folded his arms and planted himself beside the luggage with the solemn satisfaction of a man delivering a verdict. He had on gray sweatpants, a black T-shirt, and the expensive watch I bought him for his birthday six months earlier because he had looked at it in a store window and laughed like it was out of reach. At the time, I had found that look charming. Standing in my foyer that morning, I finally had the correct language for it. It was not charm. It was appetite disguised as humility.
“My sister’s moving in permanently,” he said.
He said it the way people announce the weather, as if it were something already decided by larger forces and not a demand he was making in my living room before I had even finished my first cup of coffee.
I didn’t answer immediately. I looked at the four designer suitcases, all cream and gold, all clearly expensive enough that no one suffering real hardship would have chosen them. Then I looked at him.
“Permanently,” I repeated.
Derek nodded once, jaw set, pleased with his own firmness. “For real this time. Not for a weekend. Not until she gets on her feet. She needs stability, Leah.”
Leah. My name sounded different in his mouth when he was gearing up for a performance. Softer at the edges, burdened with reasonableness. It was the tone he used when he wanted me to feel selfish before I had even spoken.
I set my coffee mug on the counter very carefully.
“And where exactly,” I asked, “is Cassidy planning to live permanently?”
He looked around my apartment as if the answer were self-evident. “Here.”
There are moments when a person says something so nakedly entitled that your mind needs an extra second to catch up, not because you didn’t hear it but because some last surviving part of you is still trying to make it less absurd than it is. I stood there in the sunlight coming through my floor-to-ceiling windows, wearing one of my old college sweatshirts and bare feet on heated marble, and let the actual meaning of the sentence settle.
My apartment.
My lease.
My furniture.
My mortgage-sized rent payment every month.
