Four Hearts

The corridor outside the Banquet Hall was still and cool, the hush broken only by the slow, rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock at the far end. Myra stopped just short of the open doors. Her hands hovered, then found the trim of the door, and she listened before stepping in.

She felt the people inside before she saw them—the specific grayness of Andy’s sorrow, the double maroon echo of Laura’s presence, both bodies, both saddened, guilty hearts. The room held a kind of negative charge, like the air was still waiting for it to settle. The silver light that always enwreathed them both was not as strong as it had recently been.

She hesitated in the doorway. Laura sat with both heads resting on Andy’s shoulder, the symmetry uncanny, but Myra’s attunement to the room was stronger than any vision. The heat of old pain, the fizz of fresh guilt. She didn’t need to see Andy’s face to know what had just gone down.

She considered just backing out and leaving them alone. But as she turned, both of Laura’s heads lifted, as if they’d been waiting for her all along. Both gazes fixed on her, a faint hint of green relief and another wave of maroon guilt, and the invitation—or maybe the summons—was clear.

Myra slipped into the room and hesitantly walked the length of the table, trailing her fingertips along the cold linen. She no longer needed cues to walk, but she enjoyed the sensory experience. Her fox ears kept swiveling to catch the tremors in the quiet. Her tails dragged behind her, the brush of them against the velvet chair legs a metronome for her steps.

She stopped at Andy’s left and waited, not breaking the silence. For a long minute, no one moved.

Laura untangled herself, both bodies rising together, each face searching Andy’s for a permission he didn’t have words for. Then, after a long, motionless moment, Laura looked at Andy, her expression gone so soft it almost blurred at the edges. She opened her mouth, like she wanted to say something she’d spent all day not saying, but closed it instead, and pressed her lips to his temples—left, then right.

Andy exhaled, the sound rough as gravel. “Go ahead,” he said, voice raw. “I’ll be fine.” The words weren’t true, and everyone in the room knew it. He was already grieving.

Laura winced, a tiny full-body flinch, then turned to Myra. Both of her bodies fell into perfect step beside Myra’s, and they left together, hands at their sides.

In the hallway, Myra didn’t let herself check if Andy was watching. She just walked until the cold in her chest had a little air to move in, then said, “Are you okay?”

Both of Laura’s faces looked down at once. “I will be,” she said, and the timbre of the words told Myra it was the same kind of lie Andy had just tried.

In the Sunroom, light poured in from three sides, throwing every surface into sharp relief—cushions, glass, the jitter of dust motes that always managed to escape the cleaning staff. Myra led Laura in by the elbow, and only then noticed the third presence: Erin, curled into the window seat, knees drawn up tight, her skin an impossible mint green against the navy of the upholstery. She wasn’t reading, or pretending to be; she just stared out the window at the patternless sky.

Erin looked up, and for once, her gaze landed not on Laura, but on Myra. “You good?” she asked, the words clipped, but there was a vein of genuine concern in it.

“Yeah,” said Myra, softer than before.

Laura turned to Erin. “You don’t have to go,” both voices said, in tandem.

Erin stood, breasts huge and unignorable. “I know,” she said. “But this one isn’t mine to sit in on.” She stretched, the muscles in her back and shoulders shifting under the plant-like skin, then stepped over to Myra, laid a warm, steady hand on her shoulder, and squeezed. She said, “I’ll be down the hall. Holler if you need me,” then left, closing the door with more gentleness than Myra thought possible.

Once the latch had clicked, Laura slumped onto the settees, both bodies moving as one, hands folded awkwardly in each lap. Myra took the other end, tails curling up around her feet.

Neither spoke for a few minutes. The room was filled with the static crackle of unsaid things.

Finally, Myra said, “The hardest part wasn’t saying no. It was watching Andy’s face while I did it.” She flexed her fingers, as if they hurt from holding the air so tight.

Laura didn’t answer right away. When she did, both faces were soft at the eyes, the words catching halfway. “I saw the same thing,” she said, “and it hasn’t stopped hurting since.”

Myra weighed the next words before letting them out. “Have you already decided what you’re going to do when it comes to it?”

Laura looked at her own hands, both sets, and didn’t answer.

Myra didn’t push. “Riley never actually said no at the table. Only that she needed to think about it. You don’t believe she’s still deciding, do you?”

Both faces turned up, and for a moment, there was a flicker of the old Laura: the directness, the dry edge. “No,” they said. “She hasn’t been undecided about any of this since the day she learned who her mother is.”

Myra nodded. “I can’t just sit with that,” she said. “So think about the footbridge—the one Andy described at lunch. Him alone on it, decades on, still looking for you. Are you really willing to be the reason that’s true instead of some version we never had to live through?”

Laura didn’t look up. “I’ve thought about nothing else since he described it.”

Myra waited for Laura’s answer, but it didn’t come. Both faces were still, both bodies hunched in the slumped posture of someone who had already spent a lifetime carrying other people’s pain. The silence was thick, not awkward but weighted, as if the world itself was holding its breath for whatever came next.

Myra let the moment go on, long enough that the noises of the Sunroom—the far-off birdsong, the faint wind flexing the glass, the tiny tick of some unseen clock—rose up and filled the space between them. She tracked the pulse of emotion, the shimmery blue haze of uncertainty rippling off Laura, the constant muffled undertone of sorrow from the rest of the Hotel.

Eventually, Myra spoke again. “If you say yes, you're safe. But you already know that if you—”

“That's not even true,” Laura said, cutting her off, quietly. “Andy said if even one of us says no, he doesn't cross the Gate. Not just for that person. For all of us. If you don't change your answer, it doesn't matter what I say. I'm not safe either way.”

Myra's mouth stayed open for a second on words that no longer fit. She'd said it like her own answer sat off to the side, like it was only her own life on the table and not Laura's too. It wasn't. She'd known that and let herself not think about it anyway, because the version where her no only cost her something was easier to live inside than the one where it cost Laura everything.

“I keep trying to find the version of me who could do it,” she said finally. “Cross that Gate, let it make me into whatever it makes Andy into, and just let that be enough. I can't find her.” Her voice was unsteady now. “I want Mom safe. I want you safe. I want Andy to have his stupid wedding and grow old and never once actually stand on that footbridge. I don't get all of that, and that’s on me, not just on you.”

She didn't say the rest of it out loud, the part she'd only ever thought, when speaking with Riley a few days earlier: that Laura had forgiven her a long time ago for the rumor, for the bridge, for all of it, but the forgiveness had never once made the debt feel paid. Some stubborn, old part of her had kept the books open anyway, waiting for a bill large enough to close them for good.

“I've run the same things through my head a hundred times,” she said, “and there's no order I can put them in where nobody loses.” She stopped, swallowed. “I'm not brave enough. I don't even know if that makes me a coward or just honest. I know it makes me the reason you're not safe, either. Whatever you decide.”

Laura nodded, almost imperceptibly. “I know.” She looked up at Myra, both faces wearing the same faint, brittle smile. “You’re not a coward,” she said, both voices together, then softer: “It would hurt, to be the one left behind.” Myra knew, from Laura’s voice and from the flare of pain, that she wasn’t thinking of Sarah.

Myra didn’t move for a moment. “Do you think he’d be okay? If it went bad, and it was you.”

Laura took a while to answer. “I think he’d have all of you. I have to believe that, or none of this makes any sense.” Both faces tightened. “I don’t know if that’s true, or if I just need it to be, so I can keep breathing.”

Myra didn’t argue with her about it either way.

“And saying no isn’t even safe,” Laura said, quieter now. “You know that too, right? If it comes down to it and I don’t ascend, somebody tries to trade themselves for me anyway. You, or Riley, or both of you fighting over who gets to. I still watch someone I love die. There’s no version where I say no and everyone I care about just… stays.”

“Then why is it still the answer?” Myra asked. “If it costs the same either way.”

“Because it doesn’t. Not exactly.” Laura’s voice was steadier now, like she’d worked this part out already, alone, more than once. “If I stay like this, whatever happens, happens to people who can actually choose it. You. Riley. Me. We’re old enough to say yes or no to our own deaths, God help us. But if I ascend, then the person Ereshkigal takes is random. Mom. Aunt Marie. Somebody in Harvey who doesn't even know I exist. They don’t even get a vote in any of this, and I’m not going to be the reason this stupid Law finds its way to people who never had a say.”

Myra went very still, tails motionless against the settee, in a way Laura almost commented on and then didn’t.

“But if all three of us ascend,” Laura went on, “we’re the ones who lose the choice. Once we’re out of reach, none of us can offer ourselves up instead of Mom, or Marie, or whoever the Law finds next. We’d just have to watch. No trading, no volunteering, nothing.” Her voice cracked, just slightly. “That’s the part that scares me more than dying does. There isn’t a version of this where nobody dies, Myra. I’ve looked. I just get to pick who’s allowed to choose it.”

Myra’s tails twitched, then stilled. She’d forgotten, for a second, that Laura’s memory of her own mother wasn’t theoretical, or that she now had memories of a life with Andy. She knew the life he could have had with her if she had lived, and the half-life he had when she had died. She knew what came after, what it did to a person. “I’m sorry,” Myra said, and for once, she let the words stand.

They sat there, letting the silence do the work, and Myra thought about what it would actually look like: a world where she was safe, at the price of her mother. She thought about the last time she’d heard her mother’s voice, yesterday, the way it cracked on the word darling, as if she’d been saving it for a decade just to use it once. She wondered what it would be like to wake up every day knowing you were alive because someone you loved had decided not to be.

The truth was, she wasn’t afraid of dying. She was afraid of what it would do to the people left.

She realized, suddenly, that this was what the show wanted from them—not the usual lineup of fake betrayals and backstabbing, but the real, raw choices, the kind that had no good outcome. She wanted to be angry about that. What she actually felt was smaller than anger, a dread that sat low in her chest and didn't move.

Laura was the first to break the new silence. “There’s something else,” she said, and for once, both faces didn’t match. The right one was steady, the left one trembled at the mouth, the voice a little thinner. “I’m pregnant.”

Myra’s hands went numb. She tried to answer, but nothing came out. It was only after a few seconds that she realized she’d stopped breathing, too. She forced herself to inhale, then exhale, and found her hands clutching at her own knees so hard her nails left marks.

She didn’t trust herself to say the right thing. She reached out and caught Laura’s hand, both of them, and held them together in her own.

They sat like that, Myra squeezing, Laura letting herself be held.

After a while, Myra found her voice again. “Does Andy know?”

Laura nodded, a fast, helpless jerk. “He knows.” Then, quieter: “I asked Arabella to confirm it, when I first suspected. She told me something else, too. She said if Ereshkigal ever does take me, she'll see to it the baby is safe. She didn't say how. She just said she would.”

Myra's grip on Laura's hand tightened. “She can promise that?”

“I don't know if she can. I know she said it like she meant it.”

Myra didn't have anything to say to that, and didn't try to invent something.

Then, after a second, Laura went on. “I want to be alive, Myra. I want it so bad. I want the baby to be alive. I want Andy to be alive. I want my mother to be alive, and Aunt Marie, and our entire family in Harvey whose only fault is that they share blood with us. If there were a way to know none of them could ever be touched, not Mom, not Marie, not anyone in Harvey, I'd say yes right now. But there's no version of this where I get all of it.”

Myra swallowed. “I’m sorry,” she said. She meant the next part just as much, when it came out a beat later. “Same for me, actually,” she said. “I still don’t know if I could stand losing myself into whatever’s on the other side of that Gate. But if somebody swore to me, no maybes, that my mom and Aunt Sarah and every name in Harvey walked away from this untouched, I’d stop asking myself that question and just go.” Her tails wound tight around the leg of the settee. “I just don’t think anyone can make me that promise and have it hold. Arabella already tried, with the baby, and even you don’t know if she can keep it.” She shook her head. “It’s not that I don’t trust Andy, or Sam, or Claire, to try everything they’ve got. I do. I just… I’m scared of losing everyone I’ve found here.”

They sat with it, the secret and the sorrow and the heat of the Sunroom. Neither tried to fix it. Myra just kept her hand on Laura’s, and Laura didn’t pull away.

The room was so bright it made Myra’s emotional sight flare and shift, all the colors doubled and blended at the edges. Laura blazed with conflicting emotions, and the silvery sheen she and Andy always carried was fainter today. She tried to memorize the feeling, in case it was the last time they’d get to do this. Not the talking—she figured there’d be plenty of that—but the part where you could sit in a room with someone you loved and say the things that hurt, and know you’d both be there for whatever came after.

Myra said, finally, “Do you think you’re going to do it?”

Laura didn’t answer right away. “I don’t know,” she said, and Myra knew it was the truth.

They went quiet again. The only sound was the thump of Myra’s own heart, so loud it felt like it belonged to someone else. She felt a flare of anger, sudden and hot—at the Producers, at Arabella, at the entire machinery of the show that would let it come down to this.

She didn’t voice it. She let it burn out, slow and cold, and focused instead on the hand in hers.

When enough time had passed, Laura said, “Do you think it matters, what we choose? Or is it already written down somewhere, what will happen?”

Myra shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I’d like to think it does.”

Laura’s left face smiled, just a little, the right one stayed sad. “I want to believe that, too,” she said.

The air in the Sunroom was starting to go gold with late afternoon. Myra watched the shadows crawl up the wall, then looked back at Laura.

“Can I ask you something weird?” Myra said.

Laura nodded, both faces at once.

“If you had the chance to do it over—be born to someone else, live a different life, never come here—would you take it?”

Both of Laura’s faces softened. “No,” they said, in absolute unison. “Because then I wouldn’t have Andy. Or you and Riley. Or the baby.” The words rang in Myra, somewhere deep, and she didn't know what to do with them except hold on to them.

“Me neither," she said, and let the rest go unsaid. They stayed in the Sunroom, hand in hand, until the sky outside went from gold to orange, then to the deepening blue of a night that neither of them wanted to face just yet.

When they finally stood, Laura hugged her, both bodies at once, so tight it was almost too much. Myra let herself be folded in, let herself be small for a second, and didn't say out loud that holding on like this was the only thing either of them had actually managed to fix all afternoon. They left the Sunroom together. Nothing about the walk back felt lighter.

---

Andy walked the Hotel’s corridor like a sleepwalker. There was a hush in the air that reminded him of the aftermath of a blizzard—bright, cold, and a little mean, the world stripped of detail and left with only its big, unmoving shapes. He kept walking past the white-and-gold sprawl of the Banquet Hall, past the lounge, past the reading room where he could hear the faint, syncopated click of Dawn’s voice, maybe Chloe’s laughter. He took none of it in. His legs kept moving, and it wasn’t until he hit the end of the corridor that he realized he’d walked straight to the glass doors that opened onto the Inner Gardens.

The air outside was heavy with green: the hot, almost sweet smell of flowers, the sharp cut of fresh grass, the cold undertow of ozone that meant rain was coming sometime soon. He let himself through the doors and didn’t look back.

He didn’t have anywhere to be, so he let his feet take him wherever they wanted. He passed a Mildred in her black uniform, restocking a linen cart in the corridor. For a second, Andy almost stopped to talk to her—he’d promised her during the Dream Date that he would, and he could see the faint shine of expectation in the set of her jaw. But he couldn’t do it, not today. He nodded to her, just enough to acknowledge that he remembered, and kept walking.

He wandered the winding paths of the garden, passing the small pond with the koi in it, the tiny tea house that had never been unlocked, the row of palm trees that someone (Emily, probably) had festooned with party lights despite the fact that there was never a party scheduled for tonight. Every step was background noise.

He only really stopped when he saw the wedding arbor, standing on a small island surrounded by a stream, seven white bridges connecting to it.

It was half-built, strung with white roses and broad loops of gold tulle. Someone had started winding twinkle lights through the rafters but hadn’t finished, so they dangled in a limp spiral down the side. The space beneath it looked like a wound, the grass trod down to bare dirt where chairs had already been set and then removed. Andy wondered, idly, who they’d get to walk anyone down the aisle. He pictured himself in a tuxedo, holding Laura’s hand, the way he’d once played with her in the backyard, the both of them giggling because neither had any idea what it was supposed to look like. The memory made his heart ache.

He sat on a bench a little off the main path, under a canopy of wisteria, and waited for his mind to catch up with the rest of him.

He went over the facts, the ones that mattered: Claire’s loophole was closed to him. If Laura and Myra both said no, that was the end. The Law would find a way, and he’d lose Laura for real this time, and maybe lose the baby, too. There was a way out, but only if he could convince both to walk through it, which meant dooming one of their mothers, or a Harvey relative, instead. Or finding a way to protect all of them.

He’d never wanted to be a god. The whole idea made his skin crawl. Even before Claire said it out loud, he’d known—the moment the conversation turned and the shape of that final loophole became clear—that whatever power waited past the Gate, it was nothing he wanted. He was good at many things, but he’d watched enough Greek tragedy to know what came of mortals who took power into their own hands, and he knew exactly the flavor of disaster it portended.

But the thought of losing Laura—of watching her die again, or worse, watching her fade out of reach, inch by inch—was more terrifying than all the rest. Before she had come back, some days, the memory of her death in Warrenville had been a shadow he could manage, something quietly folded inside him. Other days, it had been a living thing, black and endless and breathing just behind his eyes, and it took everything he had to keep it from leaking into the way he spoke, the way he touched, the way he held onto the people he loved.

He didn’t want to be a god, but he’d do it if he had to. He’d burn out every last human part of himself to keep her alive, even if that meant nothing of him was left at the end. Some bitter part of him hated that the choice was his to make, as if the universe had decided that after all this time, after all the careful avoidance, it was his turn to pull the lever and find out what kind of person he really was.

He reached for the bond, the one that had always been there between them, even before they’d had the words for it. Sometimes it was the only thing that made sense at all.

He reached for it now, as a test, a confession, a way of taking the measure of what was left. It was still there, but it felt thinner than it had lately, stretched out like a filament so fine that one sharp tug might break it. He wondered, not for the first time, if maybe the bond depended on more than magic—if it was just a mirror of how close they really felt, how much he’d managed to hurt her over the last few days. If so, he’d already failed her, and not by a little.

He cast back over their last conversation. The way she’d let her head rest on his shoulder, barely breathing, her words ground down to nothing by the weight of what they weren’t saying. The way she’d looked at Myra, a kind of desperate helplessness, and then at him, as if to ask whether he’d forgive her for wanting to protect her mother. He knew, with a bitter certainty, that he would. He’d forgive her anything. He always had.

He didn’t know how long he sat there, marinating in his own unresolved grief, before Arabella appeared. She always showed up at exactly the moment you’d run out of thoughts and were about to start talking to yourself out loud. Today was no different.

She settled onto the bench beside him with easy, practiced economy, as though she’d been walking the Hotel’s paths for hours and this was just another scheduled stop. She wore a simple slate-gray shift, not the Host’s dress, and her dark hair fell loose over her left shoulder, catching the last of the afternoon light in deep copper sparks.

She sat with him in silence for a few minutes, matching his posture, hands folded in her lap, watching the wind chase patterns across the garden lawn. He was grateful for it. Every other moment of the show was so laced with meaning and double-meaning that the absence of performance felt like a kindness.

When she finally spoke, her voice was low and unobtrusive, but the words were sharper than they needed to be.

“I do not know how this ends,” she said.

He didn’t answer. There was nothing to say.

She rested one hand flat on the bench between them, palm down, the gesture almost childlike in its plainness. “I understand how you feel, Andy. Hope is not wholly gone. But there is a real chance you will lose her. I would spare you the pain if I could, but I cannot.”

He didn’t look at her, but he could feel her watching him. He traced the grain of the wooden slats beneath his fingers and tried to think of a way to carry that knowledge without letting it hollow him out. He failed.

He glanced at her hand, and for the first time he noticed a thin, pale line that ran from the base of her palm to the edge, diagonal and delicate as a cat’s scratch. “What’s that?” he asked, not expecting an answer.

Arabella looked down at her hand, flexed her fingers, then closed them into a loose fist. “Every working costs something,” she said. “This one was already spent, a long time ago.” She turned her face back to the garden, expression unreadable. “I made a promise to Sarah once, before Laura died. I told her I would watch over her daughter. I failed. And now I am watching the same danger come around again, and I cannot guarantee that it will not fail again.”

There was a depth of pain in her voice that he hadn’t heard before, a kind of resignation that felt honest in a way he’d never gotten from her in all the weeks they’d spent together. It made him realize, for the first time, that the Host wasn’t immune to the Hotel’s cruelties; she just hid it better than the rest of them.

Andy said, “You don’t have to have the answer right now.” It came out softer than he meant, almost a whisper.

Arabella’s shoulders dropped, just a fraction, a visible crack in her posture since he’d arrived at the Hotel. “I know,” she said, and let the quiet fill in the rest.

He surprised himself by reaching out and pulling her in. Some part of him recognized the need in her, the way she didn’t move when he put his arm around her shoulders, the way her head rested exactly where Laura’s had been only moments before. Her hand found a fold of his shirt and held on, the grip light but insistent, not asking for reassurance so much as a momentary anchor.

They stayed that way for a long time. Andy didn’t count the minutes, didn’t need to. The world felt suspended, as if the garden’s slow-motion hush had seeped into the bones of the Hotel itself. He let himself stop thinking, just for a little while, and it was a relief.

They didn’t talk about the wedding, or the challenge, or what waited for them after sundown. They just watched the light change, the wisteria’s shadows stretching and shrinking on the path, the distant shapes of Mildreds setting up for the next day’s event and moving in unison like a flock of urban crows.

After a while, still resting against his shoulder, Arabella asked, quietly, “Do you want to know where the hope actually lives, or would you rather not carry it yet?”

Andy went still. “Tell me.”

“Laura and Myra have not said this to you, and I suspect neither meant for you to hear it from me instead of them.” Her voice stayed low, unhurried. “But I have sat across from enough grief in this Hotel to recognize it when it is conditional. Both of them would say yes today, without an hour of hesitation, if they believed no one they loved would pay for it. Their mothers. Each other. The relatives in Harvey who do not know your name, let alone theirs. That is the whole of what stands between where they are and where you need them to be.”

He felt the words land somewhere between his ribs, hope and dread arriving at the same address. “Do you know how to make that true?”

“No.” She said it plainly, without the performance she usually wrapped around difficult truths. “If I knew how, I would have done it for Sarah sixteen years ago, and none of us would be sitting here. I do not have it. I do not know that it exists.” She sat up then, putting a little air back between them, and met his eyes. “I only know that if it does, and if you find it, you will not need to ask either of them a second time.”

They sat a few minutes longer, a strange and peaceful kinship settling over them. Andy tried to imagine what it meant to be Arabella, carrying centuries of other people’s suffering, never able to intervene except as the rules allowed. He wondered if it was like being a parent, or a therapist, or a god—a mixture of duty and despair, and the constant struggle not to take it personally.

He said, “If you could go back, would you do it over?”

Arabella didn’t look at him. “It does not matter,” she said. “There are no do-overs.”

Andy nodded, and in the gesture he felt a kinship, a sameness, that surprised him. Maybe that was the Hotel’s secret, the one thing it gave you in exchange for all the things it took away: the knowledge that everyone here, even the ones in charge, was just improvising their way through the worst moments of their lives, hoping not to make things worse.

He let the silence return, and for the first time, it felt bearable.

When Andy finally stood, Arabella looked up at him, her eyes wet but not fragile. “Riley will need you steady,” Arabella said. “Not solved. Steady.” She touched his hand, brief as a blessing. “Give her that, today.”

Andy nodded. He wanted to say thank you, but it felt wrong, so he didn’t. He left her sitting on the bench, hands folded in her lap, face turned to the wisteria.

As he walked back toward the Hotel, Andy realized he felt just a little less empty than before. Not better, not fixed. Just less alone with it. And for today, maybe that would be enough.

---

Riley barely made it through the door before Chloe closed it behind her, fingers lingering on the handle as if she might need to keep the world out a second longer. The room was still half-lit from the afternoon, gauzy sunlight casting a stripe of gold across the bed. Riley crossed straight to the window, arms folded, and stood there breathing the salt-and-sugar air off the sea until her shoulders dropped back below her ears.

She didn’t turn when Chloe said, “You don’t have to pretend with me. Not in here.” There was no accusation, only the factual warmth of someone who’d spent a lifetime convincing people it was safe to come undone in her presence.

Riley watched the horizon and said nothing, so Chloe sat on the edge of the bed and waited, like a counselor who’d learned that some silences did the job all by themselves.

After a while, Riley said, “You heard me at the table. About not leaving my sisters behind.”

Chloe nodded, though Riley couldn’t see it. “I did.”

“That’s what I meant. Every word. I’m not letting it happen again. If someone gets taken, it's going to be me.” Her voice didn't rise. It just went flat, the way it does when she's already made her peace with something she hates.

Chloe was quiet a moment. Then, she said, “I remember the Third Challenge. When you doubled back to keep the Mildreds away from everyone else. Nobody asked you to do that, but you did.” She let that memory hang in the air, no gloss, no lesson. Just the fact.

Riley shrugged, but there was less defiance than fatigue in the gesture. “People needed it.”

“They need you now, too.”

“Yeah,” said Riley. “That’s the point, Chlo.” She turned, finally, back into the room. She didn’t look at Chloe. She looked past her, scanning the books on the shelf, the glass of water she’d left on the nightstand that morning, the small trinket of a blue marble she hadn’t realized she’d brought from Sandra’s garden.

She picked up the marble, turned it over in her hand. “You want to know the real problem?”

Chloe smiled, faint but real. “If you want to tell me.”

Riley sat beside her on the bed, not quite touching. She stared at the marble, thumb rolling it back and forth. “I don’t know how to do any of this. The family thing. I’ve never had one that stayed. Never learned the steps.” She flexed her hands in her lap. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to call Myra just to say hi, or what I’m allowed to ask Sandra, or what a sister is even supposed to be to someone you had a crush on and who died sixteen years before this season.”

Chloe waited. Riley found herself grateful for it, the way Chloe didn’t fill the air with easy answers.

“It’s like there’s this whole choreography I’m supposed to know,” said Riley, “and every time I try to join in, I step on someone else’s foot. I keep thinking I’ll figure it out, but every family I ever got just got ripped away before I got past the warm-up.”

Chloe let a silence stretch long enough for the thought to breathe, then put her hand on Riley’s knee. “You can be new at this. There’s no right answer, just showing up.”

Riley let the hand stay, didn’t twitch away like she usually did. “That’s the thing. The family isn’t the part I’m most worried about.” She turned, finally meeting Chloe’s eyes—hazel and kind, never blinking. “I keep having these moments, especially since the wedding got announced, where my Dead Reckoning kicks in. For Andy. I mean, it’s always there, the little pull, the echo, but lately it’s been constant. Like if I close my eyes, I can see the whole damn map of where he is, what he’s doing, what he’s thinking about.”

Chloe looked at her, not startled, just waiting.

Riley said, “It's not even about the bond. It's about caring.” Riley picked at a loose thread on the blanket. “You know what actually got me? Not the big stuff. It's that I catch myself checking where he is before I've even decided to. Like some part of me needs to know he's fine before I can be. I spent all season telling myself I didn't care what happened to him. Now I can't tell the difference between caring about him and just being scared of what it'd do to the rest of us if something happened to him.” She let out a low laugh, bitter at the edges. “What am I supposed to do with that? I don’t know what I want from him. I just know it hurts to think of losing any of you.”

Chloe’s hand was still warm and steady on her knee. “You don’t have to want anything from him,” she said. “It doesn’t cancel out what’s between us, or between you and your family. It just… is.” She was blushing now, but she didn’t pull away. “I’ve been there, Riley. You can care for more than one person. It’s allowed.”

Riley laughed, sharp and surprised. “You make it sound so simple.”

“It’s not simple,” Chloe said, “but it’s real. I think that counts for something.”

Riley let the words settle. She looked down at the marble, held it up to the sunlight, watched the blue light ripple across Chloe’s bare thigh. She wanted to ask what came next, but she realized she didn’t need to.

Chloe hugged her then, sudden and soft, arms sliding around Riley’s back and pulling her close. “Just be you,” she said, into Riley’s hair. “You don’t have to be anything else. Andy cares about you for exactly who you are.”

For a second, Riley didn’t move. Then she hugged back, fiercely, holding on like it was the only solid thing in the world.

They must have sat like that for five minutes, or maybe an hour. Chloe lost the measure of time, her eyes closed, head resting on Riley’s shoulder, the weight of the other girl’s arm around her both a comfort and a secret promise. When Riley finally exhaled and shifted, Chloe let her go, but only enough that they could both sit up and look at each other. The hush in the room wasn’t awkward, just full—like the quiet after a thunderstorm.

Chloe reached over and brushed her thumb along Riley’s cheekbone, brushing away a lock of hair that had fallen loose. “Is that everything?” she asked, her voice gentle, but with an undercurrent of you-can-tell-me-anything.

Riley barked a short, surprised laugh. “Not even close,” she said, with a hint of her old bite, but it was the softer version, the one she only used with Chloe. “I was going to wait to say it, but if we’re doing honesty hour…”

Chloe’s eyebrows went up. “I love honesty hour,” she said. “It’s the only kind of math I’m any good at.”

Riley smirked, then went serious. “The other day, I kissed Emily.” She watched Chloe’s face, like she was waiting for something to break. “It was the Dream thing. You know, the one where someone dreams about Emily and the next day you’re basically magnetic until it happens. This time, it was me.” She flexed her hands in her lap, restless, then stilled them. “What’s fucked up isn’t the dream, or the magic, or whatever. It’s that I liked it. I keep replaying it, not as a thing that happened to me, but as something I want. And I don’t know if that means I’m a traitor or just, like, terminally messed up.”

Chloe didn’t answer right away. She ran a fingertip in a circle on Riley’s knee, small, grounding. “Okay,” she said, after a pause. “First thing? You’re not a traitor. You’re not even a bad girlfriend. You’re Riley. You’re supposed to want what you want, even if it’s more than one thing. Or person. That’s the whole point of… all of this.” She made a vague gesture that encompassed the Hotel, the world, maybe the last several years of both their lives.

Riley watched her, sharp and attentive.

Chloe went on, “Second thing? That same transformation hit me, once. Or something like it. I had this dream where Emily and I were sitting in the garden, and she just…” Chloe blushed, then shrugged. “It was nice. It didn’t make me love you less. It just made me realize I could want someone and not have it mean the end of the world.”

Riley’s voice was a little raw. “So you’re not mad?”

Chloe shook her head. “Nope. I’m relieved, actually. It means I’m not the only one who thinks Emily is beautiful.” She smiled, slow and a little wicked. “Also, maybe we should check if she wants to do that with both of us, one of these days.”

Riley snorted, caught between laughter and shock. “You’re dangerous,” she said. “You know that?”

Chloe looked smug. “I’m a kindergarten teacher, Riley. My job is making people feel okay about wanting things.”

They both grinned, and the mood lightened. The gold bar of light on the floor had shifted almost all the way to the wall, the last of the day giving the room a syrupy, dreamy glow.

Chloe checked the clock. “You have maybe twenty minutes before you need to be at the door for Andy,” she said. “Do you want to spend it hiding, or do you want me to make you a snack, or do you want to talk about Emily some more?”

Riley didn’t move. Her face was open in a way Chloe hadn’t seen since before all this started, maybe ever. “I don’t want to go,” she said. “I want to stay right here.”

Chloe nodded, then slid off the bed and knelt in front of Riley, taking her face in both hands. “Hey,” she said, quietly. “Look at me.”

Riley looked.

Chloe said, “You’re allowed to feel every bit of this. The fear, the want, the not knowing. It’s not a contest. You can show up for your sisters and still want to be wanted. You don’t have to pick one or the other.”

Riley swallowed, but didn’t look away. “I love you, you know.”

Chloe’s breath caught, just a second, then she pressed her forehead to Riley’s and said, “I love you, too. Even on days when you want to punch the sun out of the sky.”

Riley managed a smile, thin but not fake. Chloe kissed her on the cheek, then on the mouth, soft and slow. She straightened up and fussed with Riley's shirt, smoothing the collar, then tamed a stray lock of hair behind her ear.

“Go knock him dead,” Chloe said. Riley stood, still braced for whatever the date was about to hand her, and left, closing the door quietly behind her. Chloe listened to the sound of her steps in the hallway, then sat back on the bed, hands folded in her lap, and let herself breathe for a while.

She didn't know what she'd say to Riley if tonight went the way she was afraid it might. She just knew she'd be there when it did.