The two-man band, with Riley hovering close as audience and instigator, finally hit its weekend objective. Focus arrived like a weather change. Scattered lines tightened into a narrative. A chorus rose and locked into place. They recorded a rough acoustic demo. The battered microphone hissed with the room's cold, but even through the distortion the thing held. It was a song. For three minutes the duplex's clutter and tension fell away, replaced by a stillness so dense it felt earned. A coherent piece of art formed in the center of the room. When they played back the first take, Quinn sat in the corner chair and let the sound do what it did. The air changed. The song carried a practiced focus, the unmistakable feeling of something working. The driveway humiliation receded. The sting of the altered sweatshirt dulled at the edges. Silence followed the final chord, heavy and unanimous, the exact product Darren had promised when he called from three thousand miles away.
The coherence was sharp enough to tempt him. Almost a fair price for a thirty-day countdown to the street. Over the dying hiss of the recording, Riley caught his eye and offered a small, private smile. Quinn felt the weight of the Y on his chest and understood, all at once, that the song was real and the house was already becoming a ghost.
On the third pass of the demo, the room had settled into a strange, patient quiet. Darren leaned forward, listening as if the song were proof. Quinn stayed back in the corner chair with the sweatshirt warm against his leg. His thumb traced the rough, irregular embroidery of the Y, following the uneven edges as if the thread might explain itself.
Across from him, Riley held the notice in one hand, the paper already creased from being folded and unfolded. With the other she ran chapstick over her mouth in slow, unhurried strokes, sealing herself against the dry air as if that were the only problem worth addressing. The cherries reached him, bright and cloying. She pressed her lips together and looked up, and the smile she gave him was small, private, complete.
He looked down at the stitching again. Not ink. Not a quick joke. Thread pulled through fabric again and again, the kind of work you did when you wanted something to last. He could see her doing it, patient, exact, investing time in an insult the way other people invested in gifts.
A sharp point of stitching pricked his thumb. The sensation was quick and bright. It cleared his mind the way cold water does and a thought arrived with a humiliating clarity. This wasn't meant to be funny for long. It was meant to stay.
Riley hadn't needed a grand plan. She only needed pressure and a place for it to build. Quinn's arrival had been the first tightening, a third body in a space built for two, a change to the lease without the paperwork ever admitting it. The music did the second, inevitable in a duplex with thin walls and a man next door who heard rules as ownership. The photo had been the third, the perfect straw, pinned where it could be discovered in the ordinary course of things, waiting.
Everything after that had been extra. The driveway negotiations and the small humiliations, the winter theater of blocked cars and lifted hands, all of it something she could watch and enjoy without touching. When consequences threatened to land on Quinn, she stepped in with breezy ownership, pulled the spotlight onto herself in a way that kept him useful. Even with the cruiser lights in the mirror, she managed the optics. A kiss held a beat too long. The door left open. A bright, practiced normalcy that sent the cop back to the road.
When the floor dropped out, the job arrived like mercy and functioned like a tether. Even her affection had a shape to it, warming when he aligned, cooling when he didn't.
Maybe she had planned it. Maybe she had only recognized what could be used and kept using it. Quinn couldn't tell anymore, and the not-knowing didn't soften anything. It only made it colder.
Quinn stood and the sweatshirt came with him, heavy and soft, already warm from his body. The cherries were in it, faint but unmistakable, like a handprint. He felt the stitched letters shift against his skin and the thought arrived with a clean, humiliating clarity, sudden as a taste. What am I doing.
He pulled it over his head in one motion, as if it were tainted, and the room seemed to sharpen. He took his beer from the table and crossed to Riley. Up close, her mouth shone. She looked pleased, almost tender, as if she were watching him accept something.
Quinn let the sweatshirt drop into her lap.
"Here," he said. "Your joke back." His voice surprised him by staying level.
For a second she didn't move. The fabric sat across her knees like an offering. Darren looked up, caught between confusion and warning.
Quinn turned away and walked down the hall with his beer, shut his door, and left the click of the latch to speak for him.
The demo ended. The walls went dead. The cherries lingered.