“I said, is it about money?”

Lore stared at him, confused. “Is what about money?”

Miles gave her a look. “If it is, I can start paying you rent. But I thought Gilbert had left you money, too . . . ?”

True to his exasperatingly kind form and his love of surprises, Gil had left both of his “honorary grandchildren” a generous sum of money, but Lore still hadn’t touched it, except to do maintenance on the brownstone. It didn’t feel right to use it for anything else.

“It’s Gil’s money,” Lore said.

Miles seemed to understand. “Well, you could get a part-time barista job like everyone else. It’s basically a rite of passage. You could even charge for the self-defense classes.”

She shook her head, trying to focus her exhausted web of feelings and thoughts onto the single thread of their conversation.

“I’m not going to charge anyone who wants to learn how to protect themselves,” Lore said, keeping her voice low. The gym owner on 125th let her use some of his equipment when it was too cold to run outside in exchange for teaching the free lessons, and that was more than enough for her. “And it’s not about the money.”

“Are you sure? Because you’ve been reusing the same three gross Ziploc bags for the last year,” Miles said.

She held up a finger. “They aren’t gross, because I wash them out every time. What are you doing to save the environment?”

His eyebrows rose. He was interning that summer with the City Council and studying sustainable urban development at Columbia.

“Don’t answer that,” Lore said.

Miles was doing that thing she hated where he waited for her to talk while looking extremely compassionate and understanding.

“Besides,” she said, “I do have a job. I’m the super, remember?”

Lore had originally come to work for Gil as a live-in caretaker, but her role had expanded after she changed out the batteries in the smoke detectors—which said everything about the threshold of tech-savviness in their building at the time.

“By the way, Super, can you maybe come up and fix my window before winter?”

Lore scowled, smoothing a hand back over the mass of frizz the rain had gifted to her.

“Okay, it’s a little about the money,” she admitted, “but it’s about other things, too.”

“Gil things?” Miles pressed.

She pulled the necklace out of her pocket, examining the place the gold chain had snapped. Her neck felt strange without it; Gil had given it to her three years ago, on her first birthday after returning to the city, and she had only taken it off once since then.

A feather fallen from a wing is not lost, Gil had told her, but free.

It had reminded her of that, of what she had gained when she’d offered to work for Gil, every day. She had been hired to help take care of him after he had a bad fall and it became clear he couldn’t keep living alone, but he had done so much more for her. He had been a friend, a mentor, and a reminder that not all men were as harsh and cruel as the ones she had grown up around.

“It’s been a few months now . . .” Miles began.

“It’s been six,” Lore said sharply.

“Six,” he said, nodding. “We don’t really talk about it that often—” Lore opened her mouth to dismiss that, but he held up his hand. “All I want to say is that I’m here, and I always want to talk about him.”

“Well, I don’t,” Lore said. Gil had told her that sometimes you had to push away the bad things until they left you alone for good. One day his loss wouldn’t hurt so bad.

“You know . . .” Miles said in a familiar tone.

“I’m not interested in school,” she told him, for the hundredth time. “You don’t even seem to like it.”

“You don’t have to like something you need,” Miles pointed out.

“You don’t need to do something you don’t enjoy,” Lore shot back.

Miles blew out a sigh through his nose. “I just think . . . whatever happened to you, you have to start thinking about your future, otherwise your past is always going to hold you back.”

Lore swallowed, but couldn’t clear the tightness in her throat. “How did you find out about the ring anyway? Did you follow me or something?”

“I was out with my friend from school last night and he started talking about this super-crazy, super-secret fighting ring and mentioned a girl with a scar that ran from the outer corner of her eye down to her chin, and I said, wow, that sounds like my friend Lore. . . .”

Without thinking, she rubbed that side of her face against her shoulder. The scar was thin, but it hadn’t faded with age.

“Your friend wasn’t the guy I beat up, right?” she asked. “Just checking.”

“No, but I have never been so simultaneously amazed and terrified in my whole life,” Miles said.

His phone gave a shrill ring, making them both jump.

“Is that your alarm?” Lore asked, her hand still pressed to her chest. They’d lived in the same house for years and she’d never heard anything like it.

“Sort of,” he said, then answered the call with “Ma, what are you doing up? It’s like four o’clock in the morning— You absolutely do not need to print out those forms now, write yourself a note to do it at a normal hour and— No, you go back to bed— Well, if I wasn’t up, you would have woken me up— Ma. Go back to bed!”

Mrs. Yoon’s muffled words were filled with the kind of energy no one was supposed to have this early. Lore watched as Miles closed his eyes and breathed in for patience.

“Augh. Fine. You checked all the cords, right?” he asked. “Made sure they didn’t come loose?”

Miles sent Lore an apologetic look, but she didn’t mind at all. It was nice, actually. If nothing else, it gave her the opportunity to try to picture him growing up as a baby goth amidst the palm trees and bright pastels of Florida. He was an only child, and sometimes, like now, it really showed.

Miles sucked in another deep breath. “Did you actually turn the printer on? The button should be glowing.”

Lore heard Mrs. Yoon’s sheepish laughter in response and her loving “Thank you, Michael.”

Miles pressed a hand to his face in exasperation, whether at her question or at his given name, which only his family ever used, and told her that he loved her in both Korean and English, and hung up the phone.

“She made me change the ringtone when I went home last month,” Miles said. “She thought I wasn’t answering because the old one was too quiet, and now I feel too guilty to ever change it.”

Lore smiled, even as something twisted deep in her chest. You never missed calls like that until they stopped coming. “She just wants to hear your voice.”

She wants you to remember her, Lore thought. Her mind drifted, suddenly untethered. The world around her became haloed with darkness until she only saw Castor’s face, and the way the shadows had caressed it.

“Hey,” Miles said suddenly. “You’re all right, aren’t you?”

“I’m fine,” Lore insisted.

She would be. For him. For herself.

For Gil.