Weeks pass. Then months.

  Lilia becomes the best part of my week without either of us deciding that. She’s just there, easy and consistent, and I realize slowly that I haven’t had something like this since I was small enough not to know how rare it was.

  She tells me more about her mom as time goes on. Not performed, not all at once. Just in pieces, the way you share things when you’re not trying to impress anyone.

  Her mom drove two hours once to bring Lilia a jacket she’d left at home because it was going to rain.

  “She said she was coming anyway,” Lilia says.

  “Was she?”

  “She was absolutely not coming anyway.” Lilia shakes her head, laughing. “She was at home. She got in the car specifically for the jacket.”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  I laugh with her. I genuinely laugh.

  Her mom remembers things Lilia mentioned months before. Her mom makes her birthday cake from scratch every year, specific flavor, always right. Her mom once sat outside her bedroom door for an hour because Lilia said she wanted to be alone but her mom could tell alone wasn’t what she actually needed.

  “She just sat there?” I say.

  “Just sat there. Didn’t knock. Didn’t say anything. I opened the door eventually and she was just. There. With tea.” Lilia smiles. “She’s always just there.”

  I listen to every story.

  I love them. That’s the honest thing. I love hearing about this woman. Something about her fills a shape in me I don’t examine too closely, and I let Lilia talk and I ask questions and I feel, in some strange way, like I’m being fed something I’ve been hungry for without knowing I was hungry.

  “What’s her name?” I ask one afternoon. I’ve been not asking for months.

  Lilia says the name.

  My stomach moves.

  It’s a common name. It doesn’t have to mean anything. I tell myself that.

  “Nice name,” I say.

  “Right? It suits her.”

  We keep talking. My voice stays exactly where it is.

  But that night I write the name in my notebook and I look at it.

  It’s a common name, I write. It’s not her.

  I close the notebook.

  I open it again.

  But what if.