Debbie slid a plate across the counter. Eggs, toast, two strips of bacon fanned out on one side like she'd thought about the arrangement. She did that, I was learning. Made things presentable even when nothing was.
"Eat up, honey. You've been sleeping late."
I sat down at the counter and picked up a fork. The eggs were scrambled, a little wet, cooked in butter. The butter was strong and underneath it the coffee and the soap on Debbie's hands and whatever she'd sprayed on her neck before coming downstairs. Perfume, or lotion. The house smelled like a house where someone lived and cared about the details. There was a magnet on the fridge behind her that said WORLD'S BEST at the top and then the rest was hidden by a takeout menu pinned over it.
I took a bite. The eggs were good.
Two minutes ago, give or take whatever time means when you die and come back, I was on the floor of someone else's bedroom with two bullets in me and the taste of copper where the taste of eggs was now. I put the fork down for a second and picked it back up. The eggs were good and I was hungry and I was going to eat the eggs.
"Did you sleep okay?" Debbie was leaning against the counter across from me. The bathrobe had shifted again. One side had pulled away from her collarbone and the strap of whatever she was wearing underneath was showing, white, thin, cutting into the skin of her shoulder just enough to leave a shallow line. She was holding her coffee with both hands wrapped around the mug. Her fingers were long. Her nails were short and unpainted and one of them had a tiny chip on the edge.
"Yeah," I said. "Fine."
My voice cracked again. Less than before, but it was there, and her eyes went soft when she heard it. She thought I was him. She thought I was the kid who'd buried his dad yesterday and slept badly and came downstairs with that voice because grief does things to your body. She was being careful with me, gentle, and I was looking at the strap on her shoulder.
I ate the eggs. I ate the bacon. The toast was dry and I ate it anyway because she'd made it and she was watching me eat and the watching was keeping her upright.
"I was thinking," she said, and then stopped. She looked at the mug. Took a sip. Looked at me again. "I was thinking we could go through some of Frank's things today. When you're ready. There's no rush."
Frank. The dead dad. The murdered dad. Hanged by a Russian enforcer named Dimitri who'd described the experience fondly, according to the wiki page I'd skimmed once and the walkthrough video I'd had playing in the background while I ate pizza in my old apartment. That had been information on a screen. Now it was a woman standing in front of me whose hands were shaking slightly around a coffee mug and whose eyes kept going glassy and then clearing, over and over, like a fight she was having with her own face.
"Sure," I said. "Whenever."
She smiled. The puffy eyes made it wrong. She turned back to the sink and started washing the pan and the bathrobe shifted again and the line of her back showed through the fabric, the shape of her waist where the belt cinched, the curve below it. I looked at my plate.
In the game, this scene was three dialogue boxes. "Good morning sweetie." "Did you sleep okay?" "I was thinking we could go through Frank's things." Click, click, click. I'd mashed through them in two seconds because the plot wasn't why I'd installed the game and the grief wasn't something I'd cared about when it was text in a font I could skip. I couldn't skip it now. She was right there with her puffy eyes and her butter eggs and her body under that bathrobe and I'd seen all of it on a screen and none of it had been real and now all of it was real and I was the wrong man in the right chair.
This was not a game. These were not sprites.
I was chewing toast and thinking this when the stairs creaked.
Footsteps. Heavier than you'd expect from someone who looked like Jenny Cummings, but she was coming down with the full commitment of a person who didn't care what the stairs thought about it. Thump. Thump. Thump. I turned on the stool.
She came around the corner in an oversized t-shirt that hung to mid-thigh, grey, no logo, the collar stretched out enough to show one shoulder. Her hair was a mess. Dark brown, long, tangled from sleep, the lavender hair-tie from her game sprite nowhere in sight. No makeup. No choker. Her legs were bare below the shirt and they were long and they were the first thing I noticed because I'm me and that's what I do and she was twenty-two and her legs went on for a while.
Her face was sharp. Grey eyes, same as Debbie's but colder. Mouth tight, already done with the morning before coffee. She looked at me the way you'd look at a piece of furniture you keep bumping into.
"Morning, Jenny," Debbie said. "There's eggs."
"I'm good." Jenny walked past me. Close enough that her smell hit. Sleep-warm skin and cheap vanilla, shampoo or body wash, the kind that comes in a pink bottle. She reached past me for a mug from the cabinet above the counter. Her arm went across my field of vision and the oversized shirt rode up on one side and the curve of her hip above her underwear line was right there, black cotton, and I looked at the wall.
In the game, I'd paid forty dollars in microtransactions to unlock her premium cam scenes. In person, she was standing three feet away smelling like vanilla and scratching her hip through the shirt while she waited for the coffee maker to finish, and she hadn't looked at me once.
She poured coffee. Black. Took a sip, made a face, added sugar. Took another sip. Leaned against the counter and scrolled her phone. Her thumbs moved fast. The screen reflected in her grey eyes, blue-white light.
"Jenny, sweetie, are you sure you don't want something to eat?"
"I said I'm good, Mom."
Debbie's mouth pressed flat. She didn't push it. She turned back to the dishes.
I watched Jenny scroll. She hadn't said a word to me. Hadn't looked at me. I was sitting right there and she was treating me like the stool I was sitting on, and I knew exactly why. In the game, the MC was a loser to her. A twerp. A nobody living in her mom's house. That was the starting position. That was where her route BEGAN, and the route was long, and at the other end of it she called him "stud" and let him photograph her naked and eventually fell for him in a way that surprised both of them. I knew the whole arc. I'd played it. I'd clicked through every node.
And right now she was standing in front of me in a stretched-out t-shirt, not looking at me, and I was eighteen and skinny and she had no reason to look at me and I couldn't tell her that I knew things about her that she hadn't told anyone. That she ran a webcam show behind that locked bedroom door. That she was broke and lying about it. That she wanted someone to actually see her, not through a screen.
I couldn't tell her any of that. I was a kid at a kitchen counter eating toast.
Jenny finished her coffee. Put the mug in the sink without rinsing it. Debbie looked at the mug. Didn't say anything.
"Going out later," Jenny said to no one in particular. She was already heading for the stairs.
"Jenny, honey, remember we have-"
"I know, Mom." She was gone. Thump thump thump up the stairs. Door closed. Music started, muffled, some pop song with too much bass.
The kitchen was quiet again. Debbie stood at the sink holding the unwashed mug and looking at the spot where Jenny had been standing. She put the mug down. Picked up the sponge. Put it down.
"She's having a hard time," Debbie said. "With Frank."
"Yeah."
I didn't know if that was true. Jenny's relationship with Frank in the game was never really explored in the parts I'd played. I didn't know how she'd taken his death because I'd never cared enough to read the dialogue. I'd skipped it. I'd skipped her grief the same way I'd skipped Debbie's, and now I was sitting in a kitchen where the grief was real and the women carrying it were real and I'd fast-forwarded through the parts that would have told me what they needed.
That was a problem I was going to have a lot, probably.
Debbie turned the faucet on. The water hit the pan and steam curled up and she scrubbed at the stuck egg on the bottom. Her shoulders were tight. The bathrobe had gone damp at the cuffs where the water splashed.
"I'm okay," I said. "For the record."
She looked over her shoulder. The eyes were glassy again.
"I know, sweetie." She smiled. The same wrong smile. "I know you are."
She didn't know anything about me. She didn't know the person she was smiling at had been dead for less than an hour and was currently thinking about her bra strap, about the eggs being good, about the quarter-million-dollar mortgage coming, about the two Russians who were going to knock on her front door in a few days and scare her badly enough that she'd start keeping the chain on.
I knew all of that. Roughly. From a walkthrough I'd skimmed.
And I was sitting at her counter and the coffee was getting cold and outside the window the sun was hitting the lawn and the neighbor's sprinkler was running in a slow arc across grass that was too green for any world I'd ever lived in.
I drank the coffee. It was good.
The doorbell rang.