The job posting was simple. Short-range retrieval, two hours, solo-friendly rate. Will took it without thinking much about it. He'd done a dozen solo jobs over the past two months. This was just another one.
He mentioned it on his way out the door, already half-gone. "Back in a couple hours. Easy one."
"Sure," Zeraya said, not looking up from the gear she was cleaning.
He was gone four hours. The job ran long. Nothing dangerous, just a longer route than posted, a delay at the dispatch point on the way back. He walked in expecting nothing, the way he always did.
Zeraya was sitting exactly where he'd left her. The gear was clean. It had been clean for a while.
"Hey," Will said. "Sorry, took longer than—"
"It's fine."
It was not fine, and Will, eleven months of reading people notwithstanding, did not immediately clock why. He clocked the tone, the flatness of it, and reacted to the tone instead of the cause.
"It was one job," he said. "It's not a big deal."
"I said it's fine."
"You don't sound fine."
"Must be nice," Zeraya said, still not looking up, voice even in a way that wasn't actually even at all, "not having to check in with anyone."
Will opened his mouth. Closed it. He genuinely didn't understand, not yet, what had just happened, only that something had, and that whatever he said next was going to make it worse no matter what it was.
"...Okay," he said. "Fine."
"Fine," Zeraya agreed.
Neither door slammed. They just closed a little more firmly than usual, in opposite directions.
...I am going to say nothing, Khan said, quietly, once. I want that on the record. I am choosing silence. This is growth.
Two days of "pass the salt."
"Here."
"Thanks."
Nothing wrong, on the surface. Everything wrong, underneath. Lariya noticed within about four minutes of the first dinner. She always did. She handled it the way she handled everything, with the deadpan diplomacy of a kid who'd had practice. She didn't take sides. She just got quieter, spent more time in her room, came out for meals and left again fast.
By the third day, it was clear to everyone except the two adults involved that the two adults involved were not going to fix this themselves.
Lariya spent everything.
Will found out later, much later, standing in the wreckage, exactly how much "everything" meant. In the moment all he registered was the smell. Real food. Actual ingredients, not protein paste, not scavenged starch-equivalents. It was the kind of smell that didn't belong in this apartment, in this world, on a Tuesday.
It went wrong fast.
Something on the stove boiled over. Lariya, fourteen and determined and completely out of her depth, tried to fix it and made it worse. Smoke started. Thin at first, then thick, then accompanied by a small, panicked whump of actual flame as something caught.
The photograph was on the counter. She'd brought it out from her room. For luck, maybe, or because a real dinner felt like the kind of thing that should happen with her parents watching, even just from a photo. It sat too close to the stove.
Will and Zeraya came running from the noise. Zeraya got there first.
She saw the fire. She saw the smoke. And she saw the photograph, scorched along one edge now, the corner curling black, half of her mother's face gone to ash.
"Lariya—" The fear came out as volume before Zeraya could stop it. "You could have burned the whole place down—"
Lariya didn't argue. She didn't explain. She went very still, the way kids do when an adult's fear arrives disguised as anger, and then she walked to her room and closed the door.
Not a slam. Just closed.
The smoke kept clearing. Nobody said anything for a moment.
Will moved through the kitchen slowly. Pots, the small fire already out, scattered wrappers and empty packaging from ingredients that clearly hadn't come cheap. He picked one up. Turned it over. Real meat. Actual spices. The kind of things that cost real currency, the kind a fourteen-year-old Mule didn't accumulate by accident.
"...This must have cost her a fortune," Will said, quietly, almost to himself.
Zeraya, still holding the scorched photograph, looked at the wrappers. Then at the closed door. Then, slowly, at the last two days, the salt, the flatness, the repeated fine. She looked at it from a distance that made the whole thing suddenly, horribly small.
She groaned. Just once, low, the sound of someone realizing they'd been the problem the entire time and had also just yelled at a kid for trying to fix it.
"...I'll go apologize," she said.
She set the photograph down on the counter, gently, like it might fall apart if she wasn't careful, though the damage was already done. She turned toward Lariya's door.
"Will," she said, and something in her voice had changed. Quieter, more careful, the start of something that had been sitting in her for a long time. "There's something I should've told you. A long time ago, actually, I should've—"
Will came up behind her, smiling, already reaching for the nearest pot.
"Hey," he said, warm, easy, completely unaware he was interrupting anything. He pulled her into a hug, kissed the top of her head. "I'll clean up. Go talk to her."
The moment passed.
Zeraya could have brought it back. The words were right there, four words deep into something that mattered. But Will was warm again, and them again, and the fight, whatever it had even been about, already felt like it belonged to two days ago, to people who weren't quite her and Will anymore.
"...Yeah," she said, quietly, mostly to herself. "Later."
"Wait," Will said, scraping a pot, frowning slightly. "What were we even—"
"I genuinely don't know." Zeraya was already at Lariya's door. "I think I forgot yesterday and didn't want to say so."
"Okay." Will nodded, satisfied. "Good. Glad we cleared that up."
She knocked. The door opened a crack. Whatever passed between them after that, the kitchen didn't hear. Just murmured voices, Zeraya's low and steady, Lariya's smaller, then less small, and after a while, something that might have been a laugh from one of them, then both.
Fourteen-year-olds forgave fast, when the apology was real.
Later, the kitchen clean, the smoke gone, the photograph sat propped back up against the wall where it always had been. Damaged now, one corner gone to ash, half of a mother's face missing. Still recognizable. Still there.
The photograph survived, Khan said, quiet. That is the part that matters. Everything else in this house can be replaced.