We were still on the road when the light started changing.
The afternoon had moved faster than expected, the way time did on drives that had enough to fill them, and by the time the familiar streets appeared outside the window the sky had gone from pale blue to the particular amber of early evening, the sun low and casting long shapes across the houses.
Maya sat up straighter when she recognized the neighborhood. Something shifted in her posture, a small recalibration, the way people adjust when a place that belongs to an earlier version of themselves comes back into view.
I turned onto the street and pulled up in front of the house.
It looked the same. It always looked the same. The garden slightly different each time, something new planted or something overgrown, but the house itself unchanged in the way that some things stayed exactly as you left them regardless of how long you'd been gone.
The front door opened before we'd finished getting out of the car.
My mother came down the path with the particular energy of someone who had been watching for headlights for the last hour and trying not to show it. She held Maya first, the longer hold, both arms, and Maya let herself be held in the way she only did here, without the careful management she carried everywhere else. Then she reached for me and I came into it and the smell of the house was already on her, familiar in a way that landed somewhere without a name.
"You're thinner," she said, pulling back to look at me.
"I'm the same."
"You're thinner," she said again, which meant the conversation was over.
She ushered us inside with the efficiency of a woman who had already decided what we were eating and when, and the house opened up around us, warm and slightly cluttered in the way of a home that was actually lived in.
Our uncle was in the sitting room with the television on at low volume, a large man with a comfortable way of taking up space who stood when we came in and shook my hand and kissed Maya on the cheek and said something about the drive that made my mother click her tongue.
We sat and talked about nothing important for a while. The kind of conversation that wasn't about anything except being in the same room again. The uncle's knee which had been troubling him, a neighbor who had done something inexplicable to their front garden, something Maya was working on that she described briefly before deflecting. My mother brought tea without asking and set it down and the sitting room held all of us in its familiar way.
Outside the window the evening settled in properly.
We went to the grave before dark.
The churchyard was ten minutes' walk, a route all three of us knew without thinking about it. My mother carried flowers she'd had ready and she walked between us in the way she always had, one hand briefly touching my arm as we turned through the gate.
The grave was tidy. Someone had been recently. My mother, probably.
We stood in the particular quiet of a place that asked for it. My mother arranged the flowers and stood back and I looked at my father's name on the stone and felt the thing I always felt here, something between loss and something steadier. A grief that had moved from sharp to present, still there but no longer the first thing.
Maya stood beside me. Close enough that our arms almost touched.
Nobody said anything for a while.
My mother said something quietly, to herself or to him, and then she touched the top of the stone briefly with one hand and stepped back.
We walked home in the near dark, the uncle a few steps ahead talking about something neither of us tracked, and the evening air was cool and carried the smell of someone's chimney smoke and the texture of an autumn evening in a place you grew up in.
Dinner was what my mother cooked when people came home. The table full, the portions generous, the uncle talking more than anyone else while my mother watched everyone eat with the quiet satisfaction of someone whose specific form of love was this. Feeding people. Having them around a table.
Maya helped clear up after. I stayed at the table and talked to the uncle about something until his phone went and he excused himself and I sat alone at the cleared table for a moment, the house sounds around me, the specific feeling of being somewhere that held a version of you that no longer existed.
I went to help with the washing up.
My mother was already almost done. She handed me a cloth and I dried without being asked and we worked through the last of it together without talking much.
"I'm glad you came," she said.
"We were going to come," I said.
She looked at me the way she sometimes did, like she was reading something I hadn't said. Then she turned back to the sink.
Later, when the uncle had taken himself to bed and my mother was moving through her evening routine, she appeared in the hallway while Maya and I were both heading upstairs and looked at us with an expression that was already apologetic.
"I'm sorry," she said. "The spare room is your uncle's, and I didn't think to arrange it better." A pause. "Can you two manage? Just the one room. The bed's big enough."
The beat that followed lasted slightly longer than it should have.
"Of course," Maya said. Smooth and immediate.
"Fine," I said. One count behind her.
My mother looked between us and either didn't notice or decided not to. She said goodnight and kissed us both and went to her room.
We went upstairs.
The room was my mother's old guest room, familiar from childhood visits, a double bed with a headboard my father had built and a window that looked out over the back garden. Maya took the side closest to the window without discussing it. I took the other.
We moved through the small motions of getting ready for bed without talking much, the careful negotiation of shared space between two people very conscious of it. The bathroom. The light. Who had what they needed.
We got into bed.
Maya turned onto her side facing the window. I lay on my back for a moment and then turned the other way. We were back to back, not touching, the space of the bed between us.
"Night," Maya said.
"Night," I said.
The room went quiet. The house settled around us, the old sounds of it, the pipes, the particular creak of this floor.
I looked at the wall.
My phone was on the nightstand. I'd put it there without thinking and now the screen sat dark a few inches from my face.
I closed my eyes.
The phone buzzed once.
Soft, the vibration kind, no sound.
I didn't move for a moment.
Then I reached for it.
The screen lit up in the dark room and I angled it toward the wall, away from Maya, shielding it without deciding to.
A new notification. The system's format, clean and white on black.
[New Quest Available]
Make a move on Maya.
Reward: pending.