The apartment was smaller than it looked online. Of course it was.

Magnolia stood just inside the doorway, keys still in hand, taking in the cramped one-bedroom, the single window, the kitchenette, the bare mattress already dragged into the bedroom and waiting to be set up. Jade pushed past her with the first box, dropping it by the kitchenette with a thud.

"We can hang a curtain," Magnolia said, staring at the one dusty window like it owed her money. "Make it feel bigger."

"Or we accept we're broke, hot, and thriving," Jade said, already kicking her shoes off toward the wall.

Magnolia smiled. Jade did that. Turned survival into a punchline before it had a chance to be sad.

Boxes everywhere. KITCHEN?? on one. BOOKS + MISC on another. One box just said DO NOT ASK.

Magnolia asked.

Jade sighed and peeled back one flap, just enough. Something inside caught the light: purple glass, crusted in rhinestones, glittering like a disco ball with a criminal record.

"Jade. Is that a bong?"

"That is a bejeweled bong," Jade said, with great dignity. "It's a family heirloom."

"Whose family?"

"Mine, as of last Tuesday." She pressed the tape back down. "The box said do not ask, Mags."

"So," Jade called from the bedroom, and flopped backward onto the bare mattress, springs shrieking under her. "New city. New life. What's first?"

Magnolia leaned in the bedroom doorway, then crossed to the window and pressed her palm to the glass. Down on the street, nobody knew her name. Nobody knew anything about her at all.

"First," she said, "we exist without explaining ourselves."

Jade didn't ask what that meant. She never did, not when it mattered. Just made a small noise into the mattress and let it be.

People saw the shaved head, the piercings, the eyeliner sharp enough to file a complaint, and crossed the street. They were wrong about her, obviously. Jade was the one who grabbed half your grocery bags without asking. Sat on bathroom floors during panic attacks and didn't ask a single question. Just stayed.

They'd been coworkers, once. Same fluorescent lights. Same bad coffee nobody replaced, just kept adding water to. Magnolia never explained the bruises she used to hide under long sleeves in July. Never explained the flinch every time her phone buzzed. She never had to. Jade just knew.

She started walking Magnolia to her car after shifts. Started sitting closer at lunch. Never asked why. Just kept showing up until showing up became the whole point.

Magnolia had spent most of her life trying to take up less space. Shoulders in. Chin down. Bun already coming loose from the humidity, same as always.

Before Jade, there'd been hallways. A locker door slammed shut an inch from her fingers, and a whole row of kids laughing like it was the best thing they'd seen all week. Notes slipped through the vents that she read twice even though she hated every word of them. Shoves that were always "an accident."

Too much. Too loud. Too everything.

By fourteen she'd learned to apologize before anyone finished the sentence.

Then there'd been him. He was sweet, at first. They always are.

"You're lucky I love you."

"Who else would put up with you?"

He didn't have to hit her every day to make her small. Sometimes it was silence. Sometimes it was a hand around her wrist, tight enough to leave four fingerprints that faded but never fully left.

When she finally packed a bag, Jade folded the clothes. No lecture. No I told you so.

"You don't deserve to live like that," Jade had said.

Nobody had ever told her that before. Three days into this apartment with its one dusty window and its shrieking mattress springs, Magnolia let herself believe, just a little, that it might be true.

Monday, first day of work. Magnolia practiced "Good morning, this is Magnolia, how can I help you?" in the bathroom mirror until it stopped sounding foreign in her own mouth. She adjusted her blazer three separate times and decided, finally, that she looked like someone capable of this, whether or not she fully believed it yet.

The office turned out to be ordinary in the best possible way. Phones ringing, mediocre coffee, coworkers who nodded politely without asking anything more probing than her name. Nobody here knew the shape of what she'd left behind. Nobody flinched when she flinched, because nobody had any reason to notice.

Friday night, phone buzzed. Unknown number. No message. Area code she recognized without wanting to.

She stared at it a long moment. Thumb hovering.

Then she flipped the phone face-down and made herself breathe.

Not tonight. Whatever that was, it could wait.

Jade found her a few minutes later, curled tighter than usual on the secondhand couch they'd hauled up three flights of stairs together.

"You good?" Jade asked, not pushing, just checking.

"Yeah," Magnolia said, and mostly meant it. "Just tired."

Saturday morning, Jade announced there was a farmers market a few blocks over. Magnolia didn't need much convincing. They dressed in whatever was cleanest and least wrinkled and walked out into a morning that belonged, for once, entirely to them.

They were both running from something. Neither of them said it out loud yet.