The living room, in the merciless light of the overhead fixture Leo eventually turned on, was smaller than Maya's brain had generously estimated at 1:40 a.m. A couch that would fit a person of maybe five foot two comfortably. A coffee table currently doing double duty as a hockey-stick repair station, judging by the roll of tape and the single skate blade sitting on top of a stack of what looked like actual, real textbooks — surprising, that, filed away for later. And a lease, which Leo had produced from a kitchen drawer with the grim efficiency of a man building a legal case against himself, currently spread open on the counter under the one working light.

"Okay," Leo said. "Okay. Two-tenant occupancy. That's what it says. Right here." He jabbed a finger at a paragraph of dense gray text. "Landlord does unit checks — not often, but he did one in September, showed up with like an hour's notice to look at the water heater. If he sees a third person living here, or even thinks there's a third person living here, we're either paying an extra-occupant fee we cannot afford or he's terminating the lease. Both bad. Very bad."

"Then I'll go to Res Life in the morning," Maya said, already reaching for her backpack. "It's fine. I'll figure out the emergency housing thing, I don't want you guys risking your lease over —"

"Res Life waitlist is three weeks minimum this time of year, everyone in Bell Hall just got displaced at the same time as you," Jace said from the kitchen doorway, where he'd reappeared in an actual shirt, unfortunately, and was pouring himself a glass of water like this was a completely normal Tuesday-night domestic scene he was simply observing with mild interest. "You'd be sleeping in the rec center gym on a cot with two hundred other flooded-out freshmen. I've seen it happen before. It's not good."

"How do you know that?" Leo asked.

"I know things," Jace said, which answered nothing, and took a slow drink of water while looking at Maya over the rim of the glass in a way that made her very aware of exactly how unwashed and wrung-out she must look after four hours of standing in a parking lot.

"I have savings," Maya said. "I can get a hotel for a couple weeks, it's not ideal but —"

"Absolutely not," Leo said, in the tone that had ended every argument between them since she was seven years old. "You are not paying two thousand dollars to sleep alone in a Best Western while your brother has a spare — while your brother has an apartment. That's not happening. Give me a second, I need to think."

He pressed his palms flat against the counter, staring down at the lease like it might rearrange itself if he glared hard enough, and Maya watched something familiar cross his face — the particular flavor of guilt he'd worn on and off for five years now, ever since the DUI, ever since the summer he'd cost their parents legal fees they didn't have and became, in the family mythology nobody said out loud, the one who'd made the mistake. She knew that expression. She'd built her entire adult personality around never causing it.

"It's fine," she said again, softer. "I'll figure something out. This isn't your problem to solve, Leo, I'm twenty years old —"

"Can I say something?" Jace set his glass down.

Leo looked up, already suspicious, in the specific way that suggested this was a familiar dynamic between them. "Depends what it is."

"There's the storage room. Off the laundry nook." Jace tipped his head toward the hallway. "It's not nothing — it's like six by eight, there's a window, previous tenants apparently used it as an office. If we cleared it out, put a mattress in there —"

"She is not sleeping in a closet, Jace."

"It's bigger than a closet. Marginally." Jace's mouth did the thing again, the almost-smile, like he found his own suggestion funny even as he was making it in earnest. "I'm just saying — it solves the actual problem, which is the landlord doing a headcount. Nobody checks a storage room for a person. She keeps her stuff low-key, we don't advertise it, she's not on any lease paperwork because she's not on the lease, she's just — visiting. A lot. For two weeks."

"That's insane," Leo said.

"That's a college roommate lease violation strategy as old as time," Jace said. "I did it my freshman year, different apartment, different circumstances, but the principle's the same. It works as long as everyone keeps their mouth shut and nobody's an idiot about it."

Maya looked between them — her brother, jaw tight, clearly running the numbers on how much worse this could get versus how much worse the alternative already was; and Jace, leaning against the kitchen doorway with the loose, unbothered posture of someone who solved problems like this for a living, or at least liked to look like he did. Something about the whole scenario — the absurdity of being discussed in the third person while standing four feet away, the exhaustion, the adrenaline crash from the flood — made a short, disbelieving laugh escape her before she could stop it.

Both of them looked at her.

"Sorry," Maya said. "It's just — an hour ago I was reviewing flashcards. Now I'm being offered a closet."

"A storage room," Jace corrected, deeply serious, and something about his face when he said it — like he was personally offended on the storage room's behalf — made her laugh again, more than the joke really warranted, in the specific unhinged way that happens after a fire alarm and four hours of adrenaline.

Leo's phone buzzed on the counter, loud in the quiet apartment, and he glanced at the screen and swore under his breath. "It's the team group chat, coach is asking about tomorrow's ice time, I have to — give me one second, I need to take this outside, service is garbage in here." He was already moving toward the door, phone pressed to his ear, throwing one more look back at Maya. "Don't decide anything, okay? We'll figure out a real plan. Just — hang tight."

The door clicked shut behind him. The apartment went quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and, somewhere outside, Leo's voice rising and falling on the balcony.

Maya used the sudden privacy to actually look at the apartment for the first time since arriving — the mismatched furniture that suggested two people who'd moved in with whatever they already owned rather than anything coordinated, a corkboard by the door pinned with a practice schedule and, oddly, a photo of what looked like a much younger Jace and an older woman standing in front of a modest brick house, both of them laughing at something outside the frame. She didn't ask about it. It wasn't hers to ask about yet, ninety minutes into knowing him, but she filed it away with the same instinct that made her color-code everything else in her life — data worth keeping, even without a category for it.

Jace crossed the kitchen in three unhurried steps and leaned against the counter across from her, close enough that she had to tip her head back slightly to keep looking at him, which she resented on principle.

"Look," he said, and his voice had dropped, gone low and quick and a shade more serious than the performance he'd been putting on for Leo's benefit. "I know the storage room thing sounds like a joke. It's not. It's actually the only version of this where you don't get shipped an hour home to your parents' place and miss two weeks of classes you clearly care way too much about missing." His eyes flicked, briefly, to the flashcard box visible through the gap in her backpack, and something in his expression shifted — recalibrated, like he'd just re-sorted her into a different category of person. "Your call. But if you want to do it — the storage room, staying here without it being a whole thing — you gotta trust me on how we play it with Leo."

"What does that mean?"

"It means," Jace said, and the smirk came back, quick and easy, covering whatever had flickered underneath it a second ago, "keep your mouth shut and let me handle him."

The balcony door rattled. Leo's voice, closer now, cutting off mid-sentence.

Jace didn't move away. Didn't so much as change his posture, just kept looking at her with that maddening, unreadable half-smile as the door swung open and Leo walked back in, phone still in his hand, already talking.

"Okay, sorry, that took forever, coach wants — what?" He stopped in the doorway, looking between the two of them, something flickering across his face that Maya couldn't quite name. "What did I miss?"

"Nothing," they said again, in the exact same unfortunate unison as before, and this time Leo actually laughed, short and disbelieving, rubbing a hand over his face.

"Okay, that's — you two are being weird, but it's one in the morning and I genuinely do not have the bandwidth to figure out weird right now." He dropped onto the arm of the couch, phone finally pocketed, and some of the frantic energy that had carried him through the last two hours visibly drained out of him all at once, leaving behind a tired twenty-four-year-old who'd clearly been awake since well before the fire alarm had gone off in his sister's dorm. "Coach wants ice time bumped up before the Michigan series. It's fine. It's not important. What's important is figuring out where my sister's sleeping tonight, because it is very late and I am very much not thinking straight."

"She can take my room," Jace offered, easy as anything, like it cost him nothing. "I'll crash on the couch. It's one night."

Leo blinked at him. "You'd do that?"

"It's not a big sacrifice, Leo, it's a couch, not a hostage situation." Jace shrugged, already moving toward the hallway to start stripping his own bed for her, and Maya watched her brother watch him go with an expression she couldn't quite parse — gratitude, mostly, but something else underneath it too, some old habit of expecting the people around him to disappoint him that Jace kept quietly, consistently failing to confirm.

"He's a good guy," Leo said, half to himself, once Jace was out of earshot. "I know he comes off like a lot at first. Give him a chance, though. He'd give you the shirt off his back if you needed it — has, actually, for me, more than once." He scrubbed both hands over his face, exhaustion catching up to him all at once. "Anyway. We'll sort out something better tomorrow. Get some sleep, May."

He was asleep himself within twenty minutes, and Maya lay awake on a couch she'd been assured, wrongly, that she would not have to use, running through the events of the last four hours and finding that none of the calculations she was used to running seemed to apply anymore.

She could hear Jace moving around in his own room down the hall, quiet, deliberate sounds — a drawer, the soft thud of something being moved, the specific rustle of sheets being stripped and remade — and she realized, with a small jolt, that he was actually doing what he'd said, stripping his own bed down to bare mattress and remaking it fresh for a girl he'd known for two hours, on the strength of nothing but his own casual insistence that it wasn't a big deal. It was, she thought, lying there in the dark, listening to a near-stranger quietly rearrange his own life to make room for her — a bigger deal than he was letting on, and a bigger kindness than she knew what to do with yet.

She thought about her dorm room's water-stained ceiling tiles, about the version of tonight where she'd ended up in a Res Life gymnasium on a cot between two hundred strangers instead of here, on a stranger's couch that felt, against all odds, like the safest place she'd been all night. She thought about the version of Leo who used to check under her bed for monsters, still very much alive underneath the exhausted grad student he'd become, still willing to drop everything — his sleep, his roommate's privacy, an entire Tuesday — the second she needed him. And she thought, drifting finally toward something like sleep, about the particular geometry of Jace's shoulders in a hallway doorway, and hated, mildly, how much real estate that thought was taking up in a brain that was supposed to be running crisis logistics.