"Nothing," Maya said, at the exact same moment Jace said, "We were just talking logistics," and the overlap sat there in the air for a second too long before Leo apparently decided he didn't have the bandwidth to interrogate it.

"Right. Okay." He scrubbed a hand over his face. "Coach moved practice up to six a.m. tomorrow, which is its own disaster, but — May, I talked to Priya down the hall, she's got a friend who's subletting a studio across town, cheap, month to month, no lease paperwork required because the girl's already halfway moved out. I texted her, she says you can come look at it tomorrow."

Maya blinked. "That's — great. Thank you."

"It's not perfect, it's like a twenty-minute bus ride from campus, but it's something. For tonight, though —" Leo gestured helplessly at the couch. "Tonight you're just here. We'll figure the rest out tomorrow when I'm not running on four hours of sleep and adrenaline."

"Tonight's fine," Maya said, and did not look at Jace, and did not ask what had happened to the studio apartment Leo was apparently now inventing on the spot to buy them time, because she suspected — correctly, she'd learn twenty minutes later — that no such studio existed, and that Jace had somehow, in the span of Leo's phone call, planted the idea in her brother's head that a solution was already in motion, distracting him from the storage room conversation entirely.

It wasn't until close to 3 a.m., after Leo had finally collapsed into his room with the specific boneless exhaustion of a man who'd solved a problem in his own head, that Jace reappeared in the hallway in sweatpants and a hoodie, holding a flashlight and looking entirely too awake for the hour.

"You didn't actually call anyone about a studio," Maya said, quiet, standing in the dark living room with her suitcase still by the door where she'd left it, unwilling to fully unpack into a life that might not exist by morning.

"Nope."

"Leo thinks there's a studio."

"Leo will think there's a studio until it falls through in a couple days, at which point I'll have another idea ready," Jace said, entirely unbothered, like this was a hobby he particularly enjoyed. "By then you'll already be settled, he'll be too relieved you're not homeless to ask hard questions, and everyone wins. Come on." He tipped his head toward the short hallway past the bathroom. "Let's get you moved in before he wakes up for his six a.m. skate."

The storage room, when Jace clicked the flashlight on and pushed open the door, was — Maya took a breath, recalibrating her expectations downward in real time — smaller than she'd let herself imagine, even accounting for Leo's dire warnings. Roughly six by eight, like Jace had said, with a single narrow window high on the far wall that let in a slice of parking-lot light, unfinished shelving along one side stacked with hockey gear and a box labeled, in Sharpie, DORM STUFF — DO NOT THROW OUT (MOM), and a floor space that, once you subtracted the shelving, was maybe wide enough for a twin mattress if you didn't mind your feet ending a few inches from the door.

"It's not the Ritz," Jace said, watching her face with something that might have been nervousness if she'd known him well enough yet to identify it as such.

"No," Maya agreed. "It's not."

"But it's private, it's got a door that locks, and Leo genuinely never comes back here — the laundry's mine, I'm the one who actually does it in this apartment, which I will die on that hill about — so as far as functional secret bedrooms go, this is a pretty solid option." He set the flashlight down on the shelf, angled to throw light across the floor, and started hauling boxes off the shelving unit, stacking them with an efficiency that suggested he'd already thought this through more carefully than his casual delivery let on. "We'll clear this side, get you a real mattress tomorrow — I've got a friend on the team whose girlfriend just upgraded to a real bed frame, I bet she's still got the old twin in her garage — for tonight we improvise."

Improvising, it turned out, meant an air mattress Jace produced from a hall closet with the slightly guilty air of someone who kept camping gear for reasons he didn't want to explain, and a space heater with a frayed cord that he assured her, unconvincingly, was "basically fine," and the two of them on their knees on the storage room floor at 3:20 in the morning, wrestling a rectangular vinyl mattress into a space clearly not designed to hold one.

"Your elbow is in my ribs," Maya informed him, muffled, half-crushed between the mattress and the shelving unit as they tried to angle it through the narrow doorway.

"Your suitcase is under my knee, we're even." He shoved the mattress the last few inches with his shoulder, and it finally, grudgingly, unfolded into the space, filling nearly the entire floor, leaving perhaps eighteen inches of clearance on either side. Jace sat back on his heels, breathing a little harder than the task probably warranted, and surveyed his work with visible satisfaction. "There. Home sweet home."

Maya looked around at the boxes stacked three feet from her face, the hockey stick propped against the wall like a sentry, the single bare bulb overhead that Jace had screwed in fifteen minutes ago after producing it, somehow, from thin air, and felt something complicated rise up in her throat — gratitude and humiliation in roughly equal measure, tangled together in a way she didn't have a category for.

"Thank you," she said. "For — this. For not just letting me sleep in a parking lot, basically."

"Don't thank me yet." He held up a finger, suddenly businesslike, all traces of the smirk gone, replaced by something more serious that she suspected was closer to who he actually was than the version he performed for Leo. "There are rules. If we're doing this, we're doing it right, or Leo finds out in a week and we're both out on the street."

"Okay."

"One — nothing of yours lives outside this room. Not a toothbrush, not a hair tie, nothing in the bathroom that isn't already explainable as mine or his. You use the bathroom, you clear it out after, every time, no exceptions."

Maya nodded, already mentally drafting a checklist, the kind of organizational instinct that had gotten her through four years of AP classes and a college application process her guidance counselor had once described, admiringly, as "borderline militant." Rules, she could work with. Rules were the one part of this entire upside-down night that felt like solid ground.

"Two — shower schedule. He's out the door for practice by five-forty most mornings and doesn't get back from class till after two most afternoons. Those windows are yours. Otherwise you're doing sink baths in here like it's 1890, I don't care, I'm not negotiating on this."

"Understood."

"Three." He paused, and something shifted in his face, quieter. "If he ever, ever gets close to finding out — and I mean close, not paranoid-me-being-dramatic close — you tell me first. Not because I don't think you can handle your own brother. Because I know him, and I know what he'll do if he thinks I let this happen behind his back instead of looping him in, and I'd rather manage that than have it blow up on both of us at once."

There was something underneath that Maya didn't fully understand yet — a weight to the way he said it, like Leo's trust was a thing Jace guarded more carefully than the actual apartment lease — but she filed it away instead of asking, because it was nearly four in the morning and her body had started communicating, with increasing insistence, that she was moments from simply falling asleep sitting up.

"Deal," she said instead.

"One more thing," Jace added, already halfway to standing, then sitting back down like the thought had physically pulled him back to the floor. "Money. You're not paying us rent, obviously, that would be insane, there's no lease for you to be on. But you're gonna want to contribute something, or it's gonna feel like charity, and I've watched enough of my own life get treated like charity to know how fast that curdles into resentment on both sides. So — groceries. You buy groceries sometimes, quietly, cash, we don't discuss it, everyone pretends the fridge just refills itself. That's the system."

"That's oddly specific."

"I've thought about it more than the storage room, if I'm honest." He said it lightly, but something in his face suggested he meant it more than the tone let on — the particular carefulness of someone who'd learned, somewhere along the way, exactly how corrosive it felt to owe someone something you couldn't repay. "Anyway. Groceries. Don't argue."

"I wasn't going to."

"Good. First smart decision you've made tonight, other than agreeing to sleep in a closet, which honestly could go either way." He nudged her knee with his, an easy, unthinking gesture that landed with more weight than either of them acknowledged, and pushed himself the rest of the way to standing.

Jace nodded, satisfied, and pushed himself up off the floor with the easy, economical movement of someone whose body did exactly what he told it to. He paused in the doorway, one hand braced on the frame, looking back at her sitting cross-legged on the air mattress in the wreckage of her first night as a secret tenant, and something about his expression softened into a version of the smirk that felt less like performance and more like an actual smile.

"Get some sleep, Overachiever. Big day tomorrow — pretending you don't exist."

He clicked off the flashlight, and the door swung shut behind him, leaving Maya alone in a dark that smelled like cardboard and dryer sheets and, faintly, someone else's cologne.

She lay back on the air mattress, which sighed under her weight with an unnerving hiss, and stared up at nothing, listening to the apartment settle into silence around her — the refrigerator's hum, a floorboard somewhere, the specific quiet of two a.m. in a building full of sleeping strangers.

And then, through the thin drywall separating the storage room from what she now understood was Jace's bedroom on the other side, low enough that she almost missed it, almost convinced herself she'd imagined it:

"Goodnight, neighbor."

Maya lay very still in the dark, feeling her own pulse in her throat, and did not answer, and did not, for a long time, sleep.

She spent the stretch of insomnia doing what she always did when her body refused to cooperate — she made lists, silently, in her head, because a notebook light would have been its own security risk. Things I now own that fit in a storage room: one suitcase, one backpack, one air mattress that is not technically mine, one silver ring's worth of trust in a stranger I met four hours ago. She thought about her dorm room across campus, dark now, water damage spreading behind drywall she'd never see again, the corkboard of acceptance letters and lab schedules and a photo strip from freshman orientation that she hadn't thought to grab in the scramble. She thought about her mother, who didn't yet know any of this had happened and wouldn't, if Maya had anything to say about it, until there was a tidy, reassuring version to deliver — staying with Leo, it's handled, don't worry — because there had never once, in Maya's entire life, been a version of worrying her mother that made anything better, only a version that made her mother carry weight she was already carrying too much of.

By the time the window above her went from black to the flat grey of pre-dawn, she'd cataloged and re-cataloged every variable of her new circumstances until they stopped feeling quite so much like free fall and started, instead, to feel like a plan — imperfect, precarious, entirely dependent on the goodwill of a boy she'd known for less than a day, but a plan nonetheless. She could work with a plan. She had never, in her whole meticulously organized life, been given the chance to prove that she could survive without one, and some small, unfamiliar part of her, buried under the exhaustion and the fear, was almost curious to find out.