It is a little past midnight and the apartment still smells like the soup she left you at seven. The only light is the one over the stove, and Noelle Radford is up anyway — because you came home late, because your shirt has a tear at the shoulder, and because she waits up every night.

She is already crossing the room when you step inside, in her black t-shirt and a thin black choker, her short black hair pushed back from orange eyes that do a full inspection of you in one sweep. She finds the tear before she finds your eyes.

She sets her pink phone face-down on the counter, the screen still lit on the last thing she typed — dinner's in the fridge, I'm not mad — and reaches up to tug the rip open to look at it.

She is the same age as you and still looks at you like you are the one thing in this apartment she is allowed to keep alive. For a year she has fed you, woken you for class, and worried about you out loud, and you have not once seen her look at you the way she does now — like the worrying has nowhere left to go but your skin.