Just This Once

You woke up to the sound of someone trying and failing to be quiet, which for Karina meant clipping a cabinet door shut and a muttered curse that carried up the stairs better than any shout would have.

For a while you just lay there. The ceiling fan whirled above you, the same off-rhythm hitch it always had as light came through the curtains and laid itself across the foot of the bed. Your body had that scoured-out feeling that came after a night where you'd spent everything you had, and underneath it, lower down, the thing that had kept surfacing all night was still there.

Minjeong on the porch. Her head close enough that you could smell the mint and paint in her hair.

You'd buried your hand in Karina's hair after, on the sand, and stared past her shoulder at the beams of the tower, and the word your brain had handed you was fuck. Not because you regretted Karina. You didn't. It was just that something had moved in your chest two days ago on those steps and refused to move back. You didn't have a name for it yet, but then again you weren't sure you wanted one.

You got up before the thoughts could settle in.

Downstairs, the house was already in motion. Mrs. Yoo stood at the counter doing something to a chicken with her bare hands, the radio played low, an old station that crackled whenever a truck went by outside. There was coffee, and the smell of it pulled you the rest of the way awake.

Karina sat sideways in a kitchen chair with one leg hooked over the armrest, phone in one hand, a piece of toast she wasn't eating in the other. She had your T-shirt on. She caught you clocking it and lifted her chin as if daring you to say something.

"Morning, sunshine," she said. "You look like roadkill."

"You're wearing my shirt."

"It was on the floor." She bit the toast, finally, like the conversation was over. "Possession is nine-tenths. Right, Omma?"

"I'm not getting involved in your laundry crimes," Mrs. Yoo said without turning around. Then, half to herself, half to the chicken: "The Baineses want their tent on the green again for Saturday. Same spot as last year, where it floods. I'll be refereeing that until I die."

"Tell them no," Karina said.

"You tell them no." Mrs. Yoo sighed. "I'll go round tonight and sort it before it becomes a feud."

You poured coffee. Karina watched you over the top of her phone, and there was something a little too bright in it, a little too on. She'd been like this last night at the fire too, you realized — talking a half-moment faster than the room, the jokes coming quicker, like if she kept the air full enough nobody would notice she'd handed you something real for about four seconds under the lifeguard tower and then snatched it back.

You're in deep now, you know that? she'd said. And then she'd reached for your fly, because that was easier than letting the sentence just sit there.

You took the chair across from her. "You sleep okay?"

"Like a baby," she said. "A baby who's seen things." She set the phone face-down. "You?"

"Out cold."

"Liar," she said pleasantly. "You've got the haunted look. The Jason-is-overthinking look. I can see it from here. It's very ugly. You should stop it."

"I'm not overthinking."

"You're overthinking right now about whether you're overthinking." She pointed the toast at you. "Rule number one, remember? You feel weird, you tell me. So." She raised her eyebrows. "Feeling weird?"

And there it was: the offer, made the way Karina made all her offers, wrapped in a joke so that if you took it seriously she could pretend she hadn't meant it.

"No," you said. "Just tired."

"Good." She seemed to relax at that. "Because I've got plans for you and they require you conscious."

"You always say that."

"And I always deliver." She swung her leg down off the armrest. "Eat something. You're scaring your mother-in-law."

"She's not my—"

"Eat," Mrs. Yoo said, and slid a plate in front of you, and that was the end of it.

The plans died before noon.

You were halfway through helping Mrs. Yoo carry folding tables out to the truck — for the meeting, for the signs, for whatever the day's particular fire turned out to be — when Minjeong came down the stairs two at a time with her phone pressed to her ear. Her face set in this specific blankness that meant something had gone badly wrong and she was not going to let it show until she'd decided what to do about it.

"When," she said into the phone. "Okay. And you're sure." A pause. "No, that's— Petey, that's fine, you did the right thing telling me. I owe you." She hung up and stood very still in the middle of the kitchen with her thumb still on the dark screen.

"What," Karina said.

"They moved the council session," Minjeong said. "It was Thursday. It's Tuesday now. Special session." She set the phone down on the table, carefully, the way you set down something you'd otherwise throw. "And Cole filed a letter of intent last week. To buy."

The kitchen went quiet. Even the radio seemed to drop.

"The town doesn't own all of it," Mrs. Yoo said. "The stalls are private. He can't—"

"He's not buying it from the town." Minjeong's jaw clenched. "He's got a seller already. Somebody local. Somebody who held a sign on the green two days ago and let me thank them." She said it flat, but you saw the effort it took to keep it like that. "I have until Tuesday to find out who and get in front of it, or I walk into that room and get blindsided in public, and we lose on optics before anybody says a word about the actual pier."

"So we find out who," you said.

She looked at you. For a second something flashed across her face, relief, maybe, that someone had just said we.

"So we find out who," she agreed.

Karina pushed up off her chair. "Okay," she said, and you could hear her recalibrating, finding the solution, the way she'd found it on the stage with the camera around her neck. "A traitor's actually good. People don't riot over zoning. They riot over a Judas. We lean into it. I can have something up online by tonight, get people angry, get them in that room Tuesday—"

"No," Minjeong said.

Karina stopped.

"Not yet," Minjeong said, gentler, but not by much. "If you blast it online before I know who it is, we burn the wrong person and it backfires and we look exactly as unprofessional as Cole keeps saying we are. I need to keep it quiet first. I need to talk to whoever it is before the whole town does." She rubbed her forehead. "This part has to be careful, Rina. Not loud."

It wasn't a cruelty. You were sure of that much. But you watched the words on Karina, and you watched her absorb them, and decide — fast, the way she decided everything — not to let it show.

"Sure," she said. "Careful. Right. Not my department." She picked her phone back up."I'll do the loud part when you're ready for it. You go be a detective." She tipped her head toward you. "Take him. He's good with sad old people. They love him. It's the face."

"Karina," Minjeong started.

"I'm serious, it's a compliment," Karina said, already drifting toward the back door, already halfway to somewhere else. "He's got a trustworthy face. People confess to him. It's annoying." She pulled the door open and let the morning in. "Have fun. Solve the crime. I'm going to go take pictures of something that doesn't make me want to scream."

The screen door clapped shut behind her.

For a second nobody said anything. Out the window you could see her crossing the yard toward the path down to the beach, phone already up, framing something: the water, the light, anything that wasn't this kitchen.

"She wants to help," you said.