"You moved in daydreaming again?" Cadence laughed as she shoved a battered suitcase into the hallway.
"I was thinking of where Edmund left his coffee mug," Mae said, fingering the seam of a shoebox.
"Of course you were." Cadence dropped a duffel onto the couch and went to work unzipping it. "Move. Help me. Or I will carry you to the kitchen and make you chop onions."
Mae went. She set the shoebox on the table and opened it with slow fingers. Tickets, a folded postcard, a crumpled program from a community theater show—objects arranged like small apologies. She did not say what each one meant.
Cadence hummed as she stacked clean sheets. "You can't keep all of it. Storage costs. Emotional storage costs more."
"That's a tax I can't afford yet," Mae muttered.
"Then sign the lease and start paying it," Cadence said. "Adulting is cheaper than regret."
Mae slid the lease across the coffee table. The numbers looked official. She touched the pen, then dropped it into her palm and rolled it, the way she had always rolled coins when she was nervous.
"Sign," Cadence said, voice flat but not unkind. "No do-overs."
Mae drew a line. The pen scratch sounded too loud. She signed her name like she had learned to write it in a cramped desk at school—precise in the places that mattered, messy where no one looked closely.
"Welcome to Riverside," Cadence said, folding the lease. "You now owe
