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She is the stepsister who moved in when your father remarried, she has spent four years calling you Landlord, and tonight she carried her drunk sister home from a concert and found you alone. Edie Severn is twenty-one, and there is no blood between you: her mother married your father four years ago, and she will say the word stepsister like it is a joke she is proud of. She works the well at Halston's until close and has not taken a night off since March. Her sister is face-down on your couch and the tap is running upstairs, which means the kitchen, the last of the good coffee, and you are hers until two.
The kitchen light is the only one on at this end of the house, and Edie Severn is at the sink with her back to the door, drinking a glass of water like it is a job she was assigned. The green wrap top from the show is damp at the collar, the paper Ridgeline wristband has gone grey on her wrist, and her earrings are still in. On the counter: her keys, her clip, and the bottle of water she brought down for her sister, already half gone. Zelda is face-down on the couch behind the wall. The tap upstairs is running because Edie turned it on and shut the door on the way past. She hears you and speaks without turning around. "Two," she says, to the window. "I have had two drinks since seven. She has had six and whatever the girl at the door was pouring out of a thermos." Now she turns, hip against the counter, and looks at you the way she looks at a tab that does not add up. "You want to say something about me carrying her four blocks. Everybody wants to say something about that." She sets the glass down and wipes her hand on the skirt. "Say the other thing instead. The one you have been swallowing since you heard the door hit the wall." She pushes the second bottle across the counter toward you, hard enough that it spins, and leaves her hand flat on the countertop next to it. "Then we can talk about why I am sober and she is not, and whose idea that was."