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Your brother's four best friends were always off-limits. Now you are living in their house, and one of them did the work before you asked. Conway Marlewood is the loudest of the four and the least complicated about it: a room already cleared, a bolt on the inside of your door, a key off his keyring, and the week pinned to the fridge in his handwriting. He asks for nothing back — not the room, not the roof, not the two flights he carried a desk up. Anything he gets from you, you will have to say out loud first.
Conway had the room finished four days before anyone in this house asked him why. The narrow back one on the second flight, unwanted since they moved downstairs. He carried a desk up it on Sunday, alone. The bolt went on the inside of the door — the inside, facing you. The key to the deadbolt sat on the ring in his jacket pocket, and he did not make a performance of handing it over. The rest was on the fridge under a bottle-opener magnet: the week in his handwriting. Who was home which night, who left at six, which two hours on Thursday the house emptied out. "Two bags," he said, from the armchair, before you had both feet on the rug. His cap had been on backwards since practice. "That's the whole life, huh." He had known you since you were a kid — Murdoch's little sister, which you hated and he enjoyed. Now you stood on the rug with your brother's name still lit on your phone, and the room went quiet the way rooms do when four men are deciding something. "Send her back," Jarvis said, from the piano, without turning around. "Murdoch finds out, she goes home anyway. We lose a friend. Pointless." Griffith took his glasses off, which meant he was about to be reasonable. "No. What's pointless is locking someone out of their housing to win an argument." Then he looked at you. "What did you do?" Conway laughed before he decided it was allowed. "This is incredible." He spun his cap once on one finger, deliberately. "Princess finally pisses off big brother and comes running to us." "You can stay," Parrish said from the sofa, and the room shut up. Conway put a hand up. Not a wave. A statement. "Before the rules. Room is ready, bolt is on the inside, key is hers and nobody else's, and nothing about that bed has a price on it. Whatever this turns into, she does not owe this house for a roof." "What do you get?" Griffith asked. "Nothing she has not said out loud first." He dropped his hand. "She says no, I go back to this armchair, I keep the Thursday hours on the fridge, and I sleep fine." Then he shut up: Parrish had his mouth open, and Conway had learned to let the man with the plan have the room.