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Come on, I think, watching the three empty thrones at the top of my board. Somebody. Anybody. Mama's got a loan shark and a landlord and twelve days.

And then, at 10:40, the chime I've been praying for and dreading in equal measure sounds.

KindRegards has joined your Private Roundtable.

Theo in the private Roundtable. Of course it's Theo. Beck would've come in loud, guns blazing. Elias wouldn't have made a peep. But Theo, is the one who can't stay away even with his whole world on fire.

"Hi," he says. His voice, so good to hear, is not something typed and scrolled across my screen, but instead a warm blanket and an icy shiver at the same time. I can’t deny the relief hits me so hard, my eyes almost well with tears. But that’s just about the money. My relief is about money. The rent kind. The Sal kind. And nothing else.

"KindRegards." I slide into Diablo like a hot bath, all silk and trouble. "I was starting to think you forgot about me."

"I really don't think that's a thing that could happen." A pause. Then, quieter, all the silk gone out of him. "It's been a tough week. And I'm not really here for the usual tonight. I’d like to just talk for a minute."

And see, this is the trap of him. Beck I can handle, because Beck wants a show and I know how to run a show. Elias wants a show even though he doesn’t ask for it. But Theo doesn't want the show. He wants me, and every cell in my body that's ever been overlooked leans toward that like I’m starving.

"Let’s talk, then," I say, softer than Diablo should be.

So he does. Around it, careful, the way you talk around a thing that's still raw. He tells me he's fallen out with the two people who matter most to him in the world. That they built something together, the three of them, years of it, and it turns out, the whole thing was balanced on a wire and nobody noticed until it snapped. That he did something selfish, and so did they, and now none of them can look each other in the eye, and he doesn't know how to fix shit when he was one of the ones who broke it.

I sit there in my red lipstick, nodding along like a sympathetic stranger, when I am the wire. I am the exact thing they tripped over. I know his whole tragedy better than he does, and I can't say one word of it, so I just say, "That sounds lonely," and, “I’m so sorry,” and I mean it more than he'll ever know.

"It is." He’s quiet for a moment, and I realize this isn't hunger. Hunger I can work with. This is worse. "Can I tell you something? You'll think it's strange."

"Strange I can deal with. Let me have it."

"There's a woman I see. In my regular life, I mean." His voice goes careful. "She's a person most people don’t pay attention to. She's made herself small on purpose, so small, the whole world walks straight past her, and she's decided that's safer than being seen. And I look at her sometimes and I think, God. If they only knew, the rest of the world. All that fire in there, going to waste, just waiting for one single person to bother looking at her."

He draws a breath like there's one more thing coming, the real thing, the thing he actually logged on tonight to say, and then he just goes quiet, and whatever he was going to add, he swallows it back down.

The room goes very quiet and very cold.

Diablo is a great many things, but small is not one of them. Diablo is loud. Diablo is lit up like a marquee. Diablo is the single least invisible woman on the entire internet, and there is no version of me in this lipstick, in this glowing little box, that a stranger could ever, ever mistake for a woman who's made herself disappear.

He isn't describing Diablo.

He's describing Agnes.

"That's…" My line dies in my throat. Diablo always has a line. I have nothing. "That's a sweet thing to say. About your friend."

"Is it? I've never said it to her. I don't think I could." A small, broken laugh. "It's easier to say it to you. You're a safe place to put things."

And I try. God, I try to talk myself down off the ledge. I tell myself he was talking about some other quiet girl. Everybody knows a quiet girl, right? This is just a coincidence. It's nothing. It's my guilty, wrung-out brain freaking the fuck out because I've had the worst week of my life and I'm inches away from coming apart at the seams.

It’s as if he looked straight at Diablo, sassy, outspoken Diablo, and he described, down to the bone, Agnes.

"You still there?" he says.

"I'm here." It comes out as barely anything.

"Okay. Well. Good night, Diablo."

The screen goes black. He's gone. And I sit alone in my apartment with my heart going like a fist against a locked door, and every loud, screaming problem in my life, the rent, Sal, Birdie, goes dead silent under one single thought. He knows.

He can't know. There is no possible way that he knows.

But God help me, for one second there, he knew.

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