Two weeks before the towel started, Kayla had arrived at our door with two suitcases, two hundred and eighty-seven dollars in her checking account, and mascara dried beneath both eyes. Her boyfriend of six years had told her to leave their apartment.
I hadn’t asked whether she could afford a hotel. I hadn’t told her to call friends first. I’d taken one suitcase while Andrew took the other.
“Stay here until you get back on your feet,” I’d told her.
Andrew had agreed before I’d even finished the sentence.
I want to explain what those first few days actually looked like, because I think they matter for understanding everything that came after. Kayla arrived hollowed out in a way I’d never seen her before, not even during the worst breakups of her twenties. She slept twelve, thirteen hours some nights. She barely touched the meals I made, pushing food around her plate while staring at some fixed point past my shoulder. I found her once, at two in the morning, sitting on the bathroom floor scrolling through old photos on her phone, and I sat down beside her on the cold tile without saying anything, just staying there until she was ready to go back to bed.
I remember thinking, watching her those first few days, that whatever version of my sister eventually resurfaced was going to need patience from both Andrew and me, and I told myself I was prepared to give it. I didn’t yet understand what shape her particular grief was going to take, or how much collateral damage it might do before it finally settled.
For the first week, Kayla was an easy houseguest. She helped with dishes without being asked. She thanked us, repeatedly, sometimes almost obsessively, for taking her in. She apologized for existing in our space in a way that eventually started to worry me more than reassure me, some old instinct in her clearly convinced that gratitude needed to be performed loudly enough to earn its keep.
Then came the towel.
The first morning, I assumed she’d forgotten Andrew was downstairs. She came into the kitchen wrapped in a towel, hair still dripping, apparently on her way to grab something from the pantry before getting dressed, and Andrew, seated at the table with his laptop, glanced up, glanced back down, and said nothing. I didn’t think much of it. People forget things when they’re staying somewhere unfamiliar.
The second time, two days later, I pulled her aside once Andrew had left for work.
“Could you put on a robe before coming down? Andrew’s usually in the kitchen in the mornings.”
Kayla blinked at me. “He’s your husband, Amanda, not a teenage boy.”
“I know.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“It makes me uncomfortable.”
She studied my face as though I’d presented her with a puzzle she wasn’t sure was worth solving. Then she shrugged. “Fine.”
Except the next morning, she did it again.
