Ruby did not protest on my actions. She just watched me put the plates down with very wide eyes that were trying not to look at the food directly because if she looked at the food directly she was going to cry, and I knew that face because I had seen it on myself the first time I had bought decent groceries with my first donation payout four years ago.

When you begin to earn, you realise the true value of everything.

"Let’s sit and eat."

She sat down beside me. Then, she picked up the fork, held it but did not move.

"Ruby."

"Yes."

I said calmly, "If you finish that plate and want a second, I will make you a second. If you finish the second and want a third, I will make you a third. Today is not a normal eating day. Today is whatever-you-need-day. Yes?"

She looked up at me with an expression I genuinely could not parse, "...Whatever I need?"

"Whatever you need."

She took the first bite She chewed slowly and then swallowed, her eyes closed.

Then she ate.

She ate the plate in maybe three minutes, which was disturbing to watch because I could hear myself thinking go slower, go slower, but I did not say it because Zero had given me a small warning headshake from the doorway and I trusted Zero on this.

Ruby finished, and then she just looked at me silently. I made the second plate. I did not even pause to consider it.

The second plate took six minutes.

The third plate took eight, and by then Zero had quietly put a glass of water at her elbow and refilled it twice while Ruby drank without seeming to notice she was drinking.

Zero and I exchanged one short look across the kitchen... this is a girl who has not been allowed to eat to fullness in possibly years...and we did not say it out loud.

When she finished the third plate, Ruby put the fork down. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she looked at the empty plate, looked at me, "...I think I’m full."

"Good."

She looked down and muttered, "...I’m sorry. I ate so much."

"You ate exactly the right amount. That’s what the food was for." I shrugged.

After a moment of pause, she mumbled softly, "...Lukas."

"Yes."

"Thank you."

A warm smile automatically formed on my face, "You’re welcome, Ruby."

The corners of her mouth turned up about a half-millimeter, and she almost-smiled, and then she stopped because the muscles weren’t used to the motion. But the half-millimeter had been there.

’Half a millimeter today. Filing this as the day’s win. The win counts.’

...

We moved to the front room afterwards. Zero brought the second pot of coffee and her own mug. Ruby curled up on the cot...on it, I noted, with a small private flicker of progress... with the blanket pulled up to her chin. Zero took the chair and I took the floor.

"Story time," I announced.

Ruby blinked at me. "...Story?"

"I’m a writer. It is the law that I have to tell at least one story per day or I will explode. Zero, please confirm."

Zero kept her face very still. "It’s a documented condition, Ruby. Combustive narrative buildup. Tragic, really."

I winked at her and said, "There you go. Now. The story I’m going to tell you is true, technically. About four years ago, I bought my first nice pen with money I’d actually earned from writing. A real fountain pen. Cost me forty dollars, which at the time was about a quarter of my monthly food budget. I told myself it was an investment. Real writers used real pens. This pen would unlock my prose. This pen would change my life."

Ruby seemed geniunely interested, "...Did it?"

I sighed, "Two days after I bought it I leaned over my notebook, the cap fell off in my pocket, and the entire ink reservoir emptied into the pocket of the only nice shirt I owned. Which was also white. Which was also borrowed from my acquaintance Tarek, who I had told I would take very good care of it."

Zero made a small choked sound from the chair.

I threw my hands up and continued the story.

"It was a catastrophic event. I had to walk home through the city in March wearing a coat over a shirt that looked like I had murdered someone in Chapter one. I tried to wash it but the ink had set. Tarek made me buy him a replacement that cost three times the original. Damned greedy guy. The pen, in retaliation, never wrote properly again. Forty dollars and a shirt and a friendship-debt I am still paying off four years later."

Ruby inched forward and asked, "...What happened to the pen?"

"It is in a drawer in my apartment. I haven’t been able to throw it away. I look at it sometimes when I’m being a smug writer and it humbles me." I smiled remembering that.

Ruby’s mouth did a thing, a tiny, controlled thing, where it turned up at one corner. The smallest possible smile. The first one I had seen on her.

She looked very surprised by it as she covered her mouth with the blanket.

Zero, across from me, was watching Ruby’s face with the careful attention of someone watching an extremely small flower decide whether to open.

She did not say anything, neither she drew attention to it. She just sat there, pretending to drink coffee, watching the half-smile take its first hesitant breath.

"Tell me another," Ruby whispered, from behind the blanket.

So I did.

The first novel I had ever uploaded to the platform, the bad one, the one I’d taken down within a week, with the protagonist named Brick whose dialogue I now refused to read for legal reasons.

The time I’d pitched a publisher with a pizza stain on my collar and not noticed. My building manager who had not recognized me in the hallway last spring because I had not left my apartment in nineteen days and had, in her words, gone a little owl.

Zero laughed at the owl one out loud.

Ruby, over the course of three stories, lowered the blanket from her mouth.

By the end of the third story, the smile, when it came, was the smallest visible motion in the room, just a corner of her mouth, no teeth, no sound, but it was there, and it was hers, and Zero and I, both of us, did not look at it directly because we knew small things like that died if you looked at them straight.

We pretended not to see.

We told another story instead.

And outside the safehouse, the watery mid-morning sun crawled, slowly, toward noon.