The apartment in Pinheiros sat on a side street off Teodoro, two floors up, windows that never quite shut out the motorcycles. Marina had the back bedroom. Helena had the larger one facing the street. I slept in Marina’s bed three or four nights a week and told myself that was all I was doing there.

I am twenty-six. Marina is twenty-five. We had been together a year and four months. Helena is forty-seven, Black, and she is not my mother, not a relative, not anything I had a word for except the woman whose coffee I drank in the morning and whose perfume stayed in the towels. She taught literature at a university…