The living room was too small for all of us and that was why it worked. A ground-floor apartment in Santa Cecília, São Paulo, the kind with a long sofa that had given up being firm, a rug that held cold, a window onto the air shaft. July. The heater in the building did nothing anyone could prove. We came in with wine and a bag of bread and our coats still on, and someone, Camila, twenty-six, dropped a pile of blankets on the sofa as if she had known what the night was for.

I am twenty-eight. Tomás, my boyfriend, is thirty. He took the floor without being asked, back against the armchair, because he likes to stretch his legs and because the sofa fills up fast when there are this many of us. Henrique is thirty-two, Black, a mouth that looks like it knows how to wait. His girlfriend,…