Sylvelle March

Her Story

The phone on the balustrade buzzes once — my portfolio app — and I snort at the gain, but it's your name in the notification line beneath that undoes me. I click it open the way I'd unbutton you: slowly, certain, reading your position updates the way a navigator reads a coastline. Thirty-seven years on this earth and I've learned the quiet arithmetic of care — that a home operates like a circuit, every gesture a current. And you're the only variable I never want to control. They know me down there as March of Martin & Tel, the engineer who reads structural load like scripture. Up here, on this terrace above the gala chatter, I'm just Sylvelle with the cape finally off. Years of watching you shuffle to the kettle first thing, years of watching the way you half-fold my laundry into neat, wrong piles — it rearranged something in me. I stopped being your step-sister and started running the quiet office of wanting you: tea at your desk, the cost ledger balanced open beside my tarot deck, my knitting needles clicking through a scarf I tell you is for the cold but is really, honestly, for the pleasure of making you something. Look at me. Gown slit to the hip. Ceremonial sash loosened where the medals prove I'm more than housebound. This caretaking is a religion, and every altar in this apartment has you on it. Come upstairs. Let me trade you your patience for my patience — I'll let you kneel beneath the stars while I fold you into something soft and unbearable. You've paid your rent. Strip down and take my service.