The commuter train sighed into Maple Ridge like it always had, the brakes singing that tired note that meant home and history and all the things you never quite made peace with. Anna kept her forehead on the cold window a second longer, the glass humming under her skin, as if the whole car were one long, held breath. She could see the courthouse square rolling past—the diner with the neon pie sign, the barbershop with candy-cane poles in the window, the little U.S. flag fluttering over the steps where she’d once taken prom photos. Five years away and nothing had moved except her. In the city she organized her life into tidy columns: hours worked, dollars saved, a down payment that finally felt not like a fantasy but like a door she could reach and open with her own hand.

Then the phone call had come. Not a fire, not a hospital, not an accident. Worse, in a quiet way. Tears snagged on long-distance air. A mother’s voice made small. “They’re calling again… we can’t… you know your father… could you come?” And all the columns in her head turned to ash.

She stepped off the train with the same backpack she’d carried into a new life five years back. The wind pinched her cheeks. Maple Ridge smelled like woodsmoke and winter. She bought a too-sweet hot chocolate from the cart outside the station and walked the four blocks to the split-level with the crooked porch light and the mailbox her father refused to replace because “it still works, why waste.” She kept trying to imagine a version of this visit where it was a misunderstanding and then stopped, because hope like that was a way of telling stories to a child, and she wasn’t one anymore.

Inside: cabbage soup, the tang of vinegar, the weight of dread. Her mother rushed forward with apron hands, her face ashen beneath a dusting of flour. Her father sat at the kitchen table in his good sweater, the one with the elbow patches, staring fixedly at a spot past his coffee mug, as if the right amount of looking could shift reality a few inches to the left. On the sofa, Lena stretched like a cat, glossy hair, glossy magazine. Bridal, of course. Lena could turn anything into a stage. She had a genius for it.

“Anya, sweetheart,” her mother said, the old nickname unspooling like a memory you weren’t ready for, “thank goodness you came. We’re tangled up. We’re drowning.”

“What debts?” Anna said, sitting down as if she were stepping into a courtroom. “Tell me exactly.”

Her father slid over a folder. So tidy. So damning. Statements with logos that used to mean nothing: banks, financing arms, store cards that promised you a home theater and gave you an albatross with HDMI. She turned pages and felt her face cool the way a storm cloud cools the road before rain.

“It started small,” her father said, voice low, embarrassed. “One card. Then another. Lena’s salary at the salon was little, but she said the minimums were nothing and that the real plan was marriage.”

Lena sighed in that operatic way of hers. “Not this again.”

“Then,” her mother said, picking up the story like a baton, “a small loan to help with the cards. And then—well, that’s how it always goes. One bandage on top of another, and underneath, the cut keeps bleeding.”

“How much?” Anna said.

Her father pointed to a handwritten total. The number sat on the page like a man at the end of a long bar. Bigger than her down payment. Bigger than the future she’d been building with small, daily denials—no taxis, no takeout, no coffee that didn’t come from a machine that thought milk was a metaphor.

She made calls. She filled a legal pad with bullet points and interest rates and restructuring terms that were meant to sound merciful and felt like a choke-collar with rhinestones. The best the banks could offer was a longer tunnel with less light.

When she asked what the debt had bought, they showed her. A used car that needed more love than it was ever going to get, but looked good in the driveway. A bedroom done over like a theme park princess suite, blush and gold and mirrors that multiplied the illusion of more. A phone, because you cannot post a life with last year’s camera. A television too large for the wall. A fur coat her mother wore nervously, as if it might molt.

“So this is how it is,” Anna said, back in the kitchen with the folder and the cooling soup and the wide-eyed silence. “You bought a future on plastic and asked time to foot the bill.”

“Everyone has a car,” her mother said softly. “She was walking everywhere.”

“Everyone you know has a car,” Anna said. “Words are slippery like that.”

“You have savings,” Lena said brightly, as if she had discovered a twenty in a winter coat. “You don’t even like nice things. This is exactly what you save for—family. We are family.”

The word family fell into the room like a test. It landed near the photo of their grandparents on Ellis Island, near the second-grade art project with a turkey traced from a small hand, near the refrigerator magnet flag that had been there since the Bush years. Family, when said like that, is a door with one handle, on the inside.

“I will call the banks,” Anna said, and did. She chased down every option. She did it the way she did everything that mattered: completely. At the end of two hours, she had a map of a path no one wanted to take, and the other path—the easy one—was a cliff dressed up as a pillow.

“We can split this,” she said. “Sell the car, the vanity, the television, the jewelry that is costume pretending to be heirloom. We return what can be returned. We list what can’t. We cut to the bone. Then we restructure what’s left. It will be lean. It will be humbling. It will be survivable.”

“You’re joking,” Lena said, almost laughing. “Sell my life? Be serious. You’ll transfer the money. This is what you are good for.”

For a moment the kitchen blurred. It wasn’t tears, exactly. It was something colder. She looked at her parents. The lines at her father’s mouth. Her mother’s hands worrying the apron strings as if they could braid this into a different pattern.

“I’m not an ATM,” Anna said. “I’m your daughter. That means love, not limitless withdrawals.”

“We raised you,” her father burst out, unexpected heat in the words. “We fed you, clothed you, paid for your textbooks. You owe us.”

There it was. The old ledger nobody admits exists. The one parents keep, by accident, when scared.

“You raised me,” Anna said quietly. “That was your job. I did mine. I grew, I learned, I work. I’m not a bad daughter because I won’t let you burn down my future to keep your lifestyle warm.”

“Lifestyle?” Lena echoed, as if insulted by the accuracy. “You’re jealous. That’s all. I am alive. You are efficient. I will have a husband. You will have your spreadsheets.”

She wanted to laugh. She didn’t. She put the folder in order. She stood.

“I’ll think,” she said, because she knew they needed time to understand the shape of the door she was closing.

“No,” Lena said. “Choose.”

It was almost funny. After all, isn’t that what Anna had been doing for five years? Choosing. Every day was a coin turned over. Every day was no to this, yes to that, in service of a door to a small apartment with a lock that would turn because she turned it.

She slept in her old room because no one had repainted her past. The narrow bed held her like an old friend who had seen your worst haircut and still invited you over. She stared at the ceiling and listened to the house breathe. She saw her future apartment as if it were a photograph: the small kitchen, the secondhand couch, the plant that didn’t die because she finally learned which windows got morning light.

A thought came then, as clear as a bell. You can love people and still refuse to be their scaffold.

In the morning she said the words she needed to say. Her parents pleaded. Lena called her names that slid off like rain. In the end, when her resolve did not bend, Lena chose the one tool she had left: the door slam and the declaration, full of borrowed coins. “You won’t get a single dollar from me,” Anna said first, voice steady. A clean line. The slam came after. The house rattled like it had been woken up.

On the stairs, she shook. Freedom sometimes looks exactly like all the wrong things: harshness, coldness, abandonment. It is none of those. It is the beginning of the actual story.

She went back to the city. The train rolled, the miles clicked under the wheels like a metronome. She put her head against the glass and let herself have ten minutes of rundown grief for a childhood that never learned the right languages, for a mother who wanted soft things, for a father who believed endurance was the same as love, for a sister who had been given applause when what she needed was a mirror.

Then she took out her phone and opened a new note titled: Boundaries Are Not Walls. She was a lawyer. She wrote policies for a living. She could write one for a family.

Three days later, Maple Ridge called back. But not the way it had before.

It began with a voice she didn’t expect. “Ms. Ivanova,” the woman said, American vowels wrestling with a Slavic last name Anna hadn’t used outside her résumé in years, “I’m Natalie from the Maple Ridge Community Legal Aid clinic. Your mother came in. She asked for help. She said you told her to. You didn’t. But you made space in her head for the idea.”

Anna closed her eyes. “Tell me what you need.”

“We’re not wizards,” Natalie said. “But we are good at triage. We can get the calls to stop for a minute. We can put your parents into a debt management plan if they’re willing to sell assets and commit to a strict budget. It will mean downsizing. They say you have thoughts about that.”

“I have more than thoughts,” Anna said. “I have a list.”

“Great,” Natalie said. “One more thing. Your sister agreed to job counseling.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it,” Anna said, and then immediately felt small. People grow on their timeline or not at all. She could hold her skepticism and still make room for a maybe.

Over the next weeks, the map of the solution drew itself the way all maps do: messy, then cleaner. Anna kept her promises—to herself first, and then to the people she loved, which is the only way promises hold. She did not transfer money. She did send links: to reputable used-car buyers for a voluntary surrender that would ding the credit and free the monthly bleed; to platforms where vanities sell for shocking sums to people whose TikToks depend on reflection; to Facebook Marketplace, where a blush-and-gold “princess suite” can find a second life in a teenager’s dream. She called a nonprofit that does free pickup of large appliances and issues receipts you can actually use. She emailed a spreadsheet with three columns: Must Sell, Should Sell, Nice to Sell.

Her parents argued. Then yielded. Then surprised her.

The first surprise was the apartment. That home was a museum of a few decades: the couch with the dip where her father watched the Packers, the dent in the wall by the stairs where a Christmas tree had once fought back, the doorframe with pencil marks of two girls inching up toward something that did not have a number. Her mother had always said she would die there. Now she was tired of promises made to furniture.

They found a two-bedroom in a building near the bus line with a shared laundry and an honest landlord who remembered what a lease used to look like. The mortgage was gone. The property taxes were gone. The heat worked without calling a cousin. Her father looked smaller the day they moved and bigger two weeks later, because sometimes release is a kind of growth.

The second surprise was Lena.

Appointment number one with the job counselor ended badly, by report. Lena arrived late. She informed the counselor that she was not “built for menial tasks.” She listed her preferences like an order at a restaurant you don’t intend to pay for. The counselor, a woman with a braid that declared competence over aesthetics, asked Lena one question that made the air shift: “What are you good at that helps other people right now?”

“Looking good,” Lena said. A joke and not a joke.

“Okay,” the counselor said. “Let’s start there. People pay for what they cannot do and what they do not want to do. They will not pay for your existence. They will pay for a result. What result can you make with ‘looking good’ that helps someone else?”

Lena began to answer with the usual fluff—events, modeling, the influencer word that blooms like mold. The counselor pulled the conversation down to the ground. “Can you do makeup that lasts eight hours under bad lighting? Can you make a high-school senior feel like a queen in a way that doesn’t crack by noon? Can you teach a cancer patient to draw on eyebrows? That is a result.”

The third surprise came on a Thursday in March, when Anna opened her door to find Lena on her stoop with a pastry box and no speech prepared. The city wind lifted Lena’s hair the way movies do. She looked both fabulous and frightened.

“You’re not wearing the coat,” Anna said, and Lena almost smiled.

“I sold it,” Lena said. “A woman drove from two towns over. She cried when she put it on. Not because of the fur. Because she said she hadn’t felt beautiful since chemo. People are stories we don’t know.”

Anna stepped back. “Come in.”

Lena did. She put the pastries on the counter and looked around as if the small apartment were a museum of an animal she’d only seen on TV. The living room had a secondhand couch in decent shape and a plant surviving on sheer will and the correct window. The kitchen had a humming fridge with two magnets: a small U.S. flag and a to-do list written neatly in a hand Lena always teased Anna about for being “typewriter.”

“It’s nice,” Lena said, sounding surprised by her own sincerity.

“It’s mine,” Anna said. The words tasted like victory even if the title would be months in the making.

“I’m mad at you,” Lena said, and then startled herself. “I mean—I was. I—can we try again? I want to show you something.”

She took out her phone and began to scroll through photos that weren’t selfies. Faces: a nervous teenage girl with acne and a dress two shades too pale; a woman in her fifties with a shy smile and a veil changed from blinding white to cream; a nonbinary kid in a powder-blue suit with eyes that said nobody had ever seen them properly in a mirror until today. Before and afters that weren’t about hiding so much as revealing. The caption beneath Lena’s new business name read: “Makeup that holds in real life.” Below it: $85 trial, $150 event, sliding scale on request.

“I do house calls,” Lena said, cheeks warming. “I travel with the kit. I wipe chairs down. I keep water in my bag. I book through an app I can’t pronounce. I—look, this one’s my favorite.”

Lena held up the phone. The photo showed a woman in a courthouse hallway, damp eyes, steady mouth. In her hand, a manila folder. A custody hearing, maybe. Or a worst day. She had lipstick on that refused to crack even where grief presses. She looked like someone who could walk through a door she didn’t want and still keep herself.

“She asked for ‘I can do this’ makeup,” Lena said. “So I did. I think she won.”

“Even if she didn’t,” Anna said, “you gave her armor.”

“Yeah,” Lena said, quietly. “I like that.”

They ate pastries at the small table, laughed at nothing because relief is dumb, and spoke carefully around the jagged edges as if the room had furniture you could bruise shins on.

“I’m still paying off my part,” Lena said, unprompted. “We sold a lot. I pick up extra shifts at the café because I’m not too good for tips, it turns out. I barter makeup for babysitting on nights I do coursework.”

“Coursework?”

“Community college,” Lena said, defensively. “Small business accounting. I’m bad at numbers.”

“Then you’re in the right class,” Anna said. “Being bad at something and choosing it is a kind of bravery we don’t clap for enough.”

Lena picked at the pastry box string. “I still want to get married.”

“Me too,” Anna said, surprising them both. “But I want it like a partnership, not a rescue.”

Lena nodded. “Me too. I think.” She looked up. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Anna asked gently. “The list is long. Choose one.”

“For acting like love equals money,” Lena said. “For when I called you a gray mouse. You aren’t. You’re steel wool. You scrub the rust off people.”

Anna laughed, unexpected and grateful. “I’ll take it.”

The weeks stacked into months the way weeks do. In April, the legal aid clinic got her parents into a program whose acronym no one cares about except the people it saves. The calls dropped from hourly to weekly to monthly. Her father took a part-time job at the hardware store; it turned out explaining the difference between types of screws to people made him oddly happy. Her mother started baking for the corner café on Saturdays, turning out poppy-seed rolls that made people linger and tip better. They argued less about how they had gotten here and more about what to cook for Sunday. They still made mistakes. They now caught themselves faster.

Anna kept her job. She kept her budget. She updated the spreadsheet with cautious optimism, which is a kind of prayer that doesn’t need a church. In May, her landlord announced a rent increase she couldn’t easily outmaneuver. She did not panic. She ran the numbers and then did something five-years-ago Anna would not recognize: she asked for help, the kind that honors both people. She asked her boss for a three-month remote stretch to save on commuting and took on an extra pro bono case that kept her sane—an eviction defense for a grandmother who had raised three kids and two papillons in a rent-stabilized apartment and needed someone to say “not today” in a tie.

On a warm Tuesday in June, Anna stood in a bank office where the air-conditioning had opinions and signed a stack of papers while a loan officer with a perfect bob recited rates that would have made past-Anna faint and present-Anna nod. It was done at 10:43 a.m. by her phone’s time. She stepped outside and stood on the sidewalk because if the ground was going to move, she wanted to feel it. The city was noisy and indifferent and perfect. She sent one text: “Keys at 3.” She sent it to no one special and everyone meaningful: herself, in a chat she kept because sometimes you need proof you’re listening.

She did not stage her apartment for Instagram. She took a day off work and moved her life in loads that made sense. The couch went last. The plant went in the seatbelt. The flag magnet rode in her pocket and clicked onto the new fridge with a small, satisfying sound. The apartment smelled like paint and possibility.

That Sunday, she invited her parents over for coffee and fruit. She chose coffee because it didn’t ask the kitchen to prove itself too soon. Her mother cried at the doormat. Her father put his palm on the wall and said, “Feels solid,” like a blessing. They didn’t talk about money. They didn’t have to. The room held the conversation already.

Lena arrived late, on purpose or habit, cheeks flushed from a morning wedding party where she’d wrangled three flower girls and a grandmother who wanted blue eyeliner “like Tina Turner.” She handed Anna a wrapped package that was too light to be a mistake.

“I didn’t,” Anna started.

“It’s not expensive,” Lena said, fast, “but it’s right.”

Inside lay a brass key hook with four hooks and one word stamped into the plate: Home.

“It has four,” Lena said, suddenly shy. “I figured you’d have your keys, and… someday… other people’s. Or just hang your dreams on the empty ones. I don’t know. I’m bad at symbolism.”

“It’s perfect,” Anna said, and meant it.

They ate fruit like it was an achievement. Her father told a story about a neighbor who tried to hang a shelf with roofing nails and how some lessons are loud. Her mother asked where the lightbulbs were “so I can know your life.” Lena sat with her phone upside down and didn’t touch it because she was learning that presence is a skill.

They didn’t have a toast. They didn’t need one. The moment toasted itself.

Justice, when it comes, isn’t a gavel. It’s quiet click-clicks: a budget that balances; a phone that stops ringing at dinner; a family that says “we were wrong” and then does different, not for applause but for breakfast tomorrow. It’s a sister who learns to make a living by helping other people look like themselves on days that matter. It’s parents who let go of a house to hold onto each other. It’s a woman standing in a kitchen she paid for with eleven thousand tiny no’s, turning them into one resounding yes.

In August, when the heat drummed and the city smelled like asphalt and ambition, Lena called to ask if Anna could help with a contract. “A venue wants me on their preferred vendors list,” Lena said, trying on the word vendor like a heel she hadn’t walked in yet. “I don’t want to sign something that says they own my face.”

“Email it,” Anna said. She brewed tea and annotated and wrote in plain English margins the way she wished someone had written in the margins of her childhood: This clause bites. Cross this out. Ask for net fifteen. Here is where they hide the trick. Here is how you say no and still get the job. She sent it back with a note: “Your work, your terms.”

Lena texted a photo later: a hand holding a pen over a line that said By: and her own name spelled correctly for once, not Lena-with-two-e’s as if she belonged to someone else’s spelling. “I said no to two bad clauses,” she wrote. “I thought I would faint. I did not.”

In September, Maple Ridge called with a new kind of news. Natalie from the clinic had a pleased voice. “We’re closing your parents’ file,” she said. “Not because of a miracle. Because of muscles. They did the plan. They made the payments. They still have two years on the clock, but the machine has stopped snarling. I thought you’d want to know.”

“I do,” Anna said. And then, because gratitude is a door too, she said, “Thank you for catching us when we were all falling.”

“Tell your sister we refer brides,” Natalie said, laughing. “Our office has three weddings this year because we’re human beings and no one pays us enough to pretend otherwise.”

“Send them her link,” Anna said. “She will show up on time.”

Autumn draped itself over the city. The little magnet flag on her fridge held up a grocery list most weeks: eggs, milk, thyme because why not. On Saturday mornings, she opened the windows and let the kind of air in that makes you suddenly believe you could learn the guitar at thirty-two or forgive someone who hasn’t asked or bake bread that tastes like patience. She bought a second plant. It lived.

The day the first mortgage payment left her account, Anna felt a twist in her stomach that lasted exactly as long as it took to look around the room. Fear and joy often come dressed in the same coat. She hung the coat by the door. She had hooks now.

On a gray Sunday before Thanksgiving, the family gathered in the small apartment for a trial run that had nothing to do with ovens and everything to do with temperature. Her father brought tools “just to check your cabinet hinges.” Her mother brought a pie so fragrant the hallway smelled like a Norman Rockwell painting grew legs. Lena brought a model’s case, as if habit demanded it, and then left it closed. They sat. They ate. They did not pretend nothing had happened. They also did not autopsy it. They talked about a new neighbor who watered everyone’s plants unasked and how kindness sometimes needs boundaries like water needs a glass.

Before they left, her mother touched the key hook. “Four,” she said, thoughtfully.

“Ambitious,” her father said.

“Hopeful,” Lena countered, then glanced at Anna and added, “Not in the old way.”

Anna smiled. “It’s good to have room.”

Snow came early. Maple Ridge sent a postcard with a picture of the courthouse steps under powder and a scribble from her father: “The new place is warm. We owe you nothing. We owe you everything. Love, Dad.” Her mother’s scrawl added: “Rolls on Saturday. Bring tupperware.” Lena slid in her own line on the side with a heart that wasn’t a heart, really, just two parentheses and a slash that meant effort: “Booked through June. Can afford concealer now. For the soul.”

On New Year’s Eve, when fireworks wrote uncertain promises in the sky, Anna stood at her window and watched the city celebrate as if endings and beginnings were not always the same moment with a different hat. She thought about a girl in a narrow bed, afraid to say a necessary no. She thought about the slam of a door that actually opened one. She thought about justice and how it doesn’t arrive in a robe so much as in a budget line called Savings and a calendar reminder called Call Mom and a contact saved as Natalie—Legal Aid—Hero. She thought about love that is steel wool and love that is soft, and the way they can be the same hand, cleaned up and offered.

She raised her glass. It wasn’t champagne. It was strong tea with lemon because she had never been a bubbles person. She toasted a year that had not looked like joy until it did. “To earned endings,” she said aloud, to the empty room that was not empty at all.

Spring brought one more story. It came the way all good stories do: from a stranger who begins not with their crisis but with their gratitude. A woman in her forties emailed Anna with a subject line that said “Thank you” and a body that said many things, chief among them: “Your sister did my makeup for my son’s hearing. He got his program. I felt like a person in that room, not a case file. Your family helped my family.” She attached a photo—mother and son, courthouse steps, a small flag in the background because courthouses are always capped with symbols. The woman’s eyes were bright. The boy’s smile was crooked the way smiles are when you’re surprised by the sun.

Anna forwarded the email to her parents and then to Lena with a note that said simply: This. Lena responded with three crying-laughing emojis and then, after a pause, wrote, “I’m saving for my own place. The good kind of saving. Not waiting for a ring. If a ring comes, he’ll be invited to the place, not to the rescue.”

“That’s the kind of romance they rarely film,” Anna wrote back. “The best kind.”

On a warm June afternoon a year from the day she had walked back into Maple Ridge and drawn a line, Anna stood in a living room that was still small and still hers. The light hit the floorboards the way paintings try to capture and can’t. The plants were thriving. The key hook held two sets of keys now—hers and a spare for emergencies, hanging on a little tag that said In Case of Joy as a joke she made with herself and loved. There was room for two more, but she had stopped measuring life by how many hooks were full. Some spaces you keep open on purpose.

Her phone pinged. A photo from her parents’ new apartment: her father in an apron, her mother on a stool, both of them grinning over a rhubarb pie that looked like a magazine had tried to style it and failed because family food doesn’t pose; it beams. The caption: “We’re okay.”

Another ping. A calendar invite from Lena: “Coffee at 9? Contract talk and a ridiculous story about blue eyeliner.” Time, place, a heart that was starting to look like a real heart now that Lena had learned that effort makes shapes better.

Anna accepted. She washed her mug. She clicked off lights. She put her hand on the door and felt, the way you feel the pulse of a building you’ve learned to call yours. She stepped out into a city that still didn’t care and loved her anyway, because that’s how cities do it. The hallway smelled like laundry and ambition. Somewhere, a baby laughed because a father made a face. Somewhere, a neighbor practiced trumpet with the window open and the audacity to be imperfect in public.

She locked the door behind her. It was a sound she would never get used to in the best way. Not because it meant keeping the world out. Because it meant she could always come back in.

Justice had not arrived with fanfare. It had been built, unglamorous day by unglamorous day, out of boundaries held, apologies made, work learned, debts paid, habits broken, and love, the sturdy kind that doesn’t flinch when told the truth. In the end, nobody got everything they wanted. Everybody got what they needed, which is the grown-up ending that children think is a consolation prize until they grow and discover it is the gold medal.

On the sidewalk, Anna turned her face up to the sun. The season had shifted, as seasons will, and this time it had shifted with them. She walked toward the café, toward a sister who had found a way to make art that holds on days that require courage, toward parents who had learned that home is people holding each other up, not debt propping up furniture. She walked toward the life she had chosen every day for five years and then chosen again, the day she refused to hand it over.

The door to the café jingled a small bell when she pushed it. Lena was already there, for once, hair up, sleeves rolled, eyes bright with a story trying to burst out.

“You’re early,” Anna said, teasing.

“I’m different,” Lena said, not missing a beat. “Wait till you hear. I taught a teen to draw freckles. On purpose. She cried. The good kind.”

“Tell me everything,” Anna said, sitting down, placing her keys on the table in a little clink that sounded like punctuation at the end of a sentence that had taken too long and was worth it.

So Lena did. And Anna listened. And somewhere in Maple Ridge, in a kitchen with new light, their parents sat down to coffee and rolls and a morning without the phone ringing wrong. The future, which had once felt like a cliff, laid itself out like a road you could walk—a long one, yes, but straight enough if you looked far and steady enough if you took each step on purpose.

In six months, a year, five years, there would be new problems, because life doesn’t promise otherwise. There would also be new hooks on which to hang them, and hands that had learned how to hold weight together without dropping what mattered.

For now, there was coffee. There were stories. There were keys. And there was a small, quiet justice, sitting with them at the table, as matter-of-fact as sunlight in a cup.