I cut him off before he can feel any worse about himself. “You have. The meeting I showed up to late and nearly cried. You saw it. You sawme.” And he did. He saw me, and he wasn’t fazed, even then. “Some months are worse than others. This one was…” I trail off, thinking about Tim at the job site, the phone calls with Peter where I held everything in while missing him terribly, the afternoon I spent on the bathroom floor, not because I was depressed, exactly, but I didn’t want to be inside my own body anymore. “This one was a bad one, even with the meds.”
He sets a plate in front of me and leans against the opposite counter, arms crossed. “What can I do? During the bad ones.”
It’s such a simple question, and it nearly undoes me. Not,how can I fix it,orhave you tried this supplement,ormaybe if you exercised more. Just…what can I do?
“What you did yesterday,” I say. “Show up. Make me food. Don’t ask me to be okay when I’m not.”
“I can do that.”
“I know you can.” And I do know. That’s the wonderful, horrible part.
After breakfast, he reaches for his phone, checks something on it, and then pulls open the small pocket of his bag on my hallway bench.
“Did you take yours?” he asks, casual, like he’s asking about the weather. He holds up an orange prescription bottle and shakes it once.
I blink. “Did I—oh. No. Shit.” I left my pill case in the bathroom this morning and completely forgot, which is peak ADHD irony—forgetting to take the medication that helps you not forget things. “Thank you. Hold on.”
I pad to the bathroom and come back with my pill case—the one Neve bought me with the days of the week on it because I kept losing track of whether I’d already taken my doses. I pop today’s two pills and wash them down with coffee. When I look up, Darcy is swallowing his own with a glass of water.
We stand there for a second, both mid-swallow, and the mundanity of it—two people in a kitchen, reminding each other to take their meds on a Saturday morning—is so quietly intimate I don’t know where to put it.
“We’re a pharmaceutical commercial,” I joke.
“Side effects may include domestic bliss and improved egg consumption.”
“That was terrible.”
“You’re smiling.”
“I’m grimacing. It’s different.”
It’s not different. I’m absolutely smiling, and he knows it. The look on his face is so stupidly pleased with himself, I have to turn away before I say something I can’t take back.
He tells me about Martin’s offer that afternoon.
We’re at the beach—the quiet one past the point, where the rocks jut out far enough so the tourists never bother walkingto it. We’re perched on a flat rock ledge overlooking the cove, sharing a bag of plain no-name chips and Helluva Good! Dip because neither of us felt like cooking or eating out. The tide is coming in, lazy and unhurried, and the gulls are arguing about something overhead. It’s the kind of peace that only exists in places where the nearest traffic light is twenty minutes away.
“Partner track,” I say, keeping my voice neutral.
“Yeah.”
“That’s a big deal.”
“It is.”
I stare at the water and wait for the feeling to hit me—the bracing, the walls going up, that familiar recalibration of expectations.
He’s leaving. You knew he was leaving. This was always the deal.
But it doesn’t come.
Or it does, but it’s duller than I expected, buried under something heavier.
“When does he need an answer?”
“Mid-September.”
Three weeks. I take a chip and eat it slowly, buying myself time. “What are you thinking?”
