I thought about everything she’d ever said to me over brunch tables and 3am phone calls. All the versions of: You’re allowed to be a person in this. You’re allowed to need things. “You know what you told me once? That asking for things doesn’t ruin it. It’s what builds it.”
“I know.”
“You were right when you said it to me.”
She laughed, that small, reluctant laugh. “It’s different when it’s your own kitchen.”
“Yeah.” I leaned back. “It really is. Tell them about the cabinet. Not as a complaint. As a thing you’re learning about yourself. That you have a specific, weird attachment to knowing where the mugs are.”
“That sounds neurotic.”
“That sounds human. They’ll love it.” I paused. “They already love you, Sierra. You’re not going to scare them off by being a person.”
The line went quiet for a moment. When she came back, her voice was different, softer, less careful.
“When did you get good at this?”
“I had a good teacher.”
Her breath caught on what might have been the beginning of crying. “Go knock on your mom’s door, Jett.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m going to.”
The rest of the week crawled. I planned events on autopilot. A corporate mixer on Wednesday, a birthday dinner on Thursday. Smile, charm, coordinate. Nobody would’ve guessed that behind the professional warmth lived a twenty-four-year-old kid quietly terrified of knocking on his mother’s door.
Ellis stayed steady. He didn’t ask me every day if I’d changed my mind, didn’t pressure or prod. He showed up at my apartment Tuesday night with groceries and cooked chicken and rice, not my mom’s way, but close enough that I sat at my kitchen counter and blinked at the ceiling for a minute.
“Too much salt?”
“No. It’s perfect.”
We were clearing the table when he pulled out his phone.
“I mapped the subway timing.” He slid his phone across the counter toward me. “If we leave by twelve-fifteen, we hit the D at Atlantic with a six-minute buffer, which means we’re not rushing, and I found the cross street. There’s a bakery two blocks from her building; I was thinking we could bring something.”
He had a list. An actual bulleted list. Contingency routes. Approximate arrival windows. A note about parking, even though we were taking the subway.
Something in me tightened. I opened my mouth before I could catch it.
“Should I print this out? Color-coded tabs might help. Maybe a laminated cheat sheet in case I forget my mother’s name mid-doorstep.”
Ellis went quiet. Not dramatically. He didn’t leave the room. Just wentstill, that particular quality of stillness I’d learned to read. The withdrawal. The door easing closed.
I set down the dish I was holding. “That was a deflection.”
Ellis looked at me. “I know.”
“You were doing yours, too. The spreadsheet.”
A pause. “Yeah.”
Neither of us said anything for a beat. The kitchen held the smell of rice and something almost like my mother’s house.
“I make spreadsheets when I’m scared,” he said after a long pause. “I know it looks like I’m treating it as a project. But I’m terrified, Jett. I don’t know your mother. I don’t know if she’s going to look at me and see everything she’s already decided, and I can’t optimize my way out of that, but I keep trying anyway because it’s the only thing I know how to do with fear.”
“I know.” I crossed back to him. Put my hand on the counter, close to his. “And I deflect when I’m scared. Because if it’s funny, it can’t touch me.”
“Is that what that was?”
