The work uses me in a way the call center never did. It uses the organizational thinking and the analytical instinct, and the thing I always had—the ability to look at a complicated system and see the load-bearing pieces versus the decorative ones. I come home from the first week slightly dazed, like I’ve been running in the wrong shoes for five years and have finally been given the right ones.
My feet hurt differently. In a better way.
Opal is so thoroughly, visibly thriving that I sometimes have to stop and just look at her. She and Bea are inseparable—they have inside jokes, a shared project, and an ongoing, productive dispute about whether cats are better than dogs. Opal’s drawings have become more ambitious, broader in scope, more detailed.
My little girl has big dreams, and I want her to follow all of them.
She’s started a chapter book that she reads to Dario in the evenings, a paragraph at a time, in the exaggerated voice he told her is good for audience retention. He is an impeccably patient audience. He asks questions at the end of each paragraph. She loves this.
I watch them sometimes from the kitchen doorway, the two of them on the couch with her book open between them, and I let myself feel it fully instead of managing it, and what I feel is something that doesn’t have a tidy name. Something large andwarm and not entirely separable from fear, because the things that matter most are the ones that can be lost.
I don’t announce that I’m going to start my business degree again. I’ve been researching programs for weeks, comparing schedules and accreditations and credit transfer policies for the semesters I completed years ago. I pick the one that works for my life rather than the one that would impress someone, and I sit at the kitchen counter after dinner and pay the enrollment deposit with my first paycheck from the new job. I stay there for a moment, looking at the confirmation email on my screen and feeling something I recognize from a long time ago.
Something edging toward pride.
Dario comes into the kitchen for water and stops when he sees the screen. “You enrolled.”
“I did.”
He stands there for a moment. Then he picks up his phone. “I know someone at?—”
“No.”
He looks at me.
“I picked this program. I researched it. It’s the right one for me and my schedule and what I need. I don’t want you to make calls.”
He puts the phone down and picks up his water glass instead, and I can see, in the set of his jaw, the visible effort it takes not to interfere. “Okay.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. I didn’t do anything.”
“Yeah, you did. Thank you.”
He looks at me for a moment, and then he almost smiles—not the full version, just the slight shift at the corner of his mouth that means he’s amused and won’t admit it. Then he goes back to his office.
I sit at the counter for another minute and look at the confirmation email and think about the version of myself who paid enrollment deposits in a different life, with a different sense of what was coming. She would be astonished by this kitchen. She would be blown away by Opal—an accidental pregnancy sounded like death to her back then.
And she would be, I think, floored by the man in the office down the hall.
I send Pritha my first real deliverable the following Friday, and she responds in six minutes with two words.Well done. I put my phone in my bag and go back to work.
The three months of our arrangement expired sixteen days ago. Neither of us mentioned it.
I noticed the day it passed—not with alarm, more with a quiet recognition. It felt like a storm that was forecast and then didn’t quite arrive the way I expected. As it turns out, nothing ever goes the way I expect it to.
He texts me when I’m at work:“I miss your body, pet.”
“I’m at my new job, sir.”
“That’s why I miss you. You’re not here.”
I laugh in spite of myself.“Being your usual impossible self again.”
“Since you’re at your new job, I’ll give you two minutes to get to the bathroom before I send you anything too salacious.”
Oh hell.
