I am here when you want me to be.
Not if. When.
The word lands and does not ask to be answered.
I put the phone facedown on the counter and stand there until the screen goes dark underneath it. The old apartment is doing everything it has always done. One light. Clean counter. Cold floor. Bed untouched down the hall. No one asking questions. No one waiting in the next room. No one seeing my face before I can arrange it.
It should feel safe.
It feels like a room after someone has moved out.
At 4:00, I sit on the edge of the bed. I do not get in it. The other pillow is smooth. Perfect. Undisturbed. It looks less like proof of control now and more like evidence of a life that refused to leave marks.
I hate it.
This is new enough to be useful.
At 6:30, Dana calls.
I let it ring four times, which is stupid because she knows I am looking at it. On the fifth, I answer.
"Are you alive?" she says.
"Yes."
"That was the lowest bar and somehow you made me ask."
I sit on the kitchen floor because the chair feels too formal for being verbally assaulted by my sister before sunrise.
"Did it publish?" I ask.
"No."
The word hits so hard I have to put my free hand flat on the tile.
"Alderman called me," she says. "Don't get mad. I called the team office when you stopped answering. He said legal pushed back, the site doesn't have confirmation, and the photo isn't clear enough. They're not publishing right now."
Right now.
The phrase should scare me. It does. But under it, something worse and smaller unfolds.
The article did not publish.
I still left.
Dana lets the realization arrive. She has always been cruel that way. Patient enough to make me hear myself think.
"Nolan," she says after a while.
"I know."
"Do you?"
"No."
"Better answer."
I close my eyes. The tile is cold through my sweatpants. My hip hates the floor. I stay on it anyway because discomfort is at least honest.
