“Yeah,” I say. The word comes out rough.
“Then stop making her guess about it.”
The house is waking up around us. Someone’s footsteps on the stairs, heavy and familiar. A door opens and closes upstairs. The water pipes knock as someone turns on a faucet. Life filtering back in, the Stockings’ particular symphony of creaks and voices and people moving through shared space.
I pick up the beer. It’s fully room temperature now, flat and pointless. I drain it in one go because the alternative is admitting I sat here for forty-five minutes holding a warm beer I didn’t want.
Dev watches me, mouth quirking. “Classy.”
“Shut up.”
They laugh, and the sound loosens something in my chest. That’s the thing about the Stocking—the walls are thin, and the bathroom schedule is a blood sport, everyone is in everyone else’s business, and sometimes your roommates tell you exactly what you don’t want to hear, and it’s the most honest thing in your life.
My phone is on the coffee table, screen dark.I reach for it, swapping the empy glass for the annoying little device, thumb hovering over the contact I’ve been avoiding. Maddie. The name sits there, simple and terrifying.
“You gonna text her?” Roz asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “Think I am.”
Dev nods once, sharp. “Good.”
I unlock the phone and the screen glows blue in the dim room. My thumb finds the message thread, and I start typing before I can talk myself out of it.
The words come faster than I expect. Not polished. Not careful. Just the truth, stripped down to its bones. I read it once, my heart hammering against my ribs, and then I press send before my brain can intercept.
The message flies. Delivered. No take-backs.
I set the phone down, face-up, and wait.
The house creaks. Someone laughs upstairs. The fridge hums. And I sit in the quiet, lighter and more terrified than I’ve been in years, waiting for whatever comes next.
Needing a distraction while I wait for whatever comes next, I pick up my phone again and send the other text I have been avoiding. I type the message declining the Burlington job with my thumb hovering over the screen long enough that the thing dims to save battery, and then I press send anyway because if I don’t do it right now I will talk myself out of it, and we will be right back where we started, which is nowhere I want to be.
The money panic hits approximately 1.7 seconds later, which is a new personal record. Two weeks of work, solid cash, the kind of payday that covers rent and groceries and maybe even that brake job my truck’s been whining about since March. Gone. Poof. Vanished into the ether because I pressed a button on my phone while sitting on a wobbly IKEA coffee table with a beer ring permanently etched into the veneer.
I set the phone face-down on my thigh and let the panic wash over me. It’s loud. It’s specific. It has spreadsheets and due dates and the exact amount I owe on my credit card right now ($427.63, thank you for asking). I breathe through it. In. Out. The ceiling fan clicks. Someone’s shower is running upstairs. Roz and Dev whisper across from me in a poor attempt to pretend they aren’t laser-focused on my every move.
The weird thing is, underneath the panic, there’s something else. Something lighter. Like I’ve been carrying a backpack full of rocks for years and just shrugged it off onto the sidewalk. I’m lighter and more terrified than I’ve been in my entire adult life, which is not a combination I recommend to anyone with a weak stomach.
I push myself up off the couch and then just stand there, hands at my sides, looking around the room like I’ve forgotten something. I haven’t forgotten anything. I don’t know what to do with my body. Dev watches me with their chin in their hand. Roz has stopped pretending to look at anything else. The two of them let the silence stretch just long enough to be pointed, and then Roz sets down her glass and says, simply, “Go.” I pull on my flannel and walk out the front door.
The night air is thick and warm, the kind that sits on your skin like a blanket. Main Street is quiet, most of the shops dark, just the diner still glowing at the far end and the Brew House with its windows lit amber. I cut through the alley behind the bank because it’s faster and because right now, speed feels like the only thing keeping me moving.
My boots hit the pavement, steady and too loud in the quiet. Three blocks to Maddie’s. Three blocks to figure out what the hell I’m going to say when I get there.
I don’t figure it out.
I’m on her porch before my brain has produced a single usable sentence. The yellow porch light spills over thesteps, catching the roses along the walk—Drew’s roses, pink and stubborn and beautiful because they don’t know they’re supposed to be anything else. The house is dark except for the kitchen window, a soft gold rectangle against the night.
I stand there. One hand on the railing. The other in my pocket, fist clenched around nothing.
I don’t knock.
My nerve, which has survived chimney fires and raccoon nests and one truly disastrous encounter with a sump pump, deserts me completely. It packs a bag, catches the first train out of town, and leaves me standing on Maddie Weiz’s porch with my heart hammering so hard I’m pretty sure the neighbors can hear it.
I dig through my jacket pocket and pull out a crumpled hardware-store receipt from Springs & Bells dated yesterday—a bag of deck screws and a tube of caulk. Seeing my handwriting on her store’s sales slip stings: our tangled mess reduced to thermal paper and itemized purchases. The back is blank except for a greasy smudge. I fish out the cheap ballpoint pen I keep in my inner pocket and write three simple lines:
“I’m sorry. I don’t want to be temporary anymore.”
