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On second thought, her discharge paperwork was a terrible place to start. She reached for her phone instead, opening the calendar app in search of some way to orient herself in her own life.
Several red notifications alerted her to updates on a shared calendar. Finding it was one she shared with Bishop, she flushed hot with a kind of secondhand embarrassment over the intimacy of joint schedules. She loved her calendars, loved itemizing her life and soothing her racing mind with the order wrought by effective time management, checklists, and thorough notes. The idea of giving Aster Bishop full access to that part of her spiked adrenaline through her bloodstream. She felt overexposed, too raw from a long day.
Needing something to herself, she duplicated her contributions into a new, private calendar, and then removed herself from the shared one. She refused to feel remorse for doing so. This transition wasn’t one that would happen overnight, and she wouldn’t apologize for needing time and space.
Switching to the daily view on her new calendar, she scrolled. Her days were packed with events and ancillary notes; she’d made a list for anything and everything. She scanned her schedule, desperate for a flicker of recognition. But as she read through reminders to grab takeout, read at least fifty pages in each of her current books, give Pawntès his flea medicine, and so on, her recollection remained stubbornly blank.
She pressed the phone to her chest, gripping it with clenched hands. Recognizing herself in a rigorous schedule wasn’t enough to feel like this life was hers.
Her eyes welled, stinging, and she allowed herself one painful sob muffled deep into a pillow. She refused to give into misery beyond that. It made for terrible company.
Gathering herself, she looked at the calendar again, trying to appreciate that structure brought her sanity no matter the year. She scrolled forward, blank entries for days she hadn’t lived yet, but would have to. She scrolled more, switching to a weekly view. She found blank entries for weekly reading logs, imported cycle tracking data, and what looked like auto-populated reminders for a few birthdays. Then she stopped scrolling, nearly jumping out of her own skin. Screaming at her in a frankly offensive bright red text was a single word: sex.
She tossed her phone on the bed. Maybe she didn’t need to try so hard to orient herself in this life. Maybe she didn’t want to think about any of this at all. Some things—sex with Aster Bishop, for example—were simply too much.
She turned out the light and rolled to her side, lying face-to-face with Pawntès and her avoidance in the dark.
“You’d tell me, wouldn’t you? If he was horrible?”
He blinked, and she reached out to scratch behind his ears. Not fluent in cat, Molly couldn’t decide if his purr was reassurance or a warning.
She woke with her head in a fog and her phone vibrating on the mattress beside her. She struggled to roll over, to pry her eyes open, to evaluate the contents of her skull. Dim, blurry, but not exactly hurting. Just entirely wrung out.
“Holy shit,” she grumbled.
As she sat up, it took several seconds for her vision to follow, lagging. Then with a blink, the world righted itself, and her head began to feel lighter. She’d clearly slept like the dead.
Checking her phone, she found a new text: Dear Molly, Would love to talk sometime today if you’re free. Love, Dad.
Her dad. Halfway across the country, struggling with his own health, and still as awkwardly formal in text as she remembered. He cared and didn’t always know how to show it. And she didn’t always know how to let him in.
A career roofing contractor who loved his work but hated his paycheck, Richard Graham couldn’t have been prouder when Molly’s scholarships meant she’d have a free ride to one of the best private preparatory schools in the country. His pride came in the form of celebration, glowing praise, and a sudden weight named Expectation dropped on Molly’s shoulders.
It made for a difficult few years for Molly, being the recipient of so much pride and burdened by the expectations that she would do better, be better, than her dad. Molly, for her part, couldn’t understand what she was meant to improve upon; her dad was great. On principle, she didn’t believe in one’s socioeconomic station as the barometer for personal success.
She only wanted to feel like she’d successfully achieved the things expected of her. On the days when Laburnum nearly broke her, her dad’s voice was an echo in her head reminding her of all she had to be grateful for. Of all the opportunities now in her path.
She was grateful. And sometimes she was miserable too.
She looked at the time; it was still ridiculously early for him. Even without knowing the specifics of where his health currently stood, she knew he should probably rest more.
Later tonight? she typed back. Evening for me? Afternoon for you?
They agreed on a time and Molly forced herself not to dwell on how odd it felt to have a perfectly normal conversation with him, as if her whole world hadn’t been upended in the last week.
Wanting to avoid Bishop for as long as possible, Molly puttered around the room until morning tipped closer to afternoon and a need for caffeine, her stomach’s growling, and Pawntès’s restlessness drove her out into the apartment.
She crossed her fingers that Bishop was elsewhere. So, of course, she found him sitting at the kitchen table with a laptop open and a mug of coffee within arm’s reach. For a man who’d slept on a sofa, he looked remarkably unrumpled. His shirt had a freshly pressed crispness to it, his blond hair swept back and styled as if he had people to impress. If he’d announced he had a yacht to catch, Molly would have believed him.
Pawntès hopped onto the table and laid directly on top of Bishop’s keyboard.
He looked up, eyes snapping to hers in an unsettlingly magnetic way. Molly had to look at the table.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, setting Pawntès on the floor.
“Fine.”
“Does your head hurt at all? We’re supposed to keep an eye on progressive headaches or—”
