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All good. Talk soon.

I hit “Send.” I imagine I’ll have to give her some version of the events next time I see her. So it’s like this, Chelsea. The guy was my ex. The first and only man I ever loved. He didn’t used to look at me like I was trash, despite being a megahot car-crash mess back then.

Bad choice of metaphor, but whatever. I hurt him, and though I like to think I’m a better person these days, braver, at least, it doesn’t matter. I’m still the villain, and there’s no coming back from that.

With a heavy sigh, I pull a sweatshirt on over the leggings I wore to bed and shuffle into an apartment that smells like toast, coffee, and used running shoes.

In the kitchen, Rachel stands angled away from me. She has a slice of toast in one hand and her phone in the other. Callum (“Just call me Cal”) doesn’t look up from his laptop from where he’s sitting at the table next to the living room window. No change there, I think to myself. He hasn’t looked once at me since I told him I wasn’t interested in hooking up. At least, that’s what he was getting at.

“Morning,” I say as I reach up to pull open my cabinet. There’s nothing in the fridge that belongs to me because it’s been a day-to-day kind of week for shopping. Or to put it another way, a financial stretch.

“Morning.” Rachel barely glances up. Dressed top-to-toe in knockoff Lululemon, she looks every inch the fitness influencer she aspires to be.

There’s also Casey, who is currently using up all the hot water in the bathroom. I think her official story is that she’s studying nursing, though I have a sneaking suspicion she’s really a cam girl. I don’t judge. It’s not like I didn’t consider it myself, however briefly.

“You good?” Rachel asks, without really wanting to know.

“Yes. You?” comes my standard response and the extent of our relationship after four months. Four months in a third-floor walk-up with mismatched furniture, living with people I barely know in the wilds of Inwood. One roommate who is no longer speaking to me. One who barely speaks to me at all. One I barely see.

I pull out the last cereal bar from the box and grab my cup from the drainer. World’s Okay-est Dad, it reads. Another remnant from a previous tenant. As I fill it with coffee from the ancient machine, I find myself wondering what a suitable slogan for my own dad would be.

World’s Most Narcissistic Dad? Not that I’m qualified to diagnose his narcissism, but my therapist once suggested as much.

I came across an acrostic poem once that seemed to spell out my experiences to a tee.

N never admits they’re wrong in any way

A their arrogance and superior attitudes

R is for raging when challenged

C their complete lack of boundaries

I instills doubts in their victims

S their sense of self-importance

S self-superiority

I in denial they’re ever at fault

S for the slander they inflict

T their total lack of empathy

Maybe I can get a sampler of this made instead. Send it to him for Father’s Day.

I haven’t seen my dad in quite a while, which suits me perfectly. In a lot of ways, it’s like being a kid again, left to my own devices and being ignored. I demonstrated a lot of attention-seeking behaviors for a while, though I eventually worked out that the pain wasn’t worth the effort.

I make my way to the table and stare at Cal until he begrudgingly moves his feet from the other chair. I’ve been avoiding the couch after finding one of his friends watching porn and jerking off there late one night. The same friend I’d overheard commenting that my tits were big enough to each have their own boyfriend.

But it’s not as though I had a lot of choices, accommodation wise, after I’d made some not-so-smart decisions in the initial aftermath of being cut off. It happened so suddenly. My dad removed access to my bank account, canceled my credit card, then my apartment lease. At least he kept up my medical insurance. For a while.

All this because I defied him, betrayed him, so the story goes. Though my version is a little different. I acted on the courage of my convictions for the first time in my life.

Unfortunately, principles don’t pay bills.

After my first week in a hotel—paid for by a friend’s credit card in lieu of a vacation to Paris I’d sprung for the year before—I was still certain Dad would come around when he cooled off. That he’d call me to his office and give me a lecture, and that would be that. But it didn’t happen. And I wasn’t going crawling back.