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The croissants stayed in the trunk. Tucked inside a reusable grocery bag beneath a spare jacket, where Ben would never think to look.

I wasn’t sharing them.

Not a single flake of pastry.

Those croissants belonged to a version of myself that existed only inside Drift’s kitchen, and Ben didn’t get to touch that.

Inside the house, I moved through the entry sequence without thinking. Keys on the third hook. Shoes aligned perpendicular, left even with right. A quick scan of the cameras, the red light on the bookcase unit blinking its steady, watchful rhythm.

Everything in its place. Everything accounted for. A perfect prison.

I can’t do this anymore.

I changed into the clothes Ben expected me to wear at home—gray sweats, white T-shirt, no logo, no personality—and started dinner. Spaghetti with meat sauce, one of the five approved dishes in my rotation. Simple. Boring. Hard to screw up. I had never liked spaghetti, yet I’d eaten it once a week for six months.

Maple bourbon cold brew. Autumn in a cup, minus the part where you have to rake leaves. I could practically taste the richness of maple and bourbon and hear Drift telling me not to disappear.

I’m trying not to.

The water went on the burner. The ground beef hit the skillet. I stood at the stove with a wooden spoon in my hand and my body in the kitchen, but my mind was still three miles away in a café that smelled like butter and cinnamon.

Fold it like this. Drift’s forearms appearing on either side of me, tan and dusted with flour. The brush of warmth against my back. That low voice at my ear, patient and unhurried, like time was something you could spend instead of survive.

Nothing to apologize for.

Four words. That was all it took to crack something open that I had spent years sealing shut. Nobody said that. Nobody in my life looked at my panic and responded with calm instead of punishment.

Steam curled up from the pot. Or had it been curling for a while?

The smell hit me first. Acrid, metallic, wrong. I blinked and looked down at the pot. The water was gone. All of it. The pasta had fused to the bottom in a blackened, smoking mass that looked like modern art nobody would buy.

“No! No, no, no.”

I yanked the pot off the burner, hissing when the handle seared my palm through the thin dish towel. The charred remains sent up a plume of smoke that made my eyes sting and water. I flipped on the vent fan and grabbed a second towel, fanning the air, heart slamming against the inside of my body so hard my vision pulsed at the edges.

Then it struck me I hadn’t turned on the burner for the ground beef.

How long had I been standing here? How long had I been lost inside a daydream about a man I’d met yesterday while my dinner turned to carbon?

The clock on the microwave read 6:14.

Sixteen minutes. Ben walked through the door at 6:30 every single night. Sometimes earlier if traffic was light. I needed a minimum of twenty minutes to boil pasta from scratch. Same amount of time for the meat. The math didn’t work. It never did when you needed it to.

I flipped on the burner under the meat. My hands shook as I filled a new pot, cranking the burner to high and throwing a lid on top. Maybe if I salted the water. Maybe if the stove gods took pity on me for once in my miserable—

The front door opened.

Early. Sixteen minutes early.

I can’t do this anymore.

Every muscle in my body locked. I stood at the stove gripping the wooden spoon like a weapon I’d never use, listening to the cadence of those footsteps. Dress shoes on polished hardwood, each step landing with the kind of authority that turned a hallway into a courtroom.

No pause at the living room. No detour to change clothes or check the mail he always left fanned on the entry table. Straight to the kitchen. A direct line, which meant Ben already knew something was wrong. Could he smell the smoke from the entryway? Had he seen it on the camera?

The camera. The goddamn camera in the living room that caught the edge of the kitchen doorway.

If Ben had checked the feed on his phone during his commute, he would’ve seen me standing motionless at the stove for god knows how long, staring at nothing, while smoke billowed around me, a man too stupid to notice his own house might be burning.