The movie credits roll in white on blue; the monitor hums its tiny ocean; the apartment settles the way buildings do when the night decides to sit. My phone, face-down on the box-table, vibrates across the cardboard like a trapped bee.
I don’t move at first. We made a rule. After eight, the bowl. But we are mid-move and mid-exceptions and the vibration has that specific, officious length to it that my body recognizes from a thousand emails I wish I’d ignored. It stops. I let my shoulders drop. It starts again.
“Do you want me to throw it in the freezer?” Jason asks, deadpan, without opening his eyes.
I huff a laugh and flip the phone.Unknownat the top—no, not unknown. A number I know because it’s called at inconvenient times since the press conference and pretended it was offering us opportunities. Sponsor rep. I let it go to voicemail. The red dot appears. A minute later, thepingof the transcription preview arrives like a paper cut:Hi Riley, quick ask about a photo op…My skin does the old lurch—one part obligation, one part learned fear.
Jason feels it through the blanket the way you feel the ice tilt under a bad line change. “Hey,” he says, a question and a caution.
I stare at the ceiling like it’s going to flash an answer. “It’s…them.” I don’t have to say who. “They want a comment. Or a photo. Or my pulse. I ignored it and I still feel like I’m failing at being a person.”
He shifts so we’re eye to eye, the monitor’s green dot throwing a tiny alien light across his cheekbone. “You’re not failing,” he says, patient like good tape. “You’re unlearning. Theytrained you to think your worth is measured in how fast you respond to something that isn’t yours. That’s not worth. That’saccess.”
The word drops into me like a level on a picture frame. Access. Not love. Not duty. Access.
“I know,” I say, a little too quickly. “I mean, I know in my head.” My thumb hovers over the voicemail like I’m defusing a bomb. “I also know exactly how the email will read if I don’t play nice.Appreciate your partnership. Concerned about alignment. Would love to connect about expectations moving forward.” I can hear the bulleted list threatening.
He nods, not arguing with ghosts, just acknowledging they’re loud. “We already wrote expectations moving forward,” he reminds me, tapping the corner of the signed policy packet on the box. “They don’t get to write ours for our kitchen. We can be good partners at noon and off the grid at night. If they don’t understand boundaries, that’s a them problem we can escalate at a reasonable hour.”
I breathe that in like something with calories. The monitor sighs. Oliver stays asleep. The apartment doesn’t collapse when I don’t return a call.
“Say it,” he prompts softly, like we’re rehabbing a muscle that forgot its job.
“My life isn’t optics,” I say. The words taste new and immediately necessary. “Our life isn’t optics.”
His mouth tilts. “There it is.”
I open the voicemail and, without listening, swipe left. Delete. The red dot disappears. My body waits for the sky to fall. It doesn’t. Nothing happens except my heart slows to a tempo I recognize from before adrenaline taught it bad habits.
Jason watches my face like he’s trying to memorize the exact second a weight lifts. “How’s that guilt?” he asks.
“Wobbly,” I admit. “Smaller.” I set the phone screen-down in the empty salad bowl we used for popcorn like I’m putting a toddler in time-out. “There’s relief under it.”
“Good,” he says, and threads our fingers. “We can be generous in business hours and unavailable in our living room. That doesn’t make us difficult. It makes us people.”
A text banner blooms from Sophie:Ready when you are.I can hear her voice in the pixels—bossy, gleeful,maid of honoralready a job and a promise. I laugh, the sound expanding into the space the guilt just vacated.
Jason raises an eyebrow. “Good news?”
“Great,” I say, and type back one word:Always.
Sophie’s bubble pops up again before I can put the phone fully away.Also: maid of honor binder acquired. Tabs include: Cake, Vows, Socks, Exit Strategy. Ready when you are.A string of confetti emojis and one very aggressive duck.
I laugh hard enough to startle the monitor into a polite hiss. Jason grins like he’s been waiting for that exact sound all night. “Socks?” he asks, delighted.
“She has a stance,” I report, texting backYou’re hired. No glitter cannons.I watch the dots appear, disappear, reappear.Fine. Biodegradable glitter.
Jason leans his head back against the box-couch and looks at me like a man checking the scoreboard and liking the numbers. “You want her next to you?” he asks, no surprise in it, just curiosity about how I’ll say yes.
“Obviously,” I answer, and feel the word land low and bright. “She’s the person who showed up with soup when I pretended I wasn’t sick and stood in the hall outside the compliance room like a bouncer. She deserves tabs.”
“She’ll earn a badge,” he says. “Maid of Honor, Chaos Division.”
I typeBring the binder tomorrow. We’ll bribe you with pad thai and opinions.She replies with a picture of the actual binder—clear cover, rainbow tabs, the title page readingR + J: Operation Quiet Joyin her handwriting that always looks like it’s laughing. I save the photo without thinking. It sits in my camera roll next to the napkin vows and the first blurry shot of our kid’s fist around Jason’s finger. The collection looks like a thesis I never planned to write.
“Hope looks good on you,” Jason says, so casual it sneaks under my ribs. I look at him, at the monitor’s soft lantern glow, at the ridiculous blanket bunched around our ankles, and realize he’s right. Hope used to feel like an exposure—too bright, too easy to mock. Now it feels like a muscle we’re finally using the way it was designed.
“What if we lean into it?” I say before I can talk myself out of it. “Not a spectacle. Just...joy. Quietly. With witnesses we pick.” The ring flashes when I gesture and I see my face in the reflection—tired and steady and not apologizing for either.
