I closed my eyes for a fraction of a second, because I couldn’t afford to roll them and still claim adulthood. “I’m not trying to recover a reputation. I’m trying to live with myself.”
Silence. The kind of quiet that meant I’d stepped outside the script.
When he spoke again, his tone had cooled. “Living with yourself is easier when you’re employed.”
A humorless laugh threatened. I swallowed it down. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not. You are wasting time. You should be applying. You should be putting your name in front of the right people. You should be speaking to firms who understand that these situations are survivable if you handle them properly. You are—” He paused, and I heard him choosing a word he believed would land as motivation, not cruelty. “—You are capable of better than this.”
Better than this.
As if “better” was always upward. Always visible. Always impressive.
I let my gaze drift to the window, to Rios’s boat in the slip next door. He’d gone to see Ford and Sawyer for a couple of hours of normal. Of human.
Something twisted in my chest—a brief, irrational wish that he’d step out onto the dock right then, like he could hear the tone of my father’s voice from across the water and decide to intervene.
He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.
But the thought of him—of his blunt, unsentimental steadiness—did something to me anyway. It reminded me there were other definitions of “better.”
“I’m not applying to those jobs,” I announced.
“And why not?” My father’s voice sharpened. “Because you want to prove a point? Because you want to punish yourself? Because you’ve decided to be… principled?” He said principled like it was a youthful phase people outgrew.
“Because I don’t want that life. And I’m not going to chase it just to look like I’m doing what I’m supposed to.”
“You were raised to have options,” he snapped. “You were raised to use them.”
There was the crux. Not love. Not understanding.
Investment. He had invested in me. Time, money, expectation. I was supposed to yield returns.
I could perform right now. I could soften my voice, give him a palatable version. I could promise I was “exploring options.” I could say I had meetings. I could feed him the kind of language he recognized as progress.
And perhaps if I did it correctly, I’d get that thin slice of approval. Not love. Never love. Approval. That was what had always mattered in our household.
I didn’t feed him. “I am using them.” I stayed calm because calm was armor. “Just not the way you want. Now, I have to go.”
His breath hissed, quiet but audible. “Madden?—”
“I have something on the stove,” I lied, because it was easier than saying, If I stay on this call, I’m going to say something we can’t unsay.
A tight pause. “We’ll speak again,” he said. Like it was a decision he got to make alone.
“Okay.” I ended the call.
For a few seconds, the boat was too quiet. My skin, my throat, both seemed too tight. Not in a panic way—more like my body remembered what it was like to live under constant evaluation, and it was bracing for the next critique.
Carefully, I set the phone down on the table and turned back to the stove.
The grilled cheese was darker than I’d intended. Not ruined, just… overdone on the edges. Story of my life.
I slid it onto a plate anyway and carried it to the table. I sat down and took a bite.
The crunch was satisfying. The cheese was molten. The salt hit my tongue, and for a second my brain went blank in the way it only did with simple pleasures. I let the flavor ground me until my shoulders dropped from around my ears.
A ding from my computer indicated something new hitting my inbox. Compulsively, I toggled over, and my pulse jumped as I spotted a reply. Not from email, but from the forum messaging system tied to one of the posts I’d made earlier. The subject line was generic: RE: Your post.
