By day six, I'd stopped pretending the dark circles under my eyes were from anything other than what they were. The concealer I'd been applying each morning in a futile attempt to look like a functioning human had given up the fight, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of what it was trying to conceal. My reflection in the bathroom mirror had taken on the quality of a before photo in a skincare ad—the kind designed to make you look as terrible as possible so the after would seem miraculous. Except there was no after. There was justme. A woman with shadows under her eyes and a braid that was getting less precise each day and a coloring book on her nightstand that she hadn't opened since the first night because opening it felt like opening a door she wasn't sure she could close.
It was Saturday when they came.
I'd called in sick to Maria's for the first time, not because I was physically ill but because the accumulated sleep debt of six nights had finally presented its invoice, and the invoice was a tremor in my hands that wouldn't stop and a fog behind my eyes that made the apartment look like it was being viewed through wax paper. I'd spent the morning on the couch in my pajamas, which were my own pajamas and not the oversized t-shirt of Xavier's that I'd slept in for weeks, and the difference between those two garments was the difference between being wrapped in someone's care and being wrapped in cotton, and cotton, however high the thread count, was a poor substitute for care.
Emily looked put together in the way Emily always looked put together, neat, professional, her long brown hair pulled back, her expression carrying the particular blend of warmth and assessment that she brought to every interaction, as if she were simultaneously hugging you and running a background check. She was holding a paper bag from a bakery I didn't recognize and wearing jeans and a sweater that saidoff dutyin a way that was probably deliberate.
Abby was holding a stuffed elephant.
Not carrying it casually, the way an adult might transport a children's toy from one location to another. Holding it. Against her chest. With both arms. The elephant was purple and wore a bow tie and had the slightly compressed look of a stuffed animal that had been hugged so frequently and so thoroughly that its structural integrity had been permanently altered by love. Abby's red curls were loose around her face, her greeneyes enormous and bright, and she was wearing overalls—actual overalls, denim, with a striped shirt underneath and sneakers that had stars drawn on them in what looked like silver Sharpie—and the overall effect was of a woman who had decided, with absolute conviction, that the world could take her exactly as she was or not at all.
"We brought croissants," Emily said, holding up the bag. "And Abby brought Gerald."
"Gerald needed to come," Abby said, as if this were self-evident. Then she looked past me into the apartment, and her expression did something complicated in a rapid sequence of processing that I'd come to recognize as Abby's particular way of reading a space, taking in information through channels that most people didn't have access to. Her gaze moved from the wilting tulips to the bare walls to the couch where my blanket was balled up in a way that spoke of restless, thrashing sleep, and then her eyes came back to mine and she said, with the devastating directness that was her hallmark: "Your apartment is sad."
"Abby," Emily said, in the tone of a woman who'd had this conversation before.
"It is, though." Abby stepped past me into the apartment without waiting for an invitation, Gerald the elephant tucked under one arm, her head swiveling as she cataloged the space with the rapid, comprehensive attention of someone whose brain didn't come equipped with the filters that told most people which observations to keep internal. "There's no colors anywhere. No soft things. The blanket on the couch isn't even—it's just a regular blanket. And the kitchen doesn't have any snacks. I can tell by looking, because kitchens with snacks have a different feeling than kitchens without snacks, and this kitchen has the feeling of a waiting room."
She turned back to me with an expression of genuine bewilderment, as if the absence of snacks was a moral failing on par with tax evasion.
"I have soup," I said weakly. "Katya's soup. In the fridge."
"Soup isn't a snack. Soup is a meal that gave up on being fun." Abby settled herself on my couch with the ease of someone who'd made a decision about where she belonged and wasn't interested in negotiating. Gerald was positioned on her lap with his bow tie facing outward, and she arranged herself cross-legged, her star-covered sneakers tucked under her knees, and looked up at me with those enormous green eyes. "You haven't been sleeping."
It wasn't a question.
Emily was already in my kitchen, unpacking the croissants onto a plate she'd found in the cabinet. She moved through the space with quiet efficiency, filling my kettle, finding napkins, doing the small, practical things that people did when they loved someone and didn't know what else to offer.
"I'm sleeping," I said, which was technically true in the same way that a car with a cracked engine block was technically a vehicle. "Some. A little."
Abby tilted her head. "You're sleeping the way people sleep in hospitals. The kind of sleeping where your body does it but your brain doesn't agree, and you wake up more tired than before, and everything tastes like the inside of your own mouth."
The accuracy of it was startling enough that I just stared at her for a moment, standing in the middle of my own living room in my pajamas with my unwashed hair and my trembling hands, being seen with a thoroughness that felt almost invasive, except that Abby's seeing wasn't invasive—it was generous. She saw the way a child saw, without the adult instinct to look away from things that were uncomfortable.
Emily brought the plate of croissants to the coffee table and sat down next to Abby, and the two of them looked up at me—Emily with careful concern, Abby with frank curiosity—and I realized I had a choice. I could sit down and eat a croissant and have the conversation they'd come here to have, or I could keep standing in the middle of the room pretending I was fine while my body shook and my eyes burned and the silence of the apartment pressed against me like something with weight.
I sat down. Not on the couch—there wasn't room with Abby and Gerald taking up their share and Emily occupying the other end—but on the floor, cross-legged, my back against the wall beneath the new window that worked properly and had never known the weight ofWar and Peacepropping it open. The floor was hard. I was getting used to that. The floor and I had developed a relationship over the past six nights, intimate, uncomfortable, characterized by long stretches of silence and the occasional sob.
"Eat," Emily said, pushing the plate toward me.
I took a croissant. It was still warm, flaky, the kind of pastry that required a functioning appetite to appreciate, and mine had gone AWOL somewhere around day three.
"I'm fine." It was defensive answering an unspoken question.
"Molly."
"I'm managing." I set the croissant down on my knee and stared at it—the torn edge, the layers of pastry that separated and reformed, the crumbs already accumulating on my pajama pants. "I go to work. I eat. I call Anna. I come home. I don't call him. I—"
"You're miserable," Abby said.
Miserable.Not struggling. Not adjusting. Not going through a difficult but necessary period of growth and self-discovery. Miserable. The word I'd been avoiding for six days because naming it felt like admitting defeat, and admitting defeat felt likeproving every fear I had about myself, that I couldn't function alone. That I was too broken, that the woman who'd stood on the sidewalk with two coffees and a speech about autonomy was a performance, and this, the floor and the trembling hands and the dark circles, was the truth.
"I'm building independence," I said, and even as the words left my mouth, I heard how they sounded hollow, rehearsed, the kind of thing you said in therapy when you wanted credit for the concept.
Abby looked at Gerald. Then she looked at me. Then she looked at Gerald again, and I had the distinct impression that a conversation was taking place between her and the stuffed elephant that I was not privy to. Some internal consultation conducted through a channel that operated on a frequency only Abby could hear.
"Why?" she asked.
