Johnny’s quiet beside me, matching my pace. The new flip-flops don’t love the sand, though, and after a minute he kicks them off and carries them, walking barefoot like the cold doesn’t register.
“You’ve been doing this every day?” he asks. “The beach walk?”
“Almost every day for two months. Missed a couple when I was sick.”
“Two months?” He glances at me sideways. “No job to get back to?”
“I don’t have a job. Never have.”
He lets out a low whistle. “Two months on the beach, no job, family bankrolling you. That’s a hell of a vacation. I’m not gonna lie, I’m a little jealous.”
I squint at him. “You kind of have the same thing right now.”
He laughs, short and surprised. “Yeah… I guess you’re right. I’m completely free until I remember what I’m supposed to be doing.”
He says it like a joke, but the word lands wrong.Free.I’m smiling like it’s funny because the alternative is explaining that some of us know exactly what we’re supposed to be doing and wish we didn’t.
“So why no job?” he asks. “Ever?”
“My father is…” I search for the word that tells the truth without telling any of it. “Traditional. He wanted sons to carry on the family legacy. Got my brother, and then got me.”
“Traditional,” he repeats, like he’s turning it over.
“A daughter’s role in his world is very specific,” I say. “He decided what my life would look like before I could walk. And I don’t get a say in it.”
Johnny’s grin fades. “What does that mean?”
I should stop there. I know I should. Smile, change the subject, ask him something about the water or the weather. That’s what I do. That’s what I’ve always done. Safe answers. Practiced deflections. The kind of surface-level conversation that keeps people from asking the next question.
But he’s watching me with this quiet, steady focus, like nothing exists outside of what I’m saying, and I am so dangerously starved for someone to actually listen that the next sentence is out before I can stop it.
“My mother died having me.”
The wind fills the space after my words. A wave breaks hard enough to send foam skidding up the sand toward our feet. I stare at it and wait for him to do what people do. The careful face. The softI’m so sorry. The pivot to something less uncomfortable.
He doesn’t. He just keeps walking beside me, near enough that his arm almost brushes mine, and waits.
But that’s worse. Because sympathy I know how to handle. Silence that feels like an open door is something else entirely.
“My father never forgave me for that.” I hear myself say it and thinkstop talking. “I’ve been a disappointment from day one. The wrong child, the wrong gender. A problem to be managed.”
“Nat…”
There’s that nickname again. “He doesn’t want me to have a life. He wants me to serve a purpose.” The wind cuts through my sweatshirt, cold against my neck. I fix my eyes on the waterline. “Sorry. That’s a lot for a beach walk.”
“Don’t apologize.” His voice has gone quiet. No jokes in it now. “That’s fucked up.”
The bluntness of it hits me sideways. Not sympathy. Not careful phrasing. Justthat’s fucked up, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
And maybe it is. Maybe I’ve been too close to it for too long to see it that simply. But there’s something disorienting about hearing someone name it, because it means every person who’s watched my father treat me like inventory and said nothing was making a choice. Every polite smile at every dinner, every associate who looked through me like I was furniture. They all knew. They just didn’t care enough to say it out loud.
A man with no memory and no reason to give a damn just did.
“Why don’t you leave?” He says it gently, like he’s trying to hand me something fragile. “If he’s that bad, just go.”
I stop walking.
It’s a fair question. A logical one, even. And the concern on his face is so genuine that it makes my throat ache, because he actually thinks it’s that simple.
