We said our goodbyes and I grabbed my gear, loaded it into the back of my beat-up car, and drove through the quiet Toronto streets toward the small apartment I shared with my siblings.
The adrenaline had mostly fadedby the time I pulled into the parking lot, leaving me hollow and exhausted in that familiar post-show way.
The apartment was on the third floor of a building that had seen better days, but the rent was cheap and the landlord didn't ask too many questions, which made it perfect for us. I climbed the stairs with my bag slung over my shoulder and let myself in as quietly as I could, not wanting to wake anyone if they were already asleep.
Talia was in the kitchen when I walked in, sitting at the small table with her laptop open and a mug of tea cooling next to her elbow. She looked up when she heard me and smiled, tired but warm. “Hey. How was the second set?”
“Good. Crowd was into it.” I dropped my bag by the door and crossed to the fridge, pulled out a bottle of water, and drank half of it standing there with the door still open. “What are you still doing up?”
“Quarterly reports.” She gestured at the screen. “My manager needs them by seven tomorrow morning, which means I've been living in this document since I got home.”
I shut the fridge and pulled the chair out across from her. “How bad is it?”
“The numbers are fine. The formatting is a crime against humanity.” She turned the laptop around to show me, and I looked at the spreadsheet long enough to confirm that yes, it was a mess — columns misaligned, headers inconsistent, one section where the font had changed for reasons that were completely unexplained.
“Did you do this yourself or did someone send you a template from 2009?”
“Both, somehow.” She dragged the laptop back and rubbed her eyes. “I've been fixing it for forty minutes and I think I've made it worse.”
“Slide over.”
“You don't have to?—”
“Tal.” I was already pulling my chair around to her side of the table. “Move.”
She shifted, and I took the laptop, and we spent the next twenty minutes working through it — me fixing the formatting, Talia narrating which numbers actually needed to go where, both of us talking over each other until we found a rhythm that worked. It was the most useful I'd felt all night. My hands had stopped shaking somewhere between the second song and the drive home, but the adrenaline residue was still sitting in my chest, that restless hum that needed somewhere to go. This gave it somewhere.
“Okay,” I said finally, pushing the laptop back toward her. “Check the totals in column D because I think one of them was pulling from the wrong cell, but the rest of it should be clean.”
Talia scanned it, scrolled down, scrolled back up. “How did you do that in twenty minutes when I've been losing my mind for an hour?”
“I had a spreadsheet phase in my twenties. Don't ask.”
“What kind of phase?”
“The kind where Micah needed school supplies and I was tracking every dollar we spent down to the cent.” I said it lightly, the way I said most things about that period, and Talia's expression did the small shift it always did when she heard something like that — not pity, more like a quiet acknowledgment that we'd both lived through it and were still here. “Anyway. You're good.”
“Thank you.” She closed the laptop and leaned back in her chair. “You look exhausted.”
“I'm always exhausted.”
“More than usual.” She tilted her head, studying me in that precise way that had always made lying to her feel slightly pointless. Talia read people the way she read spreadsheets — looking for the figure that didn't add up. “What happened tonight?”
“Nothing happened. Good show, decent crowd, came home.” I stood up and took my water bottle back to the counter, giving myself a reason to stop being looked at. “June reamed me out in the dressing room, but that's basically just a Tuesday.”
“What for?”
“Said I was in my head.” I shrugged. “She wasn't wrong.”
Talia was quiet for a second, which was more dangerous than questions. “You've been off for a few days,” she said eventually. “Not bad, just — somewhere else. Like you're running on autopilot.”
“I'm fine.”
“Mm.” She picked up her mug, realized the tea had gone cold, and set it back down. “You know you can just tell me when something's sitting on you, right?”
I looked at her. She was twenty-seven years old with tired eyes and ink on her wrist from a pen she'd been chewing on for the past hour, and she'd stayed in this apartment when she could have left, built her career from inside these walls instead of somewhere with more room. I knew why she'd stayed. I also knew it had cost her.
“You should go to bed,” I said. “Seven o'clock deadline.”
