"I was fine by the time I got here."
"And now you're not." She took a step closer. "You don't have to be, you know. You're allowed to have a hard day."
Part of me wanted to reach for her. Wanted to close that distance and let her in the way she was offering. Instead, I told her I'd take the cardboard to the bin and come back for the last of the tables. The silence that followed had weight to it.
When she finally spoke, her voice had shifted. Not cold. Considered.
After I came back inside, she directed her staff through the final breakdown without looking at me directly. She was composed rather than distant, as if those minutes in the alley hadn't happened. We worked through the rest of it side by side, loading her equipment into the van, saying goodbye to her crew.
In the parking lot, under the harsh yellow security lights, she turned to face me.
"What's happening?" she said. "Not only tonight. All week. What's going on with you?"
I looked at her. This woman who'd become essential to me without my fully tracking how she'd managed it.
The woman I'd sought advice about that morning, sitting in front of a headstone. I'd come away with nothing but the certainty that I was terrified of failing.
I wanted to tell her everything. That I loved her and it scared me more than anything I'd faced, including watching my mother dying by degrees and three years in county lockup. That I didn't know how to be someone's person without losing them.
Instead, I told her it was late, that she'd had a brutal night and needed rest.
She looked at me long enough that I could feel my face heating.
"Talk to me," she said. Her voice was steady, but something in it ached.
"I'm fine, Nadia."
She nodded once. Slowly. Like she was filing something away.
Then she got in her van and drove away.
I stood in the empty lot and listened to her engine fade before checking my phone. Two missed calls from Malakai. Both during the breakdown, when I'd been too busy carrying tables and avoiding conversations to notice.
I called him back. He picked up on the second ring and spoke before I had a chance.
"I've checked the footage."
"And? What've you got?"
"Someone was in that kitchen. Clear as day on the camera above the service entrance. But the file's too big to send. You and Nadia need to come in and look at it together."
I knew he was still there because I could hear him breathing. "It's not anyone I recognize, but you and Nadia are all over this thing. You'll need to see it for yourselves."
"I'll sort it," I said, then hung up and stood there in the empty lot.
Something to deal with. Something concrete and external and solvable, unlike everything else I was carrying tonight.
I told myself it was too late to call now. And I almost believed it. My mom would've had something to say about that. She probably would've had something to say about a lot of things tonight.
TWENTY-ONE
NADIA
I gave him three days.
Three days of being patient. Of telling myself he was grieving, and that grief didn't run on anyone else's schedule. Of replaying the way he'd looked in that alley, hands braced against the brick, fighting whatever was happening inside him, and deciding that pushing him wasn't the right call.
On the fourth morning, I woke at five, lay in the dark above my parents' garage, and had a very honest conversation with myself.
