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"He's my boss, Mom."

Silence. Not shocked silence — recalibrating silence. My mother has a whole library of silences and I know every one of them. This is the one where she's deciding which version of herself I need. The cheerleader. The realist. The one who tells me I'm being an idiot but makes it sound like a compliment.

"Your boss," she says.

"The founder. He owns the club. The whole — yeah. He owns it."

"Huh."

"He's a good person. He's also impossible. He wakes up at 5:15 in the morning on purpose. He irons his weekend clothes. He told me he hasn't... kissed anyone in two years like he was reporting a quarterly loss."

"But you like him."

"I really like him, Mom. That's the problem."

"Why is that the problem?"

"Because he signs my paychecks. Because I have eighty-seven thousand dollars of debt with your name on it and he could make all of it disappear with one phone call and that terrifies me. Because if this goes wrong I don't lose a boyfriend, I lose everything, and there's no—"

"Anna."

I stop.

"Breathe, bunny."

I breathe.

"Now," she says. "I'm going to say a mom thing, and you're going to let me, because I'm sick and I'm allowed."

"That's emotional blackmail."

"Yes. It's the only perk of cancer and I use it shamelessly." A rustle — her shifting in the hospital bed. "You've been taking care of me for two years. Before that you were taking care of us both, since you were twelve, since your father decided he had better things to do. You don't know how to let anyone hold anything for you. You never learned. The one time you broke your wrist in high school, you wrote your own absence note and signed my name."

"Well, I didn’t want to bother you!”

"Anna, sweetheart. I'm not worried that this man has too much power over you. I'm worried you'll never let anyone have any, and you'll spend your whole life carrying everything alone because letting someone help feels like dying."

I don't say anything. The radiator clanks. Somewhere in her hospital room, a machine beeps.

"Is he kind to you?" she asks.

"Yeah."

"Does he listen?"

"He pays attention like it's his job."

"Then the debt and the paychecks and the headlines, that's all logistics. Scary logistics, but logistics. The real question is whether you trust him. Do you?"

I look at the green dress.

"Yeah," I say. "I do."

"Then stop eating cereal over the sink and go deal with it."

"How do you know I was—"

"Twenty-six years, bunny. I know everything." A beat. "Also, if he's as rich as you're implying, tell him the Jell-O here is unacceptable. I want the brand-name kind. With the fruit in it. I have suffered."