The restaurant was small. Yellow lighting that makes everyone look slightly better than they are. Low music drifting from somewhere overhead. Something jazzy and unhurried. The windows were still fogged from the rain outside, soft white halos blooming around the streetlights beyond the glass. It felt like a place designed for people who needed a pause between one thing and the next. A room that kept no records.
We slid into a booth across from each other. The seats were worn leather. The moment my body registered it, something in my lower back released with an almost audible gratitude.
Sleep, my body noted. This could become sleep.
Across from me, Adam shrugged off his jacket — the dark brown leather one. His favorite. He folded it carefully beside him, running his palm once across the fold to flatten it.
I watched this with the specific attention as if I had memorized more things than I would ever admit.
The waiter appeared. Adam glanced at the menu. He had probably already made his decision by the time he sat down, ordered two or three things, then looked at me with one eyebrow fractionally raised.
I looked at the menu. The words blurred slightly. I pointed at something.
"She'll have the soup," Adam said to the waiter. Then, without looking at me: "You'll eat."
Not a question. Not even really a statement. Just a quiet declaration of how things were going to go.
I didn't argue. I wasn't sure if I wanted food or unconsciousness more, and soup seemed like a reasonable compromise between the two.
The waiter left. The menus disappeared. The music shifted to something slower. Across the fogged window, a set of headlights moved through the wet street and dissolved.
Adam leaned back in his seat and looked at me in the way he'd been doing since we left the lecture hall. "So," he said. "Did any of them email you back?"
I exhaled slowly through my nose and looked at my phone lying face-up on the table between us.
It had become a pastime to stare at that phone lately. Not checking anything specifically, not scrolling. Just staring. The way you stare at a door while you wait for someone to enter—not because you think they will, but because it's more comfortable to look than to turn away. Every time the screen lit up, a tiny, humiliating thing in my chest made a tiny leap—this one, maybe this one—and then sank just as quickly when it turned out to be a bank message, a promotional email from a café rewards app, or my mother inquiring if I had eaten.
Twenty or so applications. There were around nineteen quiet moments interspersed with the sporadic We hate to notify you that it was sent with all the passion of a formal letter. Greetings, applicant. Not even my name. . As if the rejection needed to be as impersonal as possible to spare both of us the intimacy of a real no.
I had initially taken the rejections personally. After that, I made an effort not to take them personally, which was a kind of draining effort in and of itself. I had now reached the third level, which was a kind of numbed arithmetic where all I could do was count the silences, watch the number increase, and attempt to find a way to understand it without coming to the conclusion that I had made an awful miscalculation.
"I got some emails," I said.
His expression didn't change, exactly. Just shifted slightly, the way a person's face does when they're bracing. "And?"
"Only the rejected ones wrote back." I turned my phone face-down. "The rest just — didn't. Which is almost worse. At least a no is a complete sentence."
He let out a breath. The breath of someone who has absorbed something they wished they could cure with a suitably rational approach and is finding, regretfully, that this specific problem is not responding to logic.
"What about the babysitting application?" he asked. "The one you were putting together last night?"
I almost laughed. Almost.
The night before, I had been briefly, synthetically motivated. Petra's voice in my head — easy money, you love kids, just try, I'm serious — combined with the particular energy of approximately midnight and a third cup of tea and the conviction that this time I would do the thing instead of just thinking about the thing. I had opened a document. I had typed my name.
And then I had stared at the blank page below my name for a while.
Hello, I'd tried. I am twenty-one years old, recently relocated, available evenings and weekends, good with children, patient, reliable.
Then I'd stopped and looked at what I'd written.
Then I'd written the honest version in my head, just to see how it sounded:
Hello. I am a sleep-deprived, financially precarious University student who cannot currently manage her own nutrition and speaks to her heater by name. I have no formal childcare qualifications. I did once successfully pacify nine children at a birthday party using napkin origami, but I acknowledge this is a narrow credential. I am, however, quite trustworthy in a face-based way that people have told me comes across immediately. Please consider me for the role. I will try very hard.
I then typed another one and erased it once again. I spent hours writing and erasing. And I just posted one that felt alright when I was finally exhausted. The typical one. However, the entire experience had been similar to throwing a paper boat into the oceans and seeing it sail away.
"I posted it," I said. "Last night."
"And?"
"And nothing, obviously. It's been twelve hours."
"You said you were hopeful about it."
"I'm hopeful about everything for approximately five minutes," I said. "That's not optimism, that's just the gap between deciding to try and realizing I've tried."
He didn't smile at that. I hadn't expected him to.
"I'm not expecting anything," I continued. "That's where I've landed. Expectation is the thing that makes rejection hurt. If I just — apply, and don't let myself want it, then whatever happens is just information. Not a verdict."
"That's not how you actually feel," he said.
I looked at him. "No," I admitted. "But it's what I'm going for."
He leaned forward slightly, both forearms on the table, that posture he had when a conversation had his full attention. The posture that made you feel, for better or worse, like the only thing in the room.
"Why do you do that?" he asked.
"Do what?"
"Pre-defeat yourself." He said it without judgment, just as an observation. "You decide something won't work before it has the chance to not work, so that when it doesn't work, you've already absorbed the impact. Like you're — pre-bruising."
I considered this. "That's not—" I stopped. "Okay, that's reasonably accurate."
"It's a way of protecting yourself."
"It's a way of surviving," I said. "There's a difference."
"Is there?"
The water arrived. The waiter set two glasses down and filled them, the ice clinking sharp and cold. I wrapped both hands around my glass immediately.
The restaurant murmured around us. Two women at the next table were deep in a conversation they'd been continuing for years. A man near the window was eating alone and reading, perfectly content, which I found obscurely comforting.
"There's something else," I said.
He waited.
I hadn't planned to say this. I hadn't planned to say it yet at all — had been carrying it in the specific way you carry something you know you'll eventually have to put down, but not yet, not until you absolutely have to.
"I think I have about a week."
He went still. "A week for what?"
"Before I have to go back." I looked at the table. The words came out lighter than they felt, which was the only way I knew to say difficult things — wrapped in a reasonable tone, like if I delivered them calmly enough they'd lose some of their weight. "That was the arrangement. I had to prove I could do this. That I could live independently, support myself, handle it. If I can — they back off. If I can't..." I lifted one shoulder. "Then I go home. That's the deal."
The silence that followed was a different quality from the ones before it.
"How long have you known this was the timeline?" he asked carefully.
"Since the beginning. I just — didn't tell people. Because saying it out loud made it more real, and I was still in the phase where I thought I'd have something sorted by now." I almost laughed, except it came out wrong. "I thought by now I'd have at least one job. Something to point at. Some evidence."
He looked at me steadily. "And you don't want to go back."
"No."
"Because of them, or because of what going back means?"
Returning meant my parents. In particular, it signified my mother's extreme caution, quietness, and concealed concern. The way she would set my plate down with extra gentleness, as if I were recovering from something she had predicted. Perhaps as a result of our argument, my father wouldn't say anything and merely nod in the manner of a man who thought the issue was resolved. The house has a unique aura that is packed, angry and unloving. Each room was a little bit smaller than it looked. Every meal was an outcome of normalcy that was so well-practiced that it had taken on a life of its own.
Going back meant the walls doing the thing I left specifically to escape.
Going back meant: you tried. You couldn't. You came home. And somewhere inside me, in the part that I couldn't logic at or manage or pre-bruise, that meant something about who I was. What I was made of. Whether the instinct I'd followed — the deep, barely-articulable sense that staying was going to cost me something I couldn't afford to lose — had been instinct or delusion.
"Both," I said. "It's both."
He absorbed this.
"Going back feels like—" I searched for it. "Not failure, exactly. More like confirmation. Like the part of me that said you can do this would be proven wrong, and I'd have to figure out how to live with that version of myself. The one who tried and couldn't."
"You haven't failed yet," he said.
"Yet."
"You've been here four days. Four days is nothing."
"Four day is most of my runway." I turned the water glass in my hands. "I just need something. Some small proof of concept. That I'm not completely—" I paused, and when the word came it came quietly — "delusional."
He looked at me for a long moment. Not with pity, which I would have resented. With something more like the expression of someone who has already reached a conclusion and is deciding how to deliver it. "You're not delusional," he said. Firmly. The way he said things he'd decided.
I gave him a small smile that didn't quite reach anywhere. "You don't actually know that."
"I do."
"You're biased."
"Probably," he said. "Doesn't make me wrong."
I looked at him across the table — the warm light doing what warm light does, making everything slightly softer, slightly more forgiving. He was watching me with that steady attention of his, unhurried, and I had the disorienting experience, not for the first time, of feeling simultaneously seen and unable to look directly at being seen.
The food arrived.
The soup came in a wide, shallow bowl, steam rising from it in slow curls. The smell hit me first and my stomach did something complicated. Not quite hunger, not quite nausea. More like confusion. Like a system that had been running on minimal power for long enough that it had forgotten what normal input felt like.
He nudged the bowl a fraction of an inch toward me. A small, deliberate gesture.
"Start," he said.
I looked at it.
There had been a time — not so long ago that I couldn't remember it, just far enough that it felt like a different person — when food was uncomplicated. When I ate mindlessly, happily, as a form of comfort or punctuation or simply because something smelled good. Now it felt like a task. One more thing on the list I was already failing to complete, one more thing requiring energy I was routing elsewhere. The decision of it. The effort of it. Even swallowing felt like something that deserved a moment of consideration.
"I feel like a hamster," I said.
He blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"A hamster." I kept my eyes on the soup. "One of the tiny helpless ones. The kind where if someone forgets to refill the water bottle for more than a day, everything is over. The kind that looks like it's surviving but is actually just one missed meal away from just—" I made a small gesture— "going still."
He stared at me for a second. Then a breath of laughter escaped him. The kind that happens when something is simultaneously funny and a little heartbreaking. "You think you're fragile," he said.
"I think I might be." I finally picked up the spoon. "Like, I thought I was a person who was built for this. For the doing-things-alone version of life. I spent years telling myself I just needed to get out, and once I got out, I'd — be okay. I'd figure it out. I'd be capable." I stirred the soup slowly. "Turns out I am capable of some things and absolutely not capable of others, and the others are most of the practical survival requirements."
"Such as?"
"Eating regularly. Sleeping. Applying to jobs without spiraling into a philosophical crisis about whether any of it means anything. Basic administrative tasks involving phone calls, which still somehow feel like a form of violence." I paused. "Remembering that I am, theoretically, an adult."
He watched me eat the first spoonful before he said anything. As if waiting to confirm I was actually going to do it.
"Being an adult," he said then, carefully, "doesn't mean doing everything alone. That's not what adulthood is. That's just — a story people tell themselves."
"It's what independence looks like."
"Independence means relying on yourself to make good decisions," he said. "Not relying on yourself for everything. Those are different. Nobody does everything alone. The ones who pretend they do are just better at hiding the parts they don't."
I looked at him. "Do you hide parts?"
"Everyone hides parts."
"Including you."
He held my gaze. "Including me."
I didn't push on what parts. I wanted to — the specific curious pressure of wanting to know more than someone's curated version was intense, with him, in ways I'd spent two years managing. But something about the way he said it — including me — felt like a door opened just barely, and pushing it fully open felt like the wrong move. Like a bird you could only keep by not reaching for it.
"The hamster thing," he said after a moment. "I want to push back on that."
"I figured."
"Not because it isn't funny. It is. But you said it like you believe it, and I don't think you should." He leaned forward slightly, that posture again. "Hamsters don't choose anything. They exist in the conditions they're given. You chose this. You packed bags, got on a bus, signed a lease, applied to twenty places even when twenty places didn't write back. That's not fragility. That's someone who keeps going even when the evidence is discouraging." A beat. "Hamsters don't have that."
I stared at my soup.
"That was actually a quite good argument," I said quietly.
"I know."
"Very annoying of you."
"I'm told." He picked up his fork. "Eat more."
I ate more.
The restaurant moved around us. Conversations layering over each other, cutlery against plates, the low music continuing its unhurried business. The fogged windows had begun to clear at the edges, the street outside starting to show through in soft fragments: a lit sign, a passing umbrella, the uneven glimmer of wet stone.
"What would you do?" I asked. "If you were me."
He considered this properly. Not immediately, not with the first available answer. "I'd post the babysitting listing everywhere," he said. "Not just one board. Every platform. I'd be shameless about it. You have nothing to lose by being thorough."
"It feels desperate."
"Most effective things do, from the inside." He looked at me. "And I'd give myself a concrete timeline that wasn't based on someone else's conditions. Not I have a week before I have to go back. Something you set. Something that's yours." He paused. "Because the deal you have with your parents — that's their frame. You're measuring yourself by their timeline. What's your own?"
I hadn't thought about it that way.
"I don't know," I said honestly.
"Then that might be the first thing."
"Decide my own timeline."
"Decide what you're actually trying to prove, and to whom." He held my gaze steadily. "Because if it's to them — that's one thing. But if it's to yourself — the timeline probably looks different."
The same facts, seen from a slightly different angle.
"You're quite good at this," I said.
"At what?"
"Talking to people in ways that make them think differently without feeling managed."
He raised an eyebrow. "Is that what I'm doing?"
"Isn't it?"
"I'm just—" He paused. Seemed to catch himself on the edge of the practiced answer and choose a different one. "I just think you're smarter than the situation you're in. And sometimes smart people need someone to reflect that back at them when they're too tired to access it themselves."
I looked at him across the warm, fogged, yellow-lit distance of a table in a restaurant neither of us had planned to be in.
"Thank you," I said. And meant it more than the two words usually carry.
He nodded. Went back to eating. Didn't make it into anything bigger than it needed to be, which was, somehow, the thing that made it biggest.
We ate. The soup was good. The music kept going.
"For what it's worth," he said eventually, setting down his fork and looking at me, "I hope the babysitting works out." He held my gaze. "You've been trying in good faith. That matters even when it doesn't feel like it does."
My throat did the thing again.
"Stop being nice to me," I said, not entirely steadily. "I'm very tired and I'll cry."
"You won't cry."
"You don't know that."
"You've been managing serious hardship for years without crying in public. You're not going to start because I said something kind over soup."
I stopped. Looked at the window. Breathed.
"Fine," I said. "I won't cry."
"There you go."
"I'm choosing not to. Actively."
"I know. I can see the effort. It's impressive."
I laughed. It sounded different from the laughs I'd been producing earlier in the day. Less performance in it. More actual relief. He smiled at that.
I ate the rest of my soup.
All of it.