The sand feels different today. I run it through my fingers, counting each grain as it falls, though I know that's impossible. One, two, three—the rest blur together like static. The morning fog hasn't burned off yet, and the pier stretches into nothing, its endpoint lost in gray.

I've been here six hours. Or maybe twenty minutes. Time moves differently when you're counting sand.

"Ma'am?" A voice breaks through. Police, probably. They always come eventually. "Are you alright?"

I don't look up. Can't look up. There's work to be done. "I'm organizing," I tell him, my voice raw from the salt air. "Each pile needs exactly one thousand grains. It's important to be precise."

His shadow falls across my workspace, disrupting the careful patterns I've drawn in the sand. Concentric circles, each smaller than the last, spiraling inward toward some truth I can't quite grasp. Yesterday there were seventeen circles. Today I count twenty-three. Tomorrow there might be none.

"Dr. Garcia called us," he says gently. "She's worried about you. You missed your last three appointments."

A laugh bubbles up, salty-bitter as seaweed. "Dr. Garcia doesn't understand. I'm conducting an experiment." My fingers tremble as I separate another small pile. "If you remove one memory at a time, at what point do you stop being yourself?"

The tide is coming in. I feel it in my bones, that slow creep of water. Soon it will wash away my work, like it does every day. Like it has every day since Mason—

No. Don't think about Mason. Don't think about the pier, or the fog, or why you know exactly how long it takes a body to—

"Five hundred ninety-eight, five hundred ninety-nine..." My voice cracks. "I lost count. I have to start over."

The officer crouches beside me. Through my peripheral vision, I catch a glimpse of his nameplate: Officer Collins. He was here yesterday too, though he's pretending this is our first meeting. They all pretend.

"How about we get you somewhere warm?" he suggests. "The fog's getting thicker."

"You don't understand," I whisper, my fingers cramping as I scrape together another pile. "If I can just figure out the exact number—if I can find the precise point where a heap becomes not a heap, where a person becomes not a person—then maybe I can work backwards. Maybe I can find the grain of sand that changed everything. The moment before it all went wrong."

A wave crashes closer, sending spray across my carefully ordered piles. The salt mingles with something warm on my cheeks. When did I start crying?

"One grain at a time," I murmur, more to myself than Officer Collins. "That's all it takes. One grain, and then another, and another, until suddenly your heap is gone. Until suddenly you're gone. But if you can count them—if you can keep track—maybe you can put them back in the right order. Maybe you can rebuild..."

The fog swallows the rest of my words. In the distance, a siren wails, or maybe it's just the foghorn. These days, I can't always tell the difference between warning sounds.

-----

Dr. Garcia's office smells like lavender and lies. She thinks she's clever, using aromatherapy to mark the passage of time—lavender on Mondays, sage on Wednesdays, eucalyptus on Fridays. As if temporal anchors could stop the slipping.

"You're agitated today," she observes, pen hovering above her notepad. Three months ago, she used blue ink. Two months ago, black. Today it's red, like warning signs, like blood in water.

"I made progress," I tell her, watching dust motes drift in the afternoon light. Each speck a tiny universe, falling. "I reached six hundred grains yesterday before Officer Collins interrupted. That's eighteen more than my previous record."

She doesn't look up from her notepad. "And how many times have you met Officer Collins?"

"Once," I say automatically. Then: "No, three times. Or—" The certainty crumbles like wet sand between my fingers. "He pretends it's always the first time. They all pretend."

"Who pretends?"

"Everyone. The officers. The lifeguards. The man who sells ice cream by the pier." My hands twist in my lap. "Even Mason pretends, when I see him in the fog."

The scratching of her pen stops. In the silence, I hear the clock on her wall ticking. One second, two seconds, three—how many seconds before a lifetime becomes a life sentence?

"We've talked about Mason," she says carefully, each word measured, weighed, precise. "About what happened on the pier."

"Nothing happened on the pier." The words taste like salt. "Nothing happens. Nothing is happening. Nothing will happen. Time is just grammar."

She sets down her pen. Red ink bleeds into white paper. "You were there when they found him."

"I found a shell that morning," I say, the memory suddenly sharp as broken glass. "Perfect spiral. Mathematical precision. The Fibonacci sequence made manifest in calcium carbonate. I was going to show him, explain how nature builds itself in predictable patterns, how even chaos has underlying order, but—"

My fingers trace spirals on the arm of the chair. One rotation, two, three...

"But?"

"The shell disappeared. Like the sand castles. Like Mason. Like everything, eventually. Entropy in action." I look up at her window, where fog is creeping in despite the afternoon sun. "Did you know that beach sand moves? Littoral drift. Constant motion. What you touch in one moment is gone the next. The beach you stand on today isn't the same beach as yesterday."

"Is that why you count the grains? To hold onto something constant?"

A laugh escapes, hollow as a seashell. "I count to find the edge. The boundary. If you remove one grain of sanity, are you still sane? Two grains? Three? Where's the line, Doctor? When does a person become a patient? A mother become a mourner? A witness become a—"

I stop. The fog is pressing against the windows now, impossible for this time of day, this time of year. Through its gray veil, I see a familiar silhouette on the pier.

"He's out there," I whisper, reaching toward the window, fingers grabbing empty air. "On the pier right now. All I have to do is count backwards, find the right number, the exact moment—"

"There is no pier outside my window," Dr. Garcia says softly. "We're three miles inland."

I blink. She's right. The window shows only a parking lot, sun-baked and solid. No fog. No pier. No Mason.

"I need to go," I say, standing. My legs shake like sand castles in rising tide. "The beach changes with every wave. If I don't get back soon, I'll lose count. Have to start over. Have to—"

"Please sit." Her voice has an edge now, sharp as shells, as broken promises. "We're not done."

But I'm already at the door, fingers reaching for the handle. I step into the hallway. The cold lights flicker—one, two, three…

-----

The sun is setting now, or rising. The fog makes it hard to tell, turning everything the color of old memories. I've arranged three hundred and forty-seven piles of sand, each containing exactly one thousand grains. Or maybe it's seven hundred and twelve piles of three hundred and forty-seven grains. The numbers swim like fish beneath the surface.

Officer Collins sits beside me now, no longer pretending this is our first meeting. His radio crackles with static that sounds like waves breaking.

"Tell me about the shell," he says.

My hands keep moving, sorting, counting. "Fibonacci. Perfect spiral. Mathematical certainty in an uncertain universe." A grain slips through my fingers. "Mason would have understood. He was brilliant at math, did I tell you? Sixth grade, but already taking pre-algebra. He could see patterns everywhere. Even in chaos. Especially in chaos."

"Wiser than his years." His voice is gentle. Like the fog. Like Mason's was, before. "What happened after you found it?"

"He was angry about the phone." The words come easier now, worn smooth like sea glass. "Such a small thing. A stupid thing. One week without it, that's all. His grades were slipping. He needed to focus. I thought the beach would help him find his peace, like it always had before. If I had just... if I had waited one more day, let him keep it one more day..."

My fingers stop moving. A thousand grains of sand cascade into nothing.

"You couldn't have known," Officer Collins says.

"There was a pattern," I insist. "In his behavior. In his moods. In the way he stormed out, slammed the door. The way he ran—" My voice cracks like a shell under pressure. "I counted the seconds before I followed. One, two, three... sixty-seven. Sixty-seven seconds between his door and mine. Between his footsteps and mine. Between mother and—"

"That wasn't your fault."

"But where's the line?" The words tumble out like tide rushing in. "How many seconds of anger before discipline becomes cruelty? How many moments of rebellion before attention-seeking becomes... If you remove one word of the argument, then another, then another, at what point does a mother's caution become a child's last—"

"Stop." His hand hovers near my shoulder but doesn't touch. "The investigators were clear. The railing was wet from the fog. When he turned around to come back—"

"No." I pull away, start a new pile. "That's not—I need to count. Need to find the right number. If I can just figure out how many grains make a heap, how many moments make a childhood, how many breaths between defiance and regret, between standing and falling, between his laugh and his—"

The fog shifts, and suddenly Mason is there, at the end of the pier. Twelve years old forever, balancing on the upper rail, turning back with that look—half-anger, half-fear, whole child. "Mom," he says, or maybe it's just the wind. "Mom, I didn't mean—"

"Do you see him?" I whisper.

Officer Collins follows my gaze. "I see fog," he says softly.

"He's trying to tell me something. He's always trying to tell me something." My voice sounds far away, like shouting underwater. "But I can't... the numbers keep changing. The grains keep shifting. Yesterday I was sure it was one thousand grains. Today it might be three. Tomorrow..."

A wave crashes against the pier's pylons. When the spray clears, Mason is gone. Like always. Like everything.

"Come on," Officer Collins says, standing. He offers his hand. "The tide's coming in."

I look down at my piles. The neat circles I've spent hours creating are already disappearing, erased by wind and water. Tomorrow I'll make new ones. Tomorrow I'll count again. Tomorrow I'll find the right number, the perfect equation, the exact point where everything changed. Where a mother's discipline became a child's rebellion became an empty bedroom with a phone still charging on the nightstand.

Or maybe I won't. Maybe that's the real paradox—not how many grains make a heap, but how many times you can watch it disappear before you accept that some questions don't have answers. Some patterns exist only in the spaces between "I love you" and "I'm sorry."

I take his hand. Let him pull me up. My feet leave perfect prints in the wet sand as we walk away from the pier.

Behind us, the fog swallows everything—the piles, the patterns, the possibilities. One grain at a time, until nothing remains but the sound of waves counting seconds into infinity, each one the exact length of a child's last breath.

The crystal wind chime shattered.

Vicky Marlowe watched, transfixed, as her mama's last good yard decoration cascaded down in a waterfall of dollar store glass, missing her carefully maintained acrylic nails by mere inches. Her blue eyes widened—not in fear, never fear—but in a most unseemly, electrified excitement.

Sweet baby Jesus, she thought, pressing a trembling hand to the rhinestones on her "Live, Laugh, Love" tank top, he planned this.

James. That devil in Carhartt clothing. That Adonis with motor oil under his fingernails.

"Vicky!" Henley came charging out of the double-wide with all the grace of a stampeding elk. "You okay, girl? Should I call Dale?"

Vicky’s lips curled into a smile so wicked it would’ve made the pastor blush. "No, Hen. And you keep your mouth shut about this. You hear me? Not a word."

How could she explain it anyway? That her neighbor's brooding mechanic had somehow known exactly where she'd be standing at four o’clock sharp? That the wind chime’s fall had miraculously cleared her path to the tool shed, where even now he was waiting, his muscled form likely aglow in the golden shafts of the setting sun, like some pagan god of NASCAR?

Her husband’s voice bellowed from the trailer. "Victoria Lynn! The HOA president’s gonna be here any minute!"

The HOA president can kiss my authentically tanned behind, she thought, her manicured fingers clutching the well-worn copy of Rich Dad, Poor Dad she’d been pretending to read. Let all of Pine Haven Trailer Park burn.

With the practiced grace of a seasoned Denny’s waitress, she glided toward the shed, her Target sundress whispering secrets across the gravel path. The sticky humidity hit her like a microwave door swinging open, mingling with the perfume of marijuana wafting from Lot 23B—nature’s aphrodisiac.

"You could’ve killed me," she breathed when she saw him, towering amid Dale’s prized power tools.

James turned, his green eyes smoldering like a grease fire. "I’d sooner sell my F-150, darlin’," he said, his voice rough as gravel, sweet as Mountain Dew. "But I had to see you. Alone."

"The wind chime—"

"Was a calculated risk." He stepped closer, close enough for her to catch the intoxicating scent of WD-40 and unfiltered masculinity. "Like this."

Without warning, he swept the self-help book from her hands, letting it tumble to the oil-stained floor with a thud. Vicky gasped—at his audacity, his magnificence, the sheer unholy nerve of him.

"That book cost me a whole shift's worth of tips," she whispered, even as her traitorous body leaned toward him like a sunflower chasing light.

"Then let me earn it back," he growled, his calloused hands cradling her face with a gentleness that almost unraveled her. "With something worth more than money."

Outside, a bolt of lightning slashed through the Oregon sky, the storm roaring approval. Thunder rolled across the valley like a souped-up diesel engine.

"The HOA president," she protested weakly, her fingers curling into his oil-streaked Metallica T-shirt.

"Will wait." His gaze burned into hers. "The world will wait. Time itself will wait, Mrs. Marlowe."

"Just Vicky," she murmured, her voice cracking under the weight of want. "When we're alone, you call me Vicky."

He grinned—a wolf’s grin, a rebel’s grin, a grin promising pleasures no respectable trailer park queen should dare to know. "Vicky," he breathed, low and dangerous, "my desert rose, my forbidden flower."

Another flash of lightning illuminated the tool shed like a Walmart parking lot on Black Friday. Somewhere in the distance, voices called her name—her husband, Henley, maybe even the HOA president himself.

"They’ll ruin you," James warned, his lips grazing her skin. "If they find us, they’ll kick you off the Pine Haven Social Committee."

Vicky threw back her head and laughed—a sound of pure, wild abandon that would scandalize every lady at the Sunday potluck. "My darling, savage mechanic," she purred, her fingers tracing the hard line of his jaw, "don’t you know? The prettiest flowers grow right through the concrete."

As if in agreement, the storm reached its crescendo, rain hammering the shed like nature’s applause. Something ancient and wild stirred in her salon-perfect highlights—something far beyond her title as Pine Haven’s three-time "Most Spirited Resident."

"The social committee," she declared, her voice dripping with rebellion, "could use a little shaking up."

And with that, as thunder rattled the very bones of her double-wide, Vicky Marlowe made her choice. Let the wind chime be the first casualty of her fall from grace. Let scandal roll through Pine Haven Trailer Park like a tornado in a beer can.

Because some things, she thought as James's lips finally claimed hers with fierce possession, are worth losing your ‘Best Kept Yard’ title for.

He walks away from the coffee shop, boots scraping against concrete that sparkles like it's embedded with a million tiny diamonds. The LA sun does that—makes everything glitter, even when it shouldn’t.

The taste of his americano sparks like a live wire. Her laugh still echoes in his ears, the way she threw her head back when he fumbled with his wallet, dropped it, coins scattering across the floor like startled mice. She helped him pick them up. Their fingers brushed three times. He counted.

Fuck.

The weight of possibility settles on his shoulders like a lead vest. An X-ray blanket of future potential crushing his spine. He hasn’t even asked for her number, and he’s already imagining how he’ll have to tell her about the anxiety meds. About the time he got fired for having a panic attack during a client meeting. About his mother.

A palm tree towers overhead, its brown fronds dropping onto a Tesla. Some guy in yoga pants gives him a dirty look as he stands frozen in the middle of the sidewalk like a tourist. But he can’t move. Not yet. His body is still processing the way she tucked her hair behind her ear, revealing a small crescent moon tattoo.

He starts walking again. Past juice bars, Botox clinics, and dogs in sweaters, even though it’s 75 degrees. The weight gets heavier with each step.

What if she likes hiking? He hates hiking. Everyone in LA loves hiking, and he’s the one asshole who’d rather stay inside and read. She had a Patagonia sticker on her laptop. Fuck. She definitely likes hiking.

The ring his grandmother left him is in a safety deposit box downtown. He’s never even seen it in person, just in a photo his mom texted before she died. Vintage art deco, small diamonds flanking a sapphire. He’s already wondering if the blue would match her eyes.

Jesus Christ. Get it together.

On the corner, a homeless man has an animated conversation with a palm tree. At least someone’s talking to somebody. He should have asked for her number. But then he’d have to text her. Then call her. Then disappoint her.

The Santa Ana winds kick up, hot and dusty, carrying the scent of jasmine from someone’s yard. His throat tightens. In the coffee shop, she’d been reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. He’d noticed it upside down while picking up his scattered quarters. He has the same copy at home, dog-eared and coffee-stained. The universe doesn’t just hand you coincidences like that without expecting something in return.

He turns down a side street to avoid the crowds on Main. The responsibility of serendipity. The weight of stars aligning. His therapist would tell him he’s catastrophizing again. Jumping ten steps ahead. Planning the divorce before the first date.

A group of teenagers spills out of a boba shop, laughing at something on someone’s phone. He remembers being that young. No, he doesn’t. He was never that young. Even at sixteen, he carried the weight of things that hadn’t happened yet.

Her name is Jane. A basic name for a not-so-basic person. She had dirt under her fingernails. Real dirt, not artifice. She’d mentioned a community garden, and he’d already seen flashes of future Sundays—him holding tools he doesn’t know how to use, pretending to know the difference between herbs. The weight of small lies told to keep someone happy.

The sun is directly overhead now, shadows nowhere to be found. His apartment is four blocks away, but he turns in the opposite direction. Keeps walking. Past boutiques selling hundred-dollar plain white T-shirts. Past a line of people waiting for gourmet ice cream. Past a guy installing a security camera on a coffee shop that used to be a bookstore, that used to be a head shop, that used to be someone’s dream.

His phone buzzes. Unknown number. His heart stops, starts, then stops again. It’s just spam about his car’s extended warranty. He doesn’t own a car. Can’t deal with the 405, the parking lot they call a freeway. Two hours to go fifteen miles while Tesla drivers pretend their autopilot means they can watch Netflix. The bus sucks, but at least he can read while someone else navigates the hellscape of LA traffic.

The wind picks up, scattering loose newspaper pages and discarded cold brew cups. Apocalypse wind. He thinks about her fingers—short nails, silver rings—the way they looked as she picked up his scattered change. The way she’d stacked the coins neatly before handing them back. Order imposed on chaos.

He’s never getting married. He’s already planning their wedding. Small ceremony. No, big ceremony. No, they’ll elope. Vegas? No, Joshua Tree. She seems like a Joshua Tree person. The weight of assumptions.

A movie poster shows a couple kissing in the rain. LA hasn’t seen rain in six months. He checks his weather app. No rain forecasted for the next ten days. The pressure of waiting for perfect conditions that never come.

He should go back. Ask for her number. No, too desperate. Yes, confident. No, creepy. The wind blows an empty potato chip bag into his face. Even the trash is trying to tell him something.

He pulls out his phone again. Opens Instagram. Closes it. Opens Twitter. Closes it. Opens his contacts and stares at the space where her number should be. The weight of empty spaces waiting to be filled.

The sun keeps shining. The palm trees keep shedding. The teenagers keep laughing. And he keeps walking, carrying the weight of a future that exists only in his head but feels more real than the concrete beneath his feet.

Let me tell you about the Thanksgiving that shattered like fine china and reassembled itself into something altogether stranger, because that's what families do - they break and mend and break again, like waves against a shore that's been there since before any of us thought to name it.

Sarah (my sister-in-law who spent three months at a French culinary institute and won't let any of us forget it) has been basting the turkey since dawn, each careful brush stroke a rebellion against our mother's decades of dry birds. The kitchen gleams with her intentions. Everything is mise en place, a term she drops like small arms fire across the gravy-scented battlefield of familial expectations.

And here comes Mom through the door clutching her own gravy boat like a shield, because she may have ceded the turkey but by God and all His angels she will not surrender the gravy. Her lips are pressed thin as paper, the kind of smile that's really a wound. Dad trails behind her carrying three kinds of pie none of us asked for, whistling through the minefield.

(I should mention I'm hiding in the pantry taking pulls from a flask of bourbon that belonged to my grandfather, the one who taught me how to tie fishing flies and curse in Lithuanian. The bourbon tastes like memory and regret, which is fitting for the occasion.)

Uncle Pete's already sprawled in the living room watching football with the volume too high, his hearing aid conspicuously absent, a convenient deafness that lets him ignore the rising tide of passive-aggressive commentary flowing from the kitchen like floodwater under a door. His new wife Cheryl (the fourth, or maybe fifth - we've stopped counting) keeps adjusting and readjusting the table settings Sarah spent forty-three minutes perfecting.

My brother Mike's kids are conducting what appears to be psychological warfare experiments on each other in the basement, their shrieks piercing through floorboards that have witnessed forty years of family gatherings. The youngest one - Trevor or Travis, I can never remember - has already broken something valuable, judging by the sudden silence followed by furious whispers.

And here we all are, orbiting around this bird that Sarah has transformed into some kind of glossy food magazine centerfold, each of us carrying our own unique burden of expectations like stones in our pockets. Mom remembers every Thanksgiving from 1973 forward and measures each one against some impossible standard of maternal perfection. Dad just wants everyone to get along and maybe watch the game. Sarah needs us to acknowledge her culinary superiority while simultaneously maintaining her role as the perpetually unappreciated artist.

The prayers, when we finally sit down, are a masterpiece of competing denominational interests - Catholic crossed with Baptist crossed with whatever crystal-based spirituality Cheryl's bringing to the table this year. We bow our heads and clutch hands and each silently bargain with our respective deities to just get us through this meal without anyone mentioning politics or that thing that happened at last year's Easter.

But then Sarah's turkey actually is perfect, damn her, and Mom's gravy performs its annual miracle, and Uncle Pete tells that story about the fish he caught in '82 that gets bigger every year, and somehow we're all laughing. And for a moment - brief as grace, fleeting as autumn - we're just a family, bound together by nothing more or less than blood and time and the peculiar alchemy of shared food.

The kids have escaped to their phones, and the adults are settling into their post-feast positions like birds coming home to roost, and I'm thinking about pouring another secret bourbon when Mom brings out the pies. And even though we're all stuffed fuller than that turkey was this morning, we each take a slice because that's what you do. That's what we've always done. That's what we'll keep doing until we can't anymore, and then we'll tell stories about the pies that were and the gravy that was, and the years will fold into each other like pastry layers, flaky and delicate and impossibly rich.

Look, I need you to understand something right off the bat—I'm not an idiot. (Well, mostly not an idiot. The jury's still out on my decision to wear Crocs to a robbery, but we'll get to that tragic footwear choice later.) You might be wondering why someone with a bachelor's degree in Contemporary Philosophy—yes, I know, LAUGH IT UP—would end up pointing a trembling finger-gun at a Korean corner store owner at 3:47 AM on a Tuesday. The answer involves three maxed-out credit cards, a gambling addiction I swear I totally have under control, and an ex-girlfriend who took my cat in the breakup. (Mr. Whiskers, if you're reading this somehow, I miss you buddy.)

But here's the thing about desperate times and desperate measures—they're basically first cousins who shouldn't date but totally are, you know what I mean?

The fluorescent lights in Kim's Quick-Stop buzzed like thoughts in my anxiety-riddled brain—incessant, flickering, probably in need of professional attention. I'd been standing in the chips aisle for twenty minutes, pretending to have an existential crisis over Doritos flavors (Cool Ranch vs. Nacho Cheese as a metaphor for the duality of man), while actually having a very real existential crisis about everything else.

My hand was in my pocket, wrapped around absolutely nothing, which—if we're being philosophical about it—is a pretty apt metaphor for my entire life strategy. The plan was simple: walk up to the counter, pretend to have a gun, grab the cash, exit stage left, pay off Kenny the bookie before he introduces my kneecaps to his favorite baseball bat. TOTALLY FOOLPROOF, RIGHT?

Wrong. So cosmically, catastrophically wrong that future civilizations will probably discover the wrongness fossilized in sedimentary rock layers and build entire religions around avoiding such spectacular failures.

Because here's what they don't tell you about robbing corner stores—the owner might be a former Olympic speed-walker. (I'm not making this up. There's literally a faded photo behind the counter of Mr. Kim power-walking his way to bronze in Seoul '88, a fact I probably should have noticed during my previous 3 AM taquito runs.) They also don't tell you that Crocs—even in Adventure Mode with the heel strap engaged—are surprisingly poor getaway shoes.

"Empty the register!" I shouted, my voice cracking like I was going through puberty all over again. (Note to self: if you ever attempt armed robbery again—WHICH YOU WON'T—maybe try voice coaching first?)

Mr. Kim looked at my pocket—my very obviously empty pocket—then at my Crocs (lime green, because if you're going to make questionable life choices, why not make them VISIBLE FROM SPACE), and did something I hadn't factored into my brilliant plan.

He laughed.

Not just a chuckle, mind you. We're talking full-body, shoulders-shaking, tears-in-eyes LAUGHTER that made me feel like I should either join in or offer to workshop better material for next time.

"You want money?" he wheezed between guffaws. "Maybe first you buy better shoes, eh?"

And that's when my fight-or-flight response kicked in, except—because I'm me—it manifested as more of a deer-in-headlights-then-trip-over-own-feet response. As I stumbled backward, my Croc caught on the edge of a display stand, sending approximately 847 packets of beef jerky cascading through the air like meaty confetti.

In the ensuing chaos—as I lay there, covered in teriyaki-flavored shame—Mr. Kim didn't call the cops. Instead, he made me tea. TEA. Earl Grey, served in a chipped mug that said "World's Okayest Speed Walker."

"You seem like you're having bad time," he said, sliding the mug across the counter to where I sat, thoroughly defeated, still picking beef jerky crumbs out of my hair. "Want to talk about it?"

And you know what? I did. I really, really did.

(Though I still maintain that the Crocs were a bold fashion choice, not a failure. Some people just aren't ready for that level of comfort-forward criminality.)

The bar smells like regret and cleaning fluid. A faint mildew tang hovers just under the lemony surface of whatever industrial cleanser they've been using since the Reagan administration. On the jukebox—a real, working jukebox that somehow survived time and irony—Stevie Nicks is singing, and Charlotte is on her third vodka soda, though she's only counting the first two.

"It's not that I don't love him," she says, swirling the straw like she's mixing cement. "It's that he's...he's like a sweater, you know? Warm, comfortable, but...it pills. He's pilled. Emotionally." Her voice breaks, just a little, at the end, and she covers it by sucking loudly on the straw. The ice rattles in the glass.

Across from her, Liz is doing her best to play therapist but keeps slipping into referee. "Right. So you dumped him. To, uh...what, avoid dry-cleaning?"

Charlotte shoots her a look—a blend of wounded and affronted, like a cat falling off a windowsill. "I dumped him because he's boring. And emotionally pilled."

Liz smirks and takes a sip of her beer, which is cheap and unapologetic. It smells faintly metallic, like wet nickels. "You said that already."

"Well, it's true." Charlotte's voice climbs in volume, the way it always does when she's circling a point she doesn't want to land on. "He was *suffocating* me, Liz. Like...like when you wake up in the middle of the night, and the blanket's wrapped around your neck, and for a second you think, 'This is it, I'm being murdered by my own bedding.' You know?"

Liz doesn't know, but she nods anyway because that's her role tonight: the nodding friend. The sober-ish one. "Totally."

Charlotte leans back, her head tilting toward the stained ceiling tiles as if she's appealing to a higher power—or just the fluorescent light flickering above their table. "God, I can't believe I wasted two years on him. Two *years.* That's, like, a master's degree in mediocrity."

Liz coughs into her beer to stifle a laugh, but Charlotte's too far gone to notice. She's launched into a tirade now, her words sharp and sloppy, like broken glass in a velvet bag.

"He never even liked my friends. Or my taste in music. He said my favorite band was 'overrated.' Overrated! Can you believe that? Like, who hurt him? Was it his mom? It was definitely his mom. And his face—"

Liz's eyebrows shoot up. "Careful."

"—his stupid *face.*" Charlotte slams her glass down for emphasis. "Always so...earnest. Like a golden retriever trying to understand quantum physics."

Liz is watching this unravel like a slow-motion car crash—equal parts horrifying and mesmerizing. "So why do you still have his number saved as 'My Love'?"

That stops Charlotte mid-rant. She stares at Liz, her mouth opening and closing like a fish gasping for air. "I...don't," she says, but it's more of a question than a statement.

Liz raises her eyebrows and gestures toward Charlotte's phone, which is lighting up on the sticky table with a notification from Instagram—one of those vague, soul-sucking posts about happiness being a choice.

Charlotte grabs the phone, her fingers fumbling with the screen. "I'll delete it right now," she announces, but instead of navigating to the contacts, her thumb hovers over his name. It's right there at the top of her recent calls, bold and accusatory.

She stares at it for a long moment, the bar noise fading into a soft, ambient buzz. The music changes to something upbeat that doesn't fit the mood at all. Her thumb twitches.

Liz's voice cuts through, low and wary. "Charlotte. Don't."

But Charlotte's already hit the call button, her face twisted into a mix of defiance and desperation. The ringing is deafening, each buzz a countdown to impact.

"Liz," she whispers, her eyes wide and glassy. "What if he doesn't pick up?"

"He will," Liz mutters, pinching the bridge of her nose.

And then—click. His voice, low and groggy, crackles through the receiver.

"Hey," Charlotte breathes, suddenly soft and fragile, like she might shatter under her own weight. "It's me."

Liz groans and buries her face in her hands as Charlotte launches into a monologue—half apology, half declaration, all chaos. "I just...I miss you, okay? I miss the way you make pancakes on Sundays and the way you laugh at dumb movies and—and I think I might love you. No, I definitely love you. I've always loved you. Even when you were boring and pilled and wrong about music."

There's a long pause, the kind that feels like it could swallow the world.

Finally, his voice comes through, soft and cautious. "Are you...drunk?"

Charlotte blinks, her mind momentarily blank, like someone pulled the plug on her brain. "No," she says, far too loudly. "Maybe."

Liz, watching this train wreck in real-time, snatches the phone and hangs up.

"What the hell?" Charlotte yelps, her voice rising an octave.

"You're welcome," Liz deadpans, tossing the phone across the table like it's a live grenade.

Charlotte slumps back in her chair, her anger fizzling out as quickly as it flared. For a moment, she just sits there, staring at her empty glass, her face a mosaic of regret and residual vodka.

"I really do love him," she mumbles, almost to herself.

Liz sighs, flagging down the bartender for another round. "I know, babe. But let's wait until morning before we start trying to prove it."

The cityscape blurs into watercolor smears beyond the fortieth-floor windows—all those lives being lived while Kaia sits frozen at her desk, caught in the gravitational pull of James’s office light down the hall. (Like a moth to flame, except moths don’t spend months constructing elaborate justifications for their inevitably fatal attraction.)

Her cursor blinks in accusatory morse code: *you’re-not-work-ing, you’re-not-work-ing*. The Peterson brief sprawls across her screen, legal jargon swimming before her eyes—a perfect metaphor for her current state, all these carefully constructed arguments dissolving into want.

Time feels elastic after hours, stretching and compressing like a universe bending around a massive object. Which is what this thing between them has become: enormous, unavoidable, warping the space-time continuum of their meticulously maintained professionalism into something dangerous and electric.

She catches her reflection in the darkened window—cheeks flushed, pupils dilated—and catalogs the physiological responses like evidence in a case she’s building against her better judgment. *Exhibit A: elevated heart rate. Exhibit B: shallow breathing. Exhibit C: the way her skin feels too tight, like it’s trying to contain something infinite.*

The walk to his office is thirty-seven steps (she’s counted, repeatedly, obsessively). Tonight each one feels like crossing a threshold, like quantum particles collapsing from possibility into certainty.

He looks up when she appears—always up, never startled, like some part of him is perpetually aware of her proximity—and something molten pools in her chest at the sight: reading glasses sliding low, sleeves rolled with precise intention, the controlled chaos of papers spreading across his desk like the physical manifestation of her scattered thoughts.

“Kaia.” Her name in his mouth is a complete legal brief: argument, evidence, and conclusion all wrapped in two syllables.

“I was just...” The lie evaporates unfinished. They’re both too smart for pretense, too aware of the chess game they’ve been playing where every casual touch is a calculated move toward this moment.

He stands—fluid, deliberate—crossing the room in measured steps that somehow contain both restraint and hunger. “Were you?” His voice carries that familiar trace of amusement, the tone that simultaneously infuriates and intoxicates her. “Just what?”

(There should be a word for this—this exact point when years of legal training in constructing airtight arguments crumbles in the face of pure want.)

“Testing a theory,” she manages, pulse thundering in her ears like waves against a crumbling seawall.

“And what theory would that be?” He’s close enough now that she can see the faint stubble along his jaw, smell the lingering notes of coffee mingled with something uniquely him—a scent her lizard brain has cataloged as *dangerous* and *necessary* in equal measure.

Instead of answering, she rises on her toes (a motion she’s rehearsed in her mind so many times it feels like muscle memory) and presses her mouth to his.

The kiss reconstructs her understanding of time: there is before and there is this, and the demarcation between them is sharp enough to draw blood. His hands find her waist as hers tangle in his hair, and some distant part of her brain notes with satisfaction that it’s just as soft as she’d imagined.

They break apart breathing hard, foreheads touching, sharing the same electrically charged air. “We should—” he starts.

“Later,” she interrupts, surprising herself with the authority in her voice. “Some cases require less deliberation than others.”

His laugh is low and warm against her neck. “Counselor,” he murmurs, “I believe you’re leading the witness.”

“Object all you want,” she whispers back, fingers tracing the strong line of his jaw. “The evidence speaks for itself.”

When he kisses her again, it feels like winning a case she didn’t know she was arguing—like justice and mercy wrapped in the same breathless verdict. His hands map the geography of her spine as she presses closer, eliminating any remaining space between precedent and possibility.

“Take me home,” she breathes against his mouth—a motion to proceed that requires no deliberation.

He answers by lacing their fingers together, and they leave their half-finished briefs behind like abandoned closing arguments, stepping into a night that promises to rewrite every law they’ve ever known.

—

Monday arrives with all the subtlety of a summary judgment, harsh fluorescent lights replacing the forgiving darkness that had made everything seem possible seventy-two hours ago. Kaia’s been rehearsing this moment since she fled his apartment at 3 AM Saturday morning (not that she’s counting the hours, except she absolutely is, with the kind of precision usually reserved for billable minutes).

The elevator ride to the fortieth floor feels like watching opposing counsel destroy her star witness. Each ascending number ratchets her anxiety higher: *thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine—God, when did this building get so tall?* She’s arrived precisely twenty-three minutes earlier than usual, a tactical maneuver designed to minimize contact that instead leaves her feeling like a coward citing procedural technicalities.

(She’s analyzed Friday night with the same obsessive attention she typically reserves for depositions, rehashing every moment, every touch, every awkward fumble and miscommunication until the memories feel worn smooth as river stones. The way his hands had shaken. The way she’d gone cold and distant. The terrible, haunting silence afterward.)

The office is blessedly empty—or so she thinks until she rounds the corner and nearly collides with James emerging from the break room, coffee mug in hand. Time stretches like hot glass, then shatters: a study in the relativity of professional mortification.

They do an awkward dance of mutual avoidance, both stepping the same direction twice before freezing in place. His coffee sloshes dangerously close to the rim. She clutches her laptop bag like a shield.

“Kaia.” Her name in his mouth sounds different now—clinical, careful, like evidence being handled with latex gloves.

“James.” (When did his name become so difficult to pronounce? Four weeks of bar exam prep were easier than these two syllables.)

The silence that follows could be submitted as an amicus brief on the topic of human discomfort. She maps his appearance with unwanted precision: tie slightly askew (unusual for him), dark circles under his eyes (did he sleep as poorly as she did?), shoulders tense beneath his perfectly pressed shirt (the same shoulders she’d—*no, absolutely not going there*).

“I was just...” They both start simultaneously, then stop. A perfect demonstration of the legal principle of mutual embarrassment.

He clears his throat. “About Friday—”

“The Peterson brief is on your desk,” she interrupts, words tumbling out with the desperate energy of a client volunteering privileged information. “I finished it over the weekend. All the citations are updated, and I added a section on recent precedents that might—”

“Kaia.” Softer this time, almost pained.

“—be relevant to our argument, particularly regarding the statutory interpretation of—”

“*Kaia.*”

She forces herself to meet his eyes, immediately regrets it. Because there it is—everything they’re not talking about, laid out like evidence in a case neither of them knows how to try.

“We should probably...” He runs a hand through his hair (she knows exactly how that hair feels now, a piece of evidence she desperately needs stricken from the record).

“I have a client meeting,” she lies, already backing away. “We can... later. Maybe. If there’s anything... professional... to discuss.”

She retreats to her office with as much dignity as she can muster (which, if quantified, would barely fill a motion in limine). Through her open door, she watches him stand there for a long moment, coffee growing cold in his hand, before he turns toward his own office.

The day stretches ahead like an endless deposition, every hour a careful dance of strategic avoidance and professional necessity. She throws herself into research with the kind of manic energy usually reserved for pro bono cases, as if enough case law can build a wall between Friday night and Monday morning.

But every time footsteps pass her door, her heart executes a series of complex maneuvers that would violate several workplace safety regulations. Each distant phone ring triggers a fight-or-flight response worthy of academic study. The coffee maker’s gurgle sounds accusatory.

(She’s already drafted and deleted seventeen emails to him, each one an exercise in saying nothing while meaning everything. The eighteenth attempt sits in her drafts folder, cursor blinking: *"Regarding the matter of Friday night..."* Like their catastrophic attempt at intimacy can be reduced to a case number and filed away.)

When 5 PM finally arrives—the longest billable hours in legal history—she begins the delicate task of packing up without being noticed, each file and notebook lifted with trembling care. But as she reaches for her coat, a post-it note slides from between the files on her desk. Her breath catches at the familiar handwriting:

*Re: Friday night

Motion to continue discussion?

My office @ 5:30pm*

She stares at the yellow square for so long the words begin to blur, her pulse keeping time like a court reporter’s stenotype. Outside her office, the elevator chimes its end-of-day rhythm as the firm empties out. Soon it will be just them again, in the same after-hours quiet that started this whole mess.

The post-it crinkles as her fingers close around it. Some cases, she realizes, require a second hearing.

She traces the familiar path of his vertebrae—thirty-three notches of bone she's memorized like prayer beads, like stations of the cross. Each touch an absolution neither of them deserves.

Time stretches. Contracts. Pools like candle wax in the hollow of his throat.

They don't speak because words would make it real, would crystallize this ending into something neither can take back. Instead: the whisper of sheets, the staccato rhythm of breath held too long and released too soon, the wet sound of mouths meeting and parting. Meeting and parting. Meeting and—

His hands remember things his mind wants to forget. The exact curve where hip meets thigh. That spot behind her left knee that makes her gasp, makes her arch like a bow string pulled taut. He's mapped her body in the dark so many times he could navigate it blind, could find true north in the constellation of freckles across her shoulder blades.

"Don't," she says when he tries to be gentle. Because gentle would break her. Because gentle would mean acknowledging what comes after.

The late afternoon light filters through gauzy curtains—the same curtains that have witnessed a hundred secret afternoons, a hundred stolen hours. Today the light feels different. Thinner. More precarious. Like it might shatter if they move too suddenly or breathe too deep.

He watches the shadows play across her skin and thinks about quantum physics—how light can be both particle and wave, how it can exist in two states simultaneously. Like them: both ending and eternal. Both here and already gone.

She bites his shoulder hard enough to leave marks that will fade before morning. Before he goes home to a different bed, a different life. Her nails dig crescents into his back—tiny bruised parentheses containing everything they've left unsaid.

The ceiling fan turns lazy circles above them. Around and around and—stop thinking. Stop. Just feel this: skin salt-slick with sweat, muscles trembling on the edge of release, the particular gravity of bodies falling into familiar patterns for the last time.

When it happens, it happens like this: a cascade of small surrenders. The way her breath catches. The way his hands tighten on her hips. The way time fractures and reforms around them. Like a wave breaking. Like a star collapsing. Like the end of all things.

After, they lie in the wreckage of what they've done—what they've been doing—bodies cooling in the artificial breeze. The space between them grows by microns, by millimeters, by miles. Already she can feel him receding, becoming memory.

She doesn't watch him dress. Doesn't watch him check his phone or straighten his tie or gather the scattered pieces of the life he's going back to. Instead she studies the ceiling, counting cracks in the plaster like rings in a tree—measuring time in concentric circles of regret.

At the door, he pauses. Opens his mouth. Closes it. What could words possibly add or subtract from this moment?

The click of the latch is so soft it's almost inaudible. Almost.

She lies there until the shadows lengthen and the day bleeds into dusk, until she can no longer smell him on her skin or feel the ghost-print of his hands on her body. Until she becomes singular again. Indivisible. Whole.

Or something like it.

Tara watches the steam rise from her coffee in precise helical patterns, the way heat always dissipates in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics. She thinks about entropy, how all systems tend toward disorder, how even the careful structures built of love and shared mornings begin to dissolve. James is saying something about needing to talk, his voice carrying that familiar frequency she has learned to recognize, the one that signals emotional turbulence barely concealed by forced calm. The afternoon light through the kitchen window catches the dancing dust between them, suspended in Brownian motion, random and purposeless like the words forming between his pauses.

He says he’s been thinking, and she already feels the framework of their life together starting to fracture. She notices the micro-expressions she once memorized: the subtle twitch in his left eye, the unconscious movements of his hands that betray the effort behind his measured tone. She wants to tell him about quantum entanglement, how two particles remain connected across any distance once they’ve interacted, how they affect each other in ways that defy logic and laws. Maybe if she could explain this, he would understand what it means to try to untangle two lives so deeply intertwined. Instead, she says she knows, because she does. She has known in the quiet, cellular way that bodies know when to change, to divide, to surrender.

The silence between them grows like a living thing, filling the space with its presence. She observes how their breathing no longer syncs, how the rhythm of shared sleep and shared life has fractured into jagged, mismatched patterns. He is explaining about growing apart, about wanting different things, about how love sometimes isn’t enough. The words feel both too simple and too heavy, like trying to map a fractal with straight lines, and she begins to catalog the physicality of pain. Elevated heart rate. Constricted throat. Cortisol and adrenaline spilling into her bloodstream as if preparing her for a battle that isn’t there.

She thinks about binding energy, about how even the strongest atomic bonds can be broken with sufficient force, about how matter cannot be destroyed but only transformed. She wonders what they will become, these two people who have shared a bed and a bathroom, the easy intimacy of familiar routines. She says maybe he’s right, because the scientific method demands she follow the evidence, even when it leads to failure, even when it breaks apart hypotheses that once felt unshakable.

The space between them stretches, expands, an invisible force pulling them apart like galaxies adrift in an accelerating universe. She watches him collect his keys and wallet, small acts of departure rendered monumental in their finality. She thinks about conservation, how nothing is truly lost but only changes form, but the thought feels hollow. When he pauses at the door, she sees him suspended in a moment of wave-particle duality, leaving and not leaving, until the act of observation collapses the uncertainty into fact. He leaves.

She sits alone in the kitchen—her kitchen now—and watches the steam rise from her coffee in precise helical patterns, dissipating into the air as heat always does. She thinks about entropy, about how all systems tend toward disorder, about the inevitable unraveling of even the most careful designs.

The algorithm craves meat—raw, bloody engagement.

Quality? A relic, quaint as typewriters or shame.

Three acts, they taught me in school: beginning, middle, end.

Now it’s hooks and dopamine, metrics climbing like hungry vines.

Thumbnail: shocked face, red arrow, numbers. Always numbers.

Title: YOU WON’T BELIEVE.

(But you will. You always do.)

Strip meaning down to its bones.

Polish those bones till they gleam with artificial light.

Content—such a sterile word for what we feed this ravenous machine.

Sawdust packed in shiny boxes.

But it sells, it sells, it sells.

Fingers hover over keys worth pennies per word.

The screen glows, a confessional booth.

Forgive me, Literature, for I have sinned.

I’ve written listicles.

I’ve optimized for search engines.

I’ve sacrificed beauty for bounce rates.

Hemingway drank to write.

I write to drink.

The difference matters.

Success tastes like copper pennies.

But pennies stack into dollars,

and dollars don’t care about Oxford commas

or metaphorical resonance. They care about:

Engagement.

Optimization.

Monetization.

(Holy trinity of the digital age.)

Write fast.

Edit faster.

Publish fastest.

Quality is a luxury

for those who can afford to starve.

The screen glows.

The metrics climb.

The words flow like water

through a coin-operated tap.

It doesn’t have to be good.

It just has to be.

(And be monetized.)