The fridge holds four things and I know all four of them by heart before I even open the door, the way you know the ending of a movie you've seen enough times that watching it is just waiting.

Mustard, the squeeze kind, half empty. Half a lemon going soft at the cut end, wrapped in a plastic bag that used to hold bread. One of my mother's gravy containers from two and a half weeks ago, the good Tupperware with the yellowed lid, maybe two tablespoons of sauce dried into an orange crust at the bottom that I will eventually have to decide whether to eat with a spoon like a crazy person or throw away like someone with self-respect. And nothing. That's the fourth thing. Nothing is doing a lot of work in this fridge.

I eat crackers standing at the counter, saltines from a sleeve gone slightly stale, and drink two full glasses of water after, which is a trick I learned a long time ago and hoped I'd forgotten — water takes up room a body can't tell isn't food, not right away, not for an hour or two, and an hour or two is sometimes all you need to get through a morning. I hate that I still know how to do this. I hate that my body filed it away as a skill instead of a wound.

The crackers taste like the box. I eat six of them and put the sleeve back, folded over twice, rubber band from yesterday's mail around it, and I stand there with my hand flat on the counter for a second longer than I need to, the old checking-if-the-room-holds-my-weight thing, except there's nothing here that's going to give out from under me except me.

My laptop is open on the mattress because that's where the outlet reaches. Three emails, in order, like a countdown somebody else is running.

The cheese label people have "paused the project pending Q1 budget review," which is corporate for we found someone cheaper and we're being polite about it until the invoice comes due, at which point we will not be polite at all.

The brewery — six months of can art, four rounds of revisions on a hop leaf that in the end looked exactly like my first draft — has "made the decision to bring design in-house," a sentence I have now heard enough times that I could set it to music. In-house, this time, is apparently the owner's nephew, who has Procreate on an iPad and no invoice to send anybody.

The third one isn't even an email. It's the absence of one. Ninety days out on twenty-four hundred dollars for a cider label I did in July, and the client's account has gone quiet in the specific way an account goes quiet when someone has decided you're a line item they can let slide because you don't have a lawyer and they know it.

Which leaves the bakery in Pawtucket. Six hundred a month for a rotating specials board and the occasional box design, paid on the fifteenth like clockwork, run by a woman named Rita who tips me in cannoli when I bring proofs in person. One client. I do the math out loud, quietly, to the empty room, because saying a number out loud sometimes makes it smaller.

Six hundred dollars a month is not a life. It is barely a lease.

There's a mason jar on the windowsill that used to hold jam and now holds change, and I upend it onto the mattress and count it sitting cross-legged like I'm nine years old doing a lemonade-stand audit. Two dollars and eighty-five cents, mostly quarters, a scatter of dimes, one Canadian penny that's been in there for two years because I keep forgetting to throw it out.

Two eighty-five buys a small coffee at the Bellini, no tip, and I catch myself — actually catch myself, mid-thought, like grabbing my own wrist — running the math on whether I could go and not order anything at all. Sit at my table, wave off Gennaro, let the visit be free.

That's the day my pride quietly packs a bag and lets itself out. I don't even get to watch it go. I just look up from the coins and it's already gone, and what's left is just me, on a mattress, doing change-jar arithmetic at eight in the morning.

Mr. Pariseau knocks at nine, three knuckles, same rhythm every month, like he's announcing a delivery instead of a debt. I have the November rent — two hundred and fifty dollars, folded into thirds in the coffee can I keep it in — and I hand it over and tell him, smoothly, in a voice I didn't know I still had, that the rest of the month is fine, everything's fine, work's steady. He counts the bills twice, lips moving, the way he always does, and drops them in his shirt pocket instead of a coffee can this time, and I think that's it, that's the whole transaction, and then he says, on his way back down the hall:

"Oh — the electric. Fella came by the office. Paid it up for the year. Cash."

He says it the way you'd mention the weather. Like it's a nice thing that happened to me, which I suppose it is, which is exactly the problem.

"What fella," I say, and my voice comes out steadier than the ground under it currently is.

Pariseau shrugs, already halfway down the stairs. "Didn't give a name. Big guy. Paid in full, didn't want a receipt." A pause, then, kindly, unhelpfully: "You got a boyfriend takes care of things, that's nice. My daughter should be so lucky."

I stand in my doorway with my hand on the frame and feel the floor do the tilting thing, the thing where nothing has actually moved but your inner ear disagrees.

I call the electric company first, standing in the kitchen because the reception's better near the window, and a woman with a Massachusetts accent confirms it without hesitation, like there's nothing strange about it at all: paid through next October, in full, cash at the payment center on Broad Street, no name on the receipt beyond "account holder — third party payment, authorized." I ask what that means, authorized, and she says, patiently, like she's explained this forty times today, that anyone can pay a bill on an account, they don't need my permission, the utility company doesn't care whose money it is as long as the account gets current.

The internet's the same story. Same office, same cash, same twelve months, paid two days ago according to the confirmation email I somehow never got because it went to an account I don't check, an old one I set up when I signed the lease and never once looked at again.

I log into my bank last, sitting on the floor with my back against the tub because that's the only spot in this apartment that ever feels like a good place to receive bad news, and I go through every transaction for the last two weeks with my finger on the trackpad like I'm reading a very slow, very boring thriller. Nothing added. Nothing taken. My balance is exactly what I expect it to be, which is to say, criminally small.

He hasn't touched my accounts.

That's the part that gets me, more than the money does, more than the fact of it. He went around me. He didn't put anything in my hands or my bank or my mailbox where I could see it coming and say no to it. He went out into the world and paid people directly, in cash, without a name, so that the only way I'd ever find out is by accident, from a landlord mentioning it like a compliment.

Trevor paid my studio rent once. Six years ago now, roughly — the spring after we moved in together, when I was still freelancing out of a shared space on Broadway that cost more than I could justify and I was three days late on my half. He didn't ask. He just paid it, told the studio manager to bill him going forward, and I found out the same way I found out about the electric bill today — secondhand, from someone who assumed I already knew.

I remember being grateful. I remember that specifically, the shape of the gratitude, warm and a little sick, like drinking on an empty stomach.

Six months later he sat across from me at our kitchen table with my invoices spread out — mine, that I'd printed for my own taxes — and read them back to me line by line in that patient, sorrowful voice, the one that always sounded like he was disappointed on my behalf rather than in me. You billed forty hours here and the mockups took you six days, Maya, do you see how that reads to a client. Do you see why people stop paying you. He'd found the invoices in a drawer. He'd read them like a lawyer building a case. And underneath the whole conversation, unspoken, was the studio rent, sitting there like collateral — I take care of you, so I get to say this.

I am sitting on my bathroom floor with a paid-in-full electric statement open on my phone, and my mouth tastes like that conversation. Six years later and it still has a flavor.

Simone calls at ten forty. I watch the screen light up on the mattress, her name, her stupid photo I took of her mid-laugh with ink on her chin, and I let it ring out.

I know exactly what she'll ask if I pick up. Where's the money coming from, Maya. And I don't have an answer I can say to her out loud and still recognize myself afterward. He's paying my bills without telling me isn't a sentence I can survive her hearing, not after everything she's already said about Trevor and narration and safety, because she'll draw the line straight and she'll be right to, and I am not currently equipped to have anyone be right about this.

The phone stops. A minute later a text: call me back when u remember u have a best friend. I don't answer that either. I put the phone face-down on the mattress like that solves anything.

I walk to Atwells because I need out of that apartment more than I need the two dollars and eighty-five cents to stay in the jar, and the cold has that early-November honesty to it, no pretending anymore, coat weather for real. My stomach makes a sound somewhere around Sutton Street that isn't quite hunger and isn't quite nausea, more like an elevator with the cable cut, a long silent drop with no bottom in sight, and I keep walking because stopping to feel it seems like a bad idea.

There's a grey sedan parked on Sutton, half a block up, nose out like it's ready to leave in a hurry, and there's a man in the driver's seat who does not get out. I stop walking. I stand there on the sidewalk in my coat with my hands jammed in my pockets and I look at that car for what feels like a very long time and is probably ten seconds, counting it the way my father taught me to count exits, uno, due — and lose it at three, same as always, and then I make myself keep walking because I have learned, somewhere in the last two months, that looking at the thing for exactly ten seconds and then walking is a skill now, filed next to counting exits and drinking water on an empty stomach, one more competence I never wanted and can't seem to unlearn.

I don't look back at the car. I don't tell myself whose it is. I've stopped being able to tell, some days, which is its own kind of exhausted.

The Bellini smells like scorched milk before I'm even through the door, same as always, the pressed-tin ceiling holding the smell in like a lid on a pot, and the grinder gives its fourth-pull shriek somewhere behind the counter right on schedule, unfixed since March, a ghost that runs on time. I take my seat, second table from the window, the one that's been mine since before any of this started, and I don't order.

Gennaro brings a cappuccino anyway. And a cornetto, warm, the sugar not quite melted into the top yet.

"On the house," he says, before I can say anything, setting them down with the specific finality of a man closing an argument that hasn't started yet.

"Gennaro—"

"On the house." He wipes the green marble beside my cup with the same rag he's used on this counter since before I was born, unhurried, not looking at me, giving me the mercy of somewhere else to put my eyes while I decide whether to cry about a pastry. "You look like you forgot how the fork works."

I eat it. Every bite. Hate myself a little for how good it tastes, how fast the ache under my ribs goes quiet the second the sugar hits, hate that my body is this simple, this easily bribed, hate that gratitude and hunger keep showing up in the same outfit lately and I can't always tell which one I'm feeling until it's over.

"The board," Gennaro says, nodding at the chalk menu behind the counter, my handwriting from May of last year, the espresso line I still think is the best lettering I've ever done for free. "Brought me three new customers since you did it. Girl from the bank. Two students. They come in, they say, is this the place with the handwriting." He shrugs, like it's nothing, like he isn't handing me the kindest sentence anyone's said to me all week. "You should charge somebody for that someday."

I laugh, wet, into the foam, and it comes out more like a hiccup than a laugh, and he doesn't comment on that either, just moves down the counter to wipe something that doesn't need wiping, giving me the room to have the small breakdown in peace.

I practice the thing I came to say. I do it under my breath, lips barely moving, the way I used to practice difficult client emails before I sent them.

I need you to ask me before you pay for things.

Too sharp. He'll go still, the specific stillness that isn't calm.

I found out about the electric today, and I need to talk about it.

Better. Softer. Gives him a door out if he wants one.

I'm not mad, I just —

I stop myself there, out loud almost, because I catch what I'm doing — sanding the thing down before I've even said it to anyone, filing the edges off my own anger so it'll fit through a smaller door, so it won't scare anyone, so it'll be easy to hold. It's such an old motion my hands could do it in the dark. I used to do this with Trevor before every hard conversation, workshop my own grievance until it was small enough to be safe, and I am disgusted, sitting here with a cornetto crumb on my lip, at how fast the old machinery started back up the second I needed it.

I decide, chewing the last bite, that I'll say the sharp version. The first one. No sanding.

Then I look up at the door for the eleventh time and it's still just the door.

Fifteen minutes.

I've had time to finish the cappuccino, to watch the foam collapse into a ring around the inside of the cup, to check my phone twice for a burner text that isn't there. Gennaro is behind the counter doing the thing he does with the register drawer, counting and recounting the same five singles.

Forty minutes.

The radio behind the counter — an actual radio, an old dial one, playing something in Italian I've never asked him to name — has cycled through two full songs and started a third. A man comes in for a coffee to go, pays, leaves, and the bell over the door does its single jingle and settles, and Dominic's chair, back-wall table, facing the door, stays exactly as empty as it was when I sat down.

I've watched that chair for seven months. I know its shape without a person in it the way you know the outline of a tooth that used to be there. Empty tables don't usually feel like held breath. This one does.

Gennaro looks at the door. Looks at the clock above the pastry case — the hands are at a quarter past eleven — and something in his face does a small, careful recalculation, the kind you do when a number that's supposed to be fixed suddenly isn't.

"He wasn't in yesterday morning either," Gennaro says, mostly to himself, wiping a counter that's already clean, and there's a flatness in it that wasn't there a second ago.

I feel my own spine go straight. "He's always in the morning."

"Every weekday." Gennaro isn't looking at me now. He's looking at the door, at the street beyond the glass, at nothing. "Since March. Every single one." A pause, and I watch him do the arithmetic the same way I've been doing mine all morning, counting something out that should never have needed counting. "This is the first one he's missed."

The radio is still going, tinny and cheerful, completely wrong for the room. Gennaro reaches under the counter without another word and switches it off, and the silence that comes in behind it is worse than anything the radio was covering, and then he untucks the dish towel from his apron, wipes his hands on it slow, and comes around the counter toward the door, already pulling it open, already leaning out to look up Atwells Avenue in both directions like a man checking for weather that hasn't arrived yet but is clearly, unmistakably, on its way.