Two Years to Forever

I found out my landlord was serious about the eviction the same day I found out my business account had eleven pounds left in it. I sat on the floor of my flat with my back against the wall, and laughed, actually laughed, the kind that scrapes on the way out and doesn't feel like anything close to joy. Four years of building something out of nothing, folded in four months. A supplier who went under without warning. A client who ghosted a six-figure invoice and a lawyer who told me suing would cost more than I'd ever recover. A lease signed back when good felt permanent instead of borrowed, back when I still believed the version of me who'd walked away from a comfortable life eight years ago had made the right call. I kept waiting to feel something bigger than this, something that matched the size of what I'd lost. Instead I just felt tired, the specific kind that lives behind your eyes and follows you into the shower and sits with you at breakfast like an old, unwelcome friend. I could feel myself tearing up but I didn't have the strength for tears. I had done a lot of crying prior. I thought about calling my mother and got as far as opening the messaging app before closing it again. She'd offer to help, and helping would mean revisiting every warning she'd given me eight years ago about walking away from a good life, and I didn't have the energy tonight to be right about my own choices in a way that also felt like losing. Lisa called while I was still on the floor. "You're coming tonight," she said. Not a question. "I'm not really in the party mood, Lisa." "You're in a free drinks mood, you just don't know it yet. I already told the Whitmore Foundation you're my plus one. I'm outside your building in eighteen minutes." I looked at the eviction notice on the counter, then at my reflection in the dark window, a woman who looked like she'd been through something because she had. "Give me twenty minutes," I said, because eleven pounds has a way of making pride negotiable. I found a short and tight green dress in the back of my closet, the kind that shows my curves. This had cost so much when I bought it and now felt like borrowed armor. Some nights you dress for the version of yourself you're trying to convince the room still exists, the version who still has a functioning business and a bank account with more than double digits in it, and I stood in front of the mirror a long moment trying to summon her before giving up and simply leaving the flat instead. The gala was held in a glass-ceilinged space where the champagne cost more than my old rent, back when I had rent instead of eviction notices, and every surface reflected light in a way clearly designed to make everyone look slightly more important than they were. I stood near the edges the way I always did at these things, half amused and half aware I didn't quite belong here anymore, watching people who'd never had a Tuesday like mine. Lisa found me a drink and a conversation with someone from a shipping conglomerate whose name I forgot within thirty seconds, and for a while I let myself pretend the evening was just an evening. That was when I saw him. Eight years, and my body reacted before my brain caught up. He was laughing at something, easy and practiced. I used to be able to tell the difference between that one and the real one, back when he let me see the real one at all. John Reed hadn't changed the way I'd hoped he would somewhere in the private, unkind corner of myself that still thought about him sometimes. He'd just gotten better at hiding whatever was underneath. Lisa went very still beside me, her drink halfway to her mouth. "Okay. We can leave, say the word and we're gone, I'll make up an emergency, I'm very good at emergencies." I wasn't fine, whatever I told myself. My body had already made a decision my mind hadn't caught up to. I turned and walked, fast, weaving between clusters of people I didn't see, heart doing something violent against my ribs. I wasn't thinking about where I was going. I was thinking about not being seen, which is a very hard thing to arrange under a glass ceiling. I didn't see the waiter until I was already colliding with him. The tray went first, a bright crash of glass and champagne and something small and expensive-looking shattering against the marble floor, and then the waiter himself staggered back with a sound of pure alarm, and half the room's attention swung toward the noise the way attention always does, hungry for a spectacle that isn't its own. "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry," I said, crouching immediately to help gather glass I had no business touching with bare hands, mortification rising hot up my neck, champagne soaking into the hem of my dress and my mind very unhelpfully supplying the thought that this was, somehow, still a better outcome than the conversation I'd been trying to outrun. "Don't move, you'll cut yourself." The voice arrived before I fully registered whose it was, low and close, and then a hand closed gently around my wrist, and I looked up directly into the face I had just spent considerable effort trying not to look at from across a room. John crouched beside the waiter first, not me, checking his hands, asking if he was hurt, and something in that ordering caught me off guard, that he'd gone to the actual injured party before he'd said a single word to me. "I'm fine, sir, truly," the waiter said, flustered, already reaching for a second tray someone had produced from somewhere. "Take the rest of the night off, paid. Tell them I said so." John pressed something into the man's hand I didn't see and didn't want to, and then it was just the two of us crouched on a marble floor in a room full of people politely pretending not to watch us. "You're bleeding," he said, nodding at my palm. A thin line of red across my thumb, champagne stinging in it. I hadn't even felt it happen. "It's nothing." "It's something." He produced a handkerchief, and for one absurd second neither of us moved, both aware of exactly how strange it was for him to be touching my hand eight years after the last time he had at all. "I don't need your help, John." "I'm aware. I'm offering it anyway." He looked at me properly, no crowd between us, no eight years of distance either. "You were trying to leave." "I was trying to find the bathroom." "You were trying to leave," he said again, quieter, not unkind about it, which was somehow worse. "I'd like five minutes. Somewhere quieter than this place" I had eight years of good reasons lined up to say no, and every one of them dissolved somewhere between the handkerchief and the look on his face. "Fine," I said, my hand still wrapped in his handkerchief, my heart still not fully recovered from either the collision or the man responsible for causing it. "Somewhere quieter."