SEVEN
957 Words
The email arrived that afternoon.
I had only meant to skim it, but when I reached the last few lines, my fingers slowly went still. I knew every word on the screen, yet together they seemed to take on some other meaning. I stood by the staircase for a long time, and my first instinct was not to find Cindy or search the answer myself. It was to look toward the living room.
Nathan was there.
Before I fully realized what I was doing, I had already walked over.
“Can you help me check this?”
He looked up, did not ask why, and simply took the phone from me. He read quickly, but not carelessly. When he finished, he turned the screen slightly toward me, his voice carrying that same steady calm.
“It’s not a rejection,” he said. “They’re asking for proof from your school.”
I froze for a second. “So it’s not bad news?”
“No,” Nathan said. “They just need to confirm something.”
He said it so steadily, as if there had never been anything to panic about. The tightness that had been hanging inside me began to settle. The email was still there, and the problem had not actually been solved, but one sentence from him seemed to pull me out of the worst of it first.
“What should I say?” I asked.
Nathan did not answer at once. He set the phone on the table and shifted slightly to make room. I sat down, and he did not comment on it. He only lowered his attention to the screen and helped me sort out the main points of the reply, his tone even, asking a question now and then to make sure he had understood what I meant.
Listening to him, I felt the confusion from earlier begin to loosen.
The feeling was familiar.
Familiar enough that I did not want to look too closely at it.
Neil came in with his keys in his hand and stopped at the entrance to the living room. I looked up. He did not speak right away. His eyes moved from me to the phone in front of Nathan.
“Need backup again?”
His tone was light, almost joking.
I blinked. “It’s just an email.”
For some reason, my thumb stopped over the screen.
Neil looked at Nathan and gave a small smile.
“Right. And he’s handling it.”
Nathan did not look up. “She was confused. That’s all.”
Neil left it there and went into the kitchen, as if the comment had been nothing more than something tossed out in passing. But as I watched him go, I had the sudden feeling that it had not been casual at all.
Later that night, I tried to finish the problems Nathan had helped me with earlier.
At first, it worked. Numbers, steps, lines of work—things that were supposed to have only one answer. But somewhere in the middle of a problem, my hand slowed. I stared at the page, trying to remember what came next, and only then did I realize I had written a word in the margin.
For a second, I only looked at it.
Then my heart jumped so hard it almost hurt. I tore the page out before I could think, crumpled it in my fist, and shoved it deep into the trash can beneath my desk. The room suddenly felt too small, the air too warm, as if the name were still sitting there in front of me even after I had thrown it away.
I told myself I just needed water.
That was all.
The lights below were not all on, and the living room was dark, but a thin strip of light came through from the back door. When I reached the staircase, my steps slowed—not on purpose, only because Neil’s voice had reached me.
“You’ve been helping her too much.”
I stopped with my fingers on the railing.
For a moment, there was no sound outside.
Nathan’s voice came back level and controlled. “She’s new here. A lot of things are unfamiliar.”
“Helping her is one thing,” Neil said. “Letting her lean on you is another.”
I remained on the stairs, suddenly unsure whether I should keep going.
Nathan did not answer immediately.
“It’s not like that,” he said.
Neil let out a soft laugh, but there was no amusement in it.
“I hope it’s not.”
A few more seconds passed.
Then Neil said, “She comes to you for everything now.”
My breath grew lighter.
The words passed through the door and landed on me exactly where I stood.
“Just don’t let her get used to it,” Neil said.
Their voices dropped after that. I could no longer catch full sentences, only fragments cut apart by the wind and the doorframe.
“Boundaries.”
“Too close.”
And then Neil’s final sentence, quiet enough that I almost missed it.
“By the time she notices, it’ll be too late.”
Standing there on the stairs, I no longer wanted the water.
In that moment, I did not fully understand what they were talking about, but something inside me slowly dropped, as if someone had spoken aloud half of a thought I did not dare finish.
And the other half was caught in the silence Nathan had not used to deny it.
More than anything, I was afraid of that crumpled page in the trash.
If anyone unfolded it, they would see the word I had written there:
Nathan.
- Writer
