SCARLETT
Three weeks sounds long until you're living inside them.
The arrangement settled into the house like a new piece of furniture, strange at first then suddenly just there. Ethan came by twice a week, sometimes three times. He brought coffee on Tuesday mornings and sat at the kitchen counter charming my mother effortlessly while I watched and felt simultaneously grateful and guilty.
Mom bloomed under it. The sharp watchful look she'd been wearing at dinner tables disappeared almost entirely. She stopped counting how many times Simon and I were in the same room. She stopped noticing the silences.
Instead she asked Ethan about his thesis and planned Monaco and hummed in the kitchen and became, quite simply, happy.
It should've felt like success.
It felt like a slow leak somewhere
