## Chapter 4 At five the alarm went off and I reached across the bed to stop it, and then I stayed there with my arm out because something about reaching had been too easy. I did it again. I could reach the phone without rolling over first. I rolled onto my back. My stomach moved with me instead of arriving a little later. For a few seconds I lay very still, taking inventory under the sheet, trying not to get ahead of myself, and then I pulled the sheet down. "Oh, come on." I sat up without using my hands. Then I stood up, which was so ordinary and so completely different that I laughed. My feet were on the floor and I was standing straight, without having to brace myself on anything. I walked to the bathroom fast, flicked the light on, and there I was. It was my face. That was what I kept checking. Same little uneven place in my eyebrows, same nose, but there was a jaw under it now and my neck went down into actual shoulders. I took my shirt off. Then I turned sideways. Then I turned back and did the thing where you pretend you're standing normally while tightening every available muscle. I had abs. You couldn't see all of them unless I helped, but I was happy to help. I moved closer to the mirror and looked at my arms, lifted one, put it down, lifted it again. At one point I realized I was smiling with my mouth open and shut it, which made the whole thing look even better. I must have spent fifteen minutes in there. It's embarrassing to put a number on it, but that is probably conservative. I bent down and touched my toes. I did a few push-ups on the bathroom floor, mostly because I wanted to watch my arms work, and got up again before it became exercise. The apartment was the same. Same windows, same expensive couch, same view I was still getting used to having. The Cadillac key was in the bowl by the door. I checked my work calendar, and my title was still there, along with meetings I didn't want to attend. Fine. Keep those. I opened the journal on the nightstand and found the page about leaving work at work and moving every day. All still there. I had managed to keep the parts I wanted. I zipped it into my work bag. In the kitchen there were glass containers stacked in the refrigerator, each with a piece of tape on the lid. Chicken, rice, vegetables, a few jars of something with oats in it. The coffee maker had already started. Beside the door sat a gym bag with a clean towel sticking out, and when I opened my phone there was a workout written out for that morning, including numbers next to the exercises. This guy had recorded everything. There were weeks of it. Months. I scrolled backward until I got bored, which happened well before the records ended. For a minute I thought I should go. I was already awake, the clothes were ready, and I wanted to see what it felt like to walk into a gym looking like somebody who went to a gym. But it was also my first morning like this. I wanted to take a shower and try on the clothes and have a normal breakfast somewhere instead of immediately reporting for whatever punishment had produced the result. One morning wasn't going to undo years. That was practically the whole advantage of years. I put the bag back down and took another look in the hallway mirror on my way to get dressed. The shirts fit so well that choosing one became an actual problem. A plain dark shirt looked good. The next plain dark shirt also looked good. I put on a button-down and rolled the sleeves up, then unrolled them because it looked like I had rolled them up to show off my forearms, which I had, then rolled them up again because who cared. My belt fastened several inches away from where my hands expected it to. I stood there holding the loose end for a second. I could have gone straight to work at that point, but I changed the shirt one more time. Downstairs I bought a breakfast sandwich and a coffee. The woman at the counter asked if I wanted my usual, and I said, "I'm changing it up," which covered quite a lot. She laughed and asked whether I was taking the day off. I said I had a meeting at seven. Maybe she asked everybody that. Maybe we had discussed my schedule fifty times. It still felt good to stand there while somebody looked pleased to talk to me. When she handed me the bag, I didn't have the automatic urge to hide it against my side. At the office I made it through the lobby without wondering whether I was sweating through my shirt. I could sit at the conference table and think about the meeting instead of how I looked sitting at the conference table. I didn't suddenly understand all the work, but I could lean back while someone spoke and look as if I did. When Bradley asked me about an installation date, I said I'd confirm it after the meeting, and the words came out normally instead of sounding like I was buying time. I was buying time. Apparently there were better and worse ways to do it. Around five, a reminder came up telling me to wrap up. There was another one fifteen minutes later. I liked that. I liked that somewhere along the way I had become a man who required electronic assistance to stop working. I answered a couple of messages, left one that would take longer, and went home. The gym bag was still beside the door. I moved it so I wouldn't trip on it. By Wednesday I had worked out once. It was a decent workout, I think. I had followed enough of the list to get sweaty and then spent too much time trying to understand a cable attachment while pretending to check my phone. My body could do more than I knew how to ask it to do. Still, I left with my shirt sticking to me and caught my reflection in the glass doors, and for the rest of the afternoon I felt like I had handled that part of my life. That evening I went out for dinner alone and ended up staying at the bar. There was a woman a couple of seats down waiting for a friend who kept pushing the time back. We started talking because the bartender put my food in front of her, and she said she was willing to accept it if I was willing to pay for it. Her name was Erin. She had already ordered fries and moved the basket toward me while they sorted out my dinner. She had spent the day trying to get two departments to agree about an event neither of them wanted to organize, and she could do both managers' voices. I laughed with a fry halfway to my mouth. For a little while I forgot to keep checking how I was coming across. She asked where I lived. I pointed vaguely up the street. Later, when her friend finally said she wasn't coming, Erin put the phone away and stayed. I managed to mention the apartment without making it sound like an invitation, and then a little later it became an invitation anyway. On the walk over she hooked her arm through mine. I kept looking straight ahead because I wanted to look like this happened to me all the time. In the elevator she straightened the collar of my shirt and left her hand there. I could see us in the metal around the doors. I looked like the man who belonged beside her. She liked the view. I had been counting on that, and then I forgot about the view for a while. Later she set an alarm and asked which side of the bed I used. I said it didn't matter. It mattered a little, but I would have agreed to sleep sideways if she had suggested it. She put a cold foot against my leg and laughed when I moved, and I lay awake for a while after she fell asleep, pleased to have another person taking up room there. In the morning she needed a hair tie and I had nothing useful to offer. She found one in her bag. I made coffee, or tried to, and she showed me which part of the machine came out to be filled. She drank half a cup standing in the kitchen, looking for her ride on her phone. "This was fun," she said, kissing me before she left. "Text me." I said I would. After the door shut I stood there holding my coffee. Her cup was on the counter. I liked seeing it, so I left it where it was while I got ready for work. When I came back, it was just a cup I needed to rinse. I checked my phone to see whether she had written from the car. She hadn't. It had been nine minutes. On Friday, Victoria invited a few of us to her house before we went downtown. Apparently this was something she did sometimes, and apparently I had missed enough of them that she said, "You are actually coming, right?" while standing in my office doorway. "Yes. Why does everybody think I don't go anywhere?" "Because you don't go anywhere." "I went somewhere Wednesday." "Congratulations. Six-thirty." I got there a little after seven with wine I had chosen mostly by the price. The house smelled like bread. There were shoes around the door and someone laughing in the kitchen, and Victoria took the bottle out of my hand so she could hug me without getting hit in the head. She was wearing socks, which made me wonder whether I was supposed to take my shoes off. Before I could ask, she was calling into the next room for somebody to move their car. She came back with a covered bowl and handed it to me. "Can you put this on the table?" In the kitchen a woman was standing on her toes to reach a shelf. I offered to get whatever she needed. She came down and moved aside. "The blue one. Thanks." I handed her the plate. There was a pale streak of something near her wrist, and she was wearing a loose shirt with one sleeve rolled higher than the other. She looked at the bowl in my other hand. "That's going out there, I think. Unless you're planning to keep it." "Depends what's in it." She lifted the towel covering it. "Bread." "Then probably." She laughed, took a piece, and tore it in half. She handed me the larger bit before I could carry the bowl away. It was warm enough that I had to move it between my fingers. Victoria came in and said this was why she could bake two loaves and still have nothing left to put on the table. "Derek, this is Maya. Maya, Derek. He works with me." "Hey," Maya said. "Nice to meet you." I liked her face more the longer I looked at it. That was inconvenient because there were only so many reasons to keep standing beside a person holding a plate. I asked whether she lived nearby. She said about fifteen minutes away and went into the other room with me, where two people from work were arguing over the music. Victoria called from the kitchen that they could change it after this song. Maya sat on the arm of a chair and finished her bread, brushing crumbs into her palm. I took the seat next to her. "Did you make anything?" I asked. "I cut some tomatoes. Very thin." "She's been here helping me all afternoon," Victoria said from the kitchen. "The tomatoes took hours." I laughed. I wanted her to keep talking to me like that. There was a painting above the chair, a view through an open back door with a patch of light on the floor. I had looked at it before without thinking much about it. Victoria came over with drinks and told Maya that somebody at work had asked where she bought it. "That's yours?" I said. Maya nodded, looking past me at it. "I keep meaning to straighten that doorframe." I looked at it again. "You could sell those." "Maybe." "Seriously. Do you have a website?" She shook her head. "I just like doing it." "My sister wants one," Victoria said. "She's asked me twice if you'll do her kitchen." "The room or a painting of it? Because I can't do cabinets." They laughed, and I laughed too, although I was still trying to work out why she wouldn't sell them. It seemed like the first thing you would do if you could make something people wanted. I started explaining that I was in sales, technically management now, and that getting somebody interested was most of the problem. Maya listened. Then Victoria asked her where the serving spoons were and she got up to find them. I stayed in the chair. My drink had left a ring on the table, and I wiped it with my thumb before anybody noticed. A few minutes later I heard Maya telling Victoria she might skip the bar. She wanted to get home early. I said she should come for one drink. "That's always the sales pitch," she said. "I'm in sales." "I heard." Somebody laughed, and I laughed too. Victoria said she could share a ride back with her at nine. Maya agreed to that and set an alarm on her phone. While we waited for the cars, she helped somebody look for an earring under the couch. I kept wanting her to look up at me. On the way to the rooftop, Maya sat in the front of the ride and asked the driver whether he preferred doing this during the day. He said yes, mostly, and told her about taking his daughter to school before he started. I waited for the conversation to finish so I could ask Maya something. It kept going. She wanted to know how old the daughter was, whether she liked school. At a light he turned a little to show her a picture on the phone clipped to the dash. I could only see the edge of it from the back. The bar was exactly the kind of place I used to dislike from outside. There was a person downstairs whose job seemed to be looking at people before allowing them to use an elevator, and upstairs there were little tables with lamps on them and drinks that required more explanation than I felt a drink should need. I loved it. I liked the height, the glass, the fact that you could see the windows of my building if you stood in the right place. My shirt fit. The weather was good. For once the whole thing seemed reasonable. We found a place where six people could sit if everybody agreed to be uncomfortable. Maya pulled a little table closer so Victoria could reach it. I offered to get the first round. Maya asked for soda with lime, and when I said, "Are you sure?" she said yes and kept talking to Victoria. I ordered it. There was a moment when everyone looked pleased with me, and that was worth quite a lot. Then I saw the total on the screen and added a tip while the bartender waited. I sat beside Maya when I got back. She thanked me and moved the lime around with her straw. I pointed toward my building. "That's mine over there. The one with the light across the top." "Oh, nice. Is it loud?" "You don't really hear it up that high." "That's good. My neighbor has been learning the drums." I told her about the windows and the gym, and she nodded. When I mentioned the pool, she asked if I spent much time there. "At the pool?" "Home. Sounds like you're pretty busy." "Yeah. Work's a lot." "What do you do when you get back?" I said it depended. I didn't want to tell her that most nights I sat in front of a screen eating something I had paid too much to have brought upstairs. I talked about restaurants in the area instead. She knew a small place near Victoria's and asked whether I had tried it. I hadn't. She started telling me about the woman who ran it, then somebody on the other couch said something about food and she turned to include them. Across the table, a man in a shirt that looked like he'd found it in his car was having no trouble keeping her attention. They were discussing grocery stores. One moved everything around, another had a bad parking lot. Maya asked where his mother shopped now. "The one by the library. She says at least the coffee stays where she left it." "I like that one," Maya said. "You can actually get out of the parking lot." He said that was half the reason his mother had switched, and Maya asked whether she still went on Saturdays. I listened long enough to establish that there was no secret brilliance in it. That was the conversation. He knew where his mother bought groceries, and apparently there were questions you could ask about that too. A woman going past touched my arm and asked if the seat beside me was taken. It wasn't anymore. Maya had moved closer to Victoria to hear her. The woman sat down while her friend went to the bar. She asked my name, and I was immediately better at talking. There were questions I could answer. She liked my shirt. She wanted to know if I came here often. I watched her eyes go to my mouth and thought, see, this works. This is a normal thing that works. Maya and Victoria left at nine, as planned. Maya said she had an early start helping at a soup kitchen. I said I hadn't known those were still called that. She looked at me for a second. "Ours is." "No, I just meant, you know. I thought there was another name now." "Maybe there is." She smiled a little. "They haven't told me." Victoria hugged me goodbye. Maya gave a small wave and followed her toward the elevator. I watched them go, then turned back to the woman beside me and had to ask her to repeat what she had said. Her name was Nina. She worked nearby and knew which places stayed open when this one closed. We went to one of them. She ordered for herself, corrected the bartender when he brought the wrong thing, and told me outright that she didn't want to hear about work. That helped. We talked about bad dates instead. I had enough material for that. When we ended up at my apartment, she asked if the windows had blinds. I showed her the control. She lowered them halfway and said that was better. I had imagined the view being more involved. The next morning she sat cross-legged at the counter eating the last of a bag of pretzels she had found in my cabinet. A friend was coming to pick her up for brunch. While she waited, she showed me pictures from a trip to Portugal. There was a dog in several of them. I asked whose it was. My phone lit up with a work email as she started to answer. "The woman we rented from. He'd come in with her when she watered the plants and then refuse to leave." She showed me one of him stretched across their doorway. I was still reading the email preview when she held the next picture toward me. The dog was under a restaurant table now. "Did you ever find out who he belonged to?" She kept the phone where it was. "You already asked me that." "Sorry. Still waking up." She looked at me for a second, then swiped to the next one. I put my phone face down and tried to pay attention. We stood downstairs waiting for her friend because I had offered to walk her out. When the car pulled up, she squeezed my arm and said she had had a good time. I believed her. Back upstairs I checked whether Maya had an account I could find through Victoria's. I was still wearing the same clothes. The following Monday I went down to the gym again. A man near the weights nodded to me as if we knew each other. I nodded back and went to the treadmill, where I understood the buttons. Walking fast felt good. I kept turning the speed up a little and discovering I could do it. I stayed longer than I meant to because there was no difficult part yet. When I got off, I felt loose and awake, and I took the stairs back up just to see. That night I looked through Maya's pictures in bed. Most were paintings. I kept scrolling for the ones she was in, then went back to see whether I had missed any. When I checked the time it was after one. I moved the alarm to six-fifteen. Tuesday's workout could wait. Wednesday there was a breakfast meeting, so Thursday made sense. Then I forgot my headphones and decided I might as well go after work, when I would have more time. By Friday I was thinking I should just start fresh the next week. The food took longer to become a problem because the refrigerator had doors. I put new takeout in front of the old containers. I ate the yogurt because it didn't involve deciding anything. One evening I opened a box of rice and chicken, smelled it, and shut it again. I threw that one out with the lid still on. It was an expensive container. I knew that while I was doing it. The others looked all right through the sides. I moved them to the back to make room for drinks. Erin texted me a picture of something from the event she had finally finished. I started a reply, got distracted looking at Maya's paintings, and answered the following night. By then Erin had already written again to ask whether I wanted to meet Saturday. I said I might have plans. I didn't have plans. I was leaving room for something to appear. At work I could still enjoy catching myself in the conference-room glass, but it no longer gave me a good mood for the whole meeting. People kept bringing things to my office. The list on my desk kept needing to be rewritten. I had begun telling people to handle things themselves, which was in the journal entry, after all. Sometimes they came back because they needed an answer only I could get. Aries sent new photographs of the installation area. There was a question about getting the service panel open beside a pipe somebody hadn't included in the first measurements. Nolan wanted to know whether the heat-exchanger package still worked with the available space. I forwarded it to engineering. They asked me to confirm which drawing the customer was using. I meant to call him after lunch. After lunch I was comparing two restaurants where I could take Maya if I got the chance. Bradley stopped in the next day. "Did you close the loop on Aries?" "Engineering's looking at it." "They're waiting on you." I opened the thread. The message was still marked unread, although I had read it in the preview. "Right. Yeah, I've got it." He stayed in the doorway until I picked up the phone. I got Nolan's voicemail and left a message. That was enough to let me move the item down my list. When he called back during another call, I told myself I would try him before leaving. At five-thirty I closed the laptop. I was meant to have boundaries now. My mother called while I was getting dressed that evening. I watched it ring because I was running late and because answering meant telling her I was running late, which would turn into where I was going and who I was seeing and whether I'd eaten. All perfectly ordinary questions, and I wanted to be out the door. I texted her that I'd call tomorrow. She sent back a heart and a picture of something my father had fixed. I opened the picture, couldn't immediately tell what I was supposed to be looking at, and closed it. For a while the money was easy to ignore too. I had more coming in than I used to, and that made nearly every individual purchase look harmless. Dinner wasn't rent. A ride wasn't a car payment. I already had the car payment anyway. I liked being the person who could say, "I've got it," and get the bill out of everyone's way. The awkwardness disappeared immediately, which seemed worth paying for. Later there would be a number in an app, but nobody was sitting across from me then. By the third week I had loosened the belt one hole after dinner. The next morning I tightened it again to check. It still worked. So that was fine. There was a little more softness around my stomach, or maybe I was looking too closely because I was nervous about it. My shirts still looked good. People still treated me the same way. I would get back on the routine after the weekend, when there wasn't something planned every night. Victoria's game night was Friday. Maya was coming. I knew because I'd asked Victoria who was going, tried to look uninterested through four other names, and then said, "Oh, cool," when she got to hers. "Derek," Victoria said. "What?" "She's taking a break from dating." "I didn't say anything." "Okay." "I can go to a game night." "Then come to a game night." I bought a different shirt that afternoon. Nothing dramatic. Just something a little more casual, because the last time I'd looked like I'd come from work, which I had, and the bar had been too loud to talk properly anyway. This would be better. I also ate before I went so I wouldn't end up standing there chewing bread through every conversation. There were practical things you could fix. I stopped for wine on the way over. At Victoria's, Maya was at the kitchen table sorting cards into piles. Her hair was tied up, and there was a pair of glasses beside the box. She looked up when I came in. "Hey, Derek." I liked hearing her say my name. I put the wine where she could see it. "You know how to play this?" she asked. "Probably. Which one is it?" She turned the box around. I hadn't played it. She explained while I helped separate the cards. One had been bent at the corner, and she smoothed it against the table with her thumb. I asked how her weekend had been, then remembered it was Friday and corrected myself. She told me about helping her brother move a bed upstairs. I said I hoped he had paid her. "He fed me. That's usually the arrangement." "Older brother?" "One of them." "How many do you have?" "Five siblings altogether." I put down the cards. "Seriously?" She nodded, smiling at my face. "It's a lot of birthdays." "Your parents must be tired." "They're enjoying being grandparents now. My brother has six." "Six kids?" "Mm-hmm. The bed was for the oldest. She wanted it against the other wall once we got it up there." She told me about the niece directing them from the doorway, holding a drawing of where everything was meant to go. Maya sat up straighter and pointed past me. "A little to the left. No, the other left." Then she dropped her hand. "We hadn't even put it down yet." "Did it end up where she'd drawn it?" "For about five minutes. Then she couldn't open her closet." "Seems like something you'd want to check." "My brother said that. She told him she didn't go in there very much." I laughed, and Maya laughed again trying to finish the story. She showed me the drawing on her phone. There was a huge bed and a tiny little door squeezed into the corner. We leaned over it together while she pointed out where they had finally put everything. When she put the phone down, I wanted her to find another picture. "Would you want that many?" I asked. "I don't know about six. I'd like a big family." I made a noise before deciding what I meant by it. She glanced up. "What?" "Nothing. Just expensive." "Yeah." I started talking about how much rent was now, then about schools, although I didn't know anything about schools. Maya finished stacking the cards and squared the edges against the table. I got as far as saying "private school" before realizing she was waiting for me to finish. I said I liked kids. She said her nieces and nephews were pretty great and got up to help Victoria carry things in. The game went well for a while. I got put on Maya's team. One of us described the word on a card and the other had to guess before the timer ran out. You couldn't use the word itself or any part of it. She wore the glasses to read the smaller print, then pushed them on top of her head and forgot where they were. I told her, and she laughed at herself. Between rounds she leaned over to look at the cards we'd missed, close enough that her hair touched my arm. I stayed very still so she could stay there. I wanted us to win. On another team's turn, somebody used "mail" as a clue for "mailbox." I pointed to the rule on the box. "She'd already guessed it," Maya said. "After she said mail." "Give them the point. We'll get another one." She slid the timer toward me. I said I wanted to know who we had to bribe to get those rules, and Victoria laughed. The next time we lost a point I brought it up again. "We heard you," Victoria said, and went to get more drinks. I picked up the next card. Apparently we were moving on. Between games, Maya's phone rang. She looked at the name, silenced it, and typed a reply. I asked whether she needed to get it. "My sister. She calls to tell me things that could be six words." The phone lit again with a picture. Maya smiled and turned it toward Victoria, who was clearing plates. A little boy had fallen asleep with one shoe on and a spoon in his hand. There was food on his shirt. "That's about where I'm at," Victoria said. Maya held the phone out to me too. I looked, smiled, and asked if she wanted to get dinner sometime. She lowered the phone. "Oh. That's nice of you. I'm not dating right now." "Yeah, Victoria said. I just mean dinner." "I know. Thank you, though." Victoria carried the plates into the kitchen. I could hear someone in the living room opening another box. There was plenty of noise. Probably nobody had heard. "It doesn't have to be a whole thing," I said. "We could just go out and see." Maya looked at me properly then, and I wished I could make her look at her phone again. "I'm not interested, Derek. Please stop asking." I looked down at the table. There was a chip broken into little pieces by my glass, and I brushed them into my palm for something to do. "Okay. Sorry. I wasn't trying to make it weird." "Okay." She went into the living room. I stayed there with the crumbs in my hand. I had kept going after she answered. I wanted to explain that I wasn't the sort of person she was apparently deciding I was, but there was no version of calling her back that seemed likely to help. I got up and put the crumbs in the trash. I played another round. Our team even won, which was a stupid thing to care about at that point, but I cared. Maya was ordinary and polite when the game required us to speak. I would almost have preferred her to be angry. Then there would have been something happening between us. She left before most of the others. She hugged Victoria, said goodbye to the room, and went out with her bag over her shoulder. I kept my eyes on the table until the door closed. Later, when people began taking their things, I started collecting glasses. Victoria scraped crumbs into her hand and carried them to the sink. I put the glasses beside her. "Where do these go?" "Dishwasher. Top." I opened it and moved a mug so I could fit one in. For a minute we did that. She brought things, I found places for them. I was grateful she didn't immediately say anything. Then I said, "I wasn't being a creep." She shut the drawer she had been looking through. "I didn't say you were." "I asked her out. That's all." "And she answered you." "I know." Victoria picked up a damp cloth and wiped the table. I followed with the last glass, as though there might be somewhere better to put it over there. "Did she say something to you?" "Derek, leave it." I looked down at the glass. There was a little wine in the bottom. I had brought an expensive bottle and barely tasted any of it. "I just thought we were getting along." Victoria stopped wiping. "You were. You can get along with somebody." "Right." She waited. I could tell she wanted me to say something else, or maybe I wanted her to give me a better answer. There wasn't much she could say without making it worse. I took the glass to the sink and rinsed it. Before I left, she wrapped half a loaf in a clean bag and handed it to me. I said she didn't have to. She said she had made two and wanted the counter back. I took it. She squeezed my shoulder at the door and told me to text when I got home. In the car I sat with the engine running while I found something to listen to. Every song was wrong. Eventually I turned it off and drove home in silence. The bread was on the passenger seat. I kept replaying the conversation with adjustments. In one version I said okay the first time and seemed relaxed about it. In another I never asked her at all. I could hear the exact place where I should have said something else, except when I tried to think of what, all I had were lines that sounded like lines. That was the problem. Other people did this all the time. They'd had years of dinners and parties and talking about grocery stores, and I'd spent most of those years going home. I could remember invitations I'd ignored because I was tired, nights I'd left as soon as the conversation got awkward, people I'd decided were boring before I'd asked them anything. I wasn't going to ask Maya again. But I kept imagining meeting her with a few more years of practice behind me. At home I took the journal out of my bag. I put it on the counter beside the bread and opened a drawer for paper. It was Friday. I had time to work out the wording. I wrote down things I could remember declining, and there were enough that I had to turn the sheet over. Drinks after work. A cookout. Victoria asking if I wanted to come by because a few people were already there. I had usually said maybe first. Then I would get home, sit down, and wait until it was late enough that staying home had become reasonable. On Saturday I crossed out Be charming because that was useless, like telling someone to be taller. I needed things I could actually have done. I spent most of the day at home, partly because I didn't want to run into anyone and partly because there didn't seem much point making a big effort with only a day left. My mother texted Sunday morning to ask whether I wanted dinner. I said I needed to get things ready for the week. She offered to send some home with me if I only had time to stop by. I looked at the message while eating a piece of Victoria's bread over the sink. Then I wrote, Next week for sure. By Sunday evening I had the wording ready. I reread the letter before opening the journal. I couldn't put Maya into a night before I had met her. I couldn't write what she was supposed to do. I had enough evenings of my own to work with. I left the other pages where they were and turned to a clean one. > When Victoria invites me over, or people at Meridian ask whether I want to join them after work, say yes more often. I remember wanting to go and deciding it would be easier to go home. On those nights, go. Give this some of the evenings I would have spent alone on the couch. Stay long enough to get past the first awkward part. Talk to somebody I don't already know. Ask about what they're telling me and let them finish. Ask another question before starting to explain myself. When I enjoy talking to someone, follow up and make an ordinary plan to see them again. If they don't want to, accept it and keep going out anyway. Help with things while I'm there. Keep showing up enough that I get comfortable with people and every conversation doesn't have to go perfectly. I read it over. It sounded reasonable. It even sounded like the sort of advice people gave for free, which was reassuring under the circumstances. If I'd already had that practice, Friday could have gone differently. A card notification dropped over the top of my screen while I was setting the alarm. I caught the balance before I swiped it away. That was higher than I'd expected. I would look at it in the morning, when I was in a better position to deal with things. I took the journal to bed. For a while I thought about Maya handing me the bread before I'd said much of anything. She had torn it in half and given me the bigger piece. I kept going back to that part. The alarm was still at six-fifteen. I looked at it, thinking I ought to put it back to five. Six-fifteen would give me enough time to get to work, though. I set the journal beside me, turned the phone over, and pulled the sheet up. There was still room on the other side of the bed.