Chapter 6
Skylar
This building always smells like someone else’s dinner. Garlic. Cumin. The faint ghost of whatever Mrs. Petrakis on the third floor has been simmering since noon. I have lived with that smell for two years and still haven’t decided whether I love it or hate it.
Some nights, it feels like coming home. Other nights, it reminds me that everyone else in this building has someone to cook for.
Tonight, it just makes my stomach twist.
My feet ache.
They always ache by Friday, and today has been what Fridays usually are.
Long and soaked through with other people’s pain.
Three intake meetings. One emergency housing call.
A court appearance for one of my kids, a seventeen-year-old named Marcus who aged out early and is now in a county shelter because his placement dissolved a week before his birthday.
Dissolved. That is the word they use. A placement dissolves.
Fuck me, it’s child abandonment. Funny how language always knows how to make cruelty sound less expensive.
I sat two rows behind him in court, watching the back of his neck, the way he kept his spine straight and his jaw locked.
All that teenage pride holding together a body already asked to carry too much too young.
I knew that posture in my bones, the way you know a song you never chose to memorize but learned anyway, note by note, whether you wanted to or not.
Dignity as armor. Pride as currency. Silence as the only thing left that no one can take from you without permission.
I fought for him.
I always fight for them. That’s my job. It’s the one part of my life I have never let anyone touch.
I am a Youth Advocate at New Ground, a nonprofit built for foster youth who have aged out or are about to be shoved into adulthood with a garbage bag of belongings and no one legally obligated to give a shit anymore.
A woman named Patricia handed me a flyer outside the community college I was attending and said, simply, that we could use someone who has been through it, so if you are aware of anyone, please let us know.
She had no fucking idea.
When I told her my story, about the homes, the rotating cast of adults with dead eyes and government funding, about Cassie and what we survived together, about Zane and the wreckage of that, and about how grief can hollow a person out so thoroughly you stop recognizing yourself in the mirror for a while, something shifted on Patricia’s face.
It wasn’t pity; it was recognition. That conversation lasted two hours, and by the end of it I understood, for the first time, that everything I had been through was not a liability. It was the qualification.
Patricia hired me before I graduated from community college and I have worked my way up from intake coordinator to case manager to senior youth advocate in five years.
No family name opening doors. No one calling in a favor on my behalf.
Just my voice, my history, and the feral, furious little piece of me that refuses to watch another kid feel invisible in a room full of people.
Along the way, while I was fighting for those kids, I forgot to fight for myself.
The elevator opens on the seventh floor.
I walk down the hallway to apartment 708, and before I even turn the key, I already know.
The lights are off. I can sense it, the way you eventually learn to feel all the things you have stopped saying out loud.
Two years of that particular quiet, and I still cannot decide if it is peaceful or just the absence of something I never had enough of to notice losing.
I unlock it anyway and the apartment opens into darkness.
The city bleeds through the floor-to-ceiling windows—amber and white against the black sky, painting the living room in that cinematic way that looks beautiful in photographs and is akin to standing inside a painting someone else made of your life.
All gorgeous light, no warmth. Story of this fucking apartment.
I hit the switch with my elbow, drop my bag by the door, and shrug off the blazer, hanging it on the hook before I move through the living room toward the kitchen.
My leg hits the small table as I pass, and the framed photograph tips forward, face down against the surface with a soft, flat knock.
I right it without looking. It’s the one Damien’s friend took of us at a rooftop party eight months ago.
Damien’s arm around me. Drinks in our hands.
Both of us smiling the way people smile when a camera appears—that automatic, slightly performative lift of the mouth that is not quite a lie but not quite the truth either.
We look like a couple in a photograph because that is exactly what we are in that moment.
I walk into the bedroom and undress quickly.
Work trousers off. Silk blouse off. Both pool at my feet for exactly ten seconds before I pick them up and fold them over the chair. Then I pull on the soft gray sweats and the oversized sweatshirt I bought at a thrift store for four dollars that says NYU across the chest.
I never went to NYU. I never went anywhere that had a sweatshirt worth buying new. But I liked the color and the weight of it, and it was mine in the simplest, cleanest way something can be yours.
I pad out to the kitchen in my socks.
The refrigerator hums as I open it and stand in the cold blue light, scanning the shelves with the unfocused stare of someone too exhausted to want anything specific.
Chicken thighs on the second shelf. Half a bag of spinach.
A lemon going soft at one end. A tub of expensive olives I have never once eaten, sitting right at the front, where I have to move it every time because Damien has been buying them and has never once noticed that I do not like them.
I reach for the chicken, then think about having something simpler. Instant noodles, maybe.
My phone buzzes against the counter.
I leave the fridge open and walk over to grab it.
It’s Cassie.
Her contact photo is from four years ago, lollipop in her mouth, the expression of someone daring the camera to try her. My mouth pulls into a smile at the sight of it.
I open her message.
Cassie: Thought you should see this.
An image is attached.
I pause with my thumb over it.
Knowing Cassie, it’s probably something about Zane. She has been doing that a lot lately, sending little breadcrumbs, laying them out, then standing back and waiting, because she has always believed that if she gives me enough rope, I will eventually climb it.
My heart starts beating faster, and I hate that it does that. Hate that even now, after everything, after all this time, the possibility of him still does something to my pulse without permission.
I take a deep breath, let it out slowly, then tap the screen.
The photograph fills it.
But it’s not Zane; it’s Damien.
The image is taken through glass, a restaurant window with warm candlelight behind it. A place that keeps the lighting low and the tables small enough that two people have no choice but to lean toward each other.
It’s the kind of place Damien always says is too loud, too intimate, not really his thing.
Unless, apparently, the right woman is sitting across from him.
And there he is. Leaned forward with full intention, body angled in a way that has nothing casual about it, his voice probably low, his face arranged into the soft, particular expression he wears when he wants a woman to feel like the only person in the room.
I know that expression. I know exactly what it costs him to produce it and exactly what he expects in return.
His hand rests on the table. Almost touching hers.
For a long time, I only stare.
I know that restaurant. Damien has taken me there once or twice on the nights I said I was going to see Cassie at the deli around the corner where she works.
She would have walked straight past that window on her way home, seen him through the glass, stopped walking, taken the photo, and sent it without a second’s hesitation, because that is exactly who Cassie is and has always been.
She has never once in her life decided that something was easier not to mention.
If someone is fucking you over, Cassie believes with her whole chest that you deserve to know.
I set the phone down on the counter when the refrigerator beeps, reminding me the door is still open. I cross the kitchen and shut it, then move back to the counter and pick up the phone again. The photograph is already right there, knowing it has all the time in the world.
I wait for the hurt to hit.
I wait for my chest to crack open.
For the floor to tilt beneath me. For that brutal, catastrophic drop that tells you something important has been taken.
I know that fucking pain. I have lived inside it, curled up in its wreckage, wondering if I would ever be able to breathe at a normal depth again.
I know exactly what it feels like when your heart rips clean in two.
But it never comes.
What comes instead is recognition.
The photograph is not a shock.
It is a confirmation of something I have apparently known for a long time and simply chosen, in the way people choose comfortable blindness, not to look at directly.
And the fact that it lands as confirmation rather than devastation tells me everything I need to know about who I have become within this relationship and within the version of myself I have been performing for the last two years.
I’m not heartbroken. I’m just done.
The realization arrives so clearly it almost frightens me.
My mind flashes back to the night I met Damien.