10. Mia
Chapter Ten
Mia
The first apartment I found was perfect.
Or at least it felt that way.
Second floor. Corner unit. A balcony overlooking a courtyard where someone had planted actual flowers—not the sad, half-dead kind landlords put in decorative pots and forget about. Real ones. Bright and alive and completely indifferent to the fact that my life had fallen apart.
“This is it,” Lyann said, spinning around the empty living room. “This is your hot-girl-era apartment.”
I laughed. “My what?”
“Your reinvention space. Your glow-up headquarters. The place where you become mysterious and emotionally unavailable.”
“I don't think that's a glow-up.”
“It is after Sebastian.”
I gave her a look.
“What? Too soon?” She was already planning where my couch would go. Which wall needed art. How we'd hang string lights on the balcony for summer nights with wine and terrible reality television.
I could see it too.
That was the problem.
I could see myself in that apartment. Waking up somewhere Sebastian had never slept.
Cooking in a kitchen where I wouldn't remember the way he used to come up behind me and steal food from the cutting board.
Sitting on a balcony without thinking about the six years I'd spent assuming every future version of me would include him.
For the first time since he left, I could picture something after.
I filled out the application that afternoon. Paid the fee. Uploaded bank statements, employment verification, references. Every document they asked for. Then I checked my email obsessively for three days. On the fourth morning, the answer came.
We regret to inform you that your application has been denied.
That was it. No real explanation. Just a vague line about applicant qualifications and competitive criteria, which is polite language for saying someone else had something you didn't. Better credit.
More income. A co-signer. A cleaner life.
I sat on my bedroom floor and stared at the email until the words blurred.
Lyann called as soon as I texted her. “Screw them.” I didn't answer, so she continued, “We'll find something better.”
“I don't want something better.” The words came out before I could stop them.
Then, softer. “Mia.”
“I wanted that one.”
“I know, babe.”
That was the part that hurt. The version of me I had already started imagining inside it.
I wanted the balcony. The flowers. The clean walls.
I wanted the woman who lived there, the one who didn't cry in the shower, who didn't still sleep on the left side of the bed because Sebastian had always slept on the right, who didn't open the closet and catch herself staring at the empty section where his clothes used to hang.
For three days, I had let myself believe I could become her.
Then someone sent me an email and told me no.
The rejection left me with two options.
Stay in the apartment Sebastian and I had shared, where I still had eight months left on the lease. Or break it.
Twenty-five hundred dollars.
That was the early termination fee. Twenty-five hundred dollars I don’t have, not after losing half the household income, not after deposits and bills and all the small financial disasters nobody warns you about when a six-year relationship ends.
People talk about heartbreak like it's emotional. Nobody mentions how expensive it is.
So I stayed.
Eight more months in a place that felt like a museum of my old life.
Eight months of walking through the kitchen where we used to cook together.
Eight months of sleeping on the left side of the bed out of habit.
Eight months of finding pieces of him in places I thought I'd already cleared out: a receipt behind the dresser, one of his socks under the couch, a bottle of hot sauce in the refrigerator I hated but couldn't bring myself to throw away for almost three months.
Time moved, but I didn't.
Lyann called it purgatory.
I call it hell.
Every morning, I knew exactly how much longer I had.
Seven months. Then six. Five. Four. I stopped checking after that.
Or tried to. The waiting became its own kind of grief.
Not the dramatic kind you see in movies where someone sobs into a pillow and emerges transformed after a montage.
Just quiet. Persistent. A low hum of not yet following me from room to room.
Not yet free. Not yet gone. Not yet mine.
Then, eventually, the number reached zero.
The second time I started looking for an apartment, I expected less.
That helped.
No courtyard flowers. No perfect balcony. No imaginary version of myself drinking wine under string lights. I wanted clean. Affordable. Safe. Preferably far enough away that I wouldn't run into Sebastian while buying toilet paper.
That last one felt important.
I had been searching for almost two weeks when Lyann sent me the listing.
Lyann: Before you say no, just look.
I was standing in the grocery store comparing two brands of pasta sauce.
Me: That sentence has never ended well for me.
Lyann: LOOK.
I opened the link.
The first photo was a loft. High ceilings. Warm wood floors. A kitchen in soft grays, whites, and wood tones. Then the living room. And the window.
I stopped scrolling.
It stretched almost from floor to ceiling, looking out over the city in one direction and the freeway in the distance, with a line of trees beyond it.
The place was beautiful. Which immediately made me suspicious.
Me: What's wrong with it?
Three dots appeared.
Lyann: Why does something have to be wrong with it?
Me: Because I have pattern recognition.
Lyann: Two-year sublease. Current occupant is relocating abroad.
I stared at the screen.
Two years. Absolutely not.
Me: No.
Lyann: You looked for four seconds.
Me: Two years, Lyann.
Lyann: And?
Me: And I just spent eight months counting down the days until I could escape a lease.
That shut her up for almost thirty seconds.
Lyann: Fair.
I put my phone in my bag. Picked the cheaper pasta sauce. Made it halfway to the next aisle.
My phone buzzed.
Lyann: Still think you should apply.
I rolled my eyes. Then reopened the listing. I told myself I was only checking the price. Then the neighborhood. Then the application requirements. Then whether pets were allowed, even though I didn't have one.
By the time I reached the cereal aisle, I had read the entire listing twice.
I applied that night.
Not because I thought I'd get it. I remembered what happened last time I got my hopes up.
The application fee, the waiting, the polite rejection.
This time, I refused to imagine myself there.
I didn't plan furniture. Didn't think about the window.
Didn't picture coffee in the kitchen or wine on the couch.
I uploaded the documents. Employment verification. References. Bank statements. Everything they requested. Then I closed my laptop.
A few days later, the email arrived while I was standing in the cereal aisle. Apparently grocery stores are where my housing decisions happen now. I almost didn't open it. I stood there between granola and a family-sized box of something covered in marshmallows, staring at the subject line.
Application Status Update: Approved.
I stared.
Read it again.
Then I read it a third time.
My first thought wasn't excitement. It was: There has to be a mistake. I called Lyann. She answered on the second ring.
“What happened?”
“I got it.”
Silence…
Then screaming. Actual screaming. So loud that I had to pull the phone away from my ear. “Oh, my God. Oh my God, Mia. You got the loft?”
“I think so.”
“What do you mean, you think so?”
“I mean, the email says approved, but—”
“No. No 'but.' You got it.”
I looked down at the email again. Two years. The number still scared me. Maybe it always would. “I don't know if I can sign another long lease. What if I hate it?”
“Then you hate it.”
“What if something happens?”
“Something will happen.”
“That's not helpful.”
“It's true.”
“Mia, you spent eight months waiting for your life to start because you were afraid of what leaving would cost.” I closed my eyes. “You don't have to love the idea of two years,” she said. “You just have to decide whether you want to keep making choices based on what happened with Sebastian.”
“That feels manipulative.”
“It is. But I'm right.”
I laughed, then looked at the email one more time.
Approved.
For the first time in eight months, something had opened instead of closed, so I signed the sublease the next morning.