Eliza
Iwoke up in a house made of light.
It came from everywhere at once—east, south, west—pouring through the floor-to-ceiling glass until the whole bedroom glowed.
The canopy outside filtered it green and gold, and the valley spread out below the windows like something you’d see from a plane, except I was lying in the middle of it, wrapped in sheets that smelled like August’s skin.
He was still asleep. On his stomach, one arm stretched across the mattress where I’d been, his face turned toward me.
The beard, the jaw, the ink across his shoulders and down both arms. In sleep he looked younger, quieter.
The stillness he carried on purpose was just stillness now, and I watched the slow rise and fall of his back and felt something open inside me that I didn’t know how to close.
I lay there for a long time. Longer than I should have.
Then I got up, found my clothes on the bedroom floor, and got dressed without waking him. I wrote a note on the back of a receipt I found on his kitchen island—Had to get to work. Last night was everything.—and left it next to the coffee grinder where he’d see it.
I ordered a rideshare from the driveway and rode back to Pixel Lofts with my forehead against the window, watching the trees thin out as the road curved south toward the city.
My hair smelled like his shampoo. My body was sore in ways I’d never been sore before, and every time I shifted in the seat I felt him.
By ten, I was at my desk in 3B with the gala binder open and a cold cup of coffee in the First Light mug.
The event was two days away. I had a final headcount to confirm, a catering timeline to approve, three donor packets to assemble, and a sound check scheduled at the Evergreen Room for tomorrow afternoon.
I stared at the binder, the sticky notes, the seating chart, and the color-coded spreadsheet I’d been living inside for six weeks. But all I could think about was the way he’d pressed me against the glass.
The guilt didn’t build slowly. It crashed in before I could brace for it—a wave that knocked the breath out of me and left me sitting at my desk with my eyes closed, replaying the sound of his voice in the dark instead of thinking about the sixty-two kids who needed this gala to go right.
Ava needed scholarship funding secured by fall.
Omari needed a new mentor match after his current one relocated.
Ananya’s AP Bio scores were coming back next week, and she’d already texted me twice asking if I’d heard anything.
And I was sitting here thinking about a man.
This was how it started. This was what my mom had looked like before she walked away from it all—distracted, split, pulled in a direction that wasn’t the work.
I’d watched it happen. I was fifteen, sitting at the kitchen table doing homework, when she came home and sat down across from me and said, “I can’t do this anymore.
” No tears, no explanation. Just a flat, hollowed-out voice and a resignation letter the following week.
She’d taken a job in insurance administration and never talked about social work again.
Not once. The woman who’d spent twelve years fighting for kids in the system became someone who processed claims and watered her garden on weekends, and the worst part wasn’t that she’d quit.
The worst part was how easily the world let her.
Nobody called. Nobody asked where she went.
The caseload got reassigned and the system kept grinding and my mother became a person who described herself in past tense.
When I was in social work.
Back when I did that kind of thing.
I’d picked up her baton the day I applied to First Light’s internship program, and I’d been running ever since.
Every grant application, every donor pitch, every late night with the binder and the sticky notes and the mug—all of it was so the mission wouldn’t become past tense. So that someone kept carrying it.
And now, I was sitting at my desk with a binder open to a page I hadn’t read in twenty minutes, thinking about a man’s hands on my body.
A call from my mother interrupted those thoughts.
“Just confirming Saturday,” Mom said. “Your father’s going to drop me off at six and pick me up after. Do I need to dress up?”
“It’s a gala, Mom. So yes.”
“I have the blue dress from Aunt Karen’s anniversary party. That’ll work.” She paused, and I could hear her moving through her kitchen—the faucet running, a cabinet closing. “How’s the planning going? You sound tired.”
“I’m fine. Just a lot of last-minute logistics.”
“You always say that.” Her voice was warm and easy—the voice of a woman who’d made peace with her life a long time ago. “I’m proud of you, you know. The work you’re doing with those kids. Your dad and I both are.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“I just hope you’re making room for the rest of it too.”
I didn’t answer right away. The rest of it. She said it casually, the way she said everything now.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean the rest of it. Friends, weekends, someone who makes you laugh.” A beat. “The work matters, baby, but it can’t be the whole thing. Trust me on that.”
She moved on to asking about parking at the Evergreen Room, and I answered on autopilot.
My mother wasn’t grieving. That was the thing I’d been missing for eight years—the thing that had been right in front of me this whole time, and I’d looked straight through it.
Diane Greer had sat down at the kitchen table and said she couldn’t do it anymore, and then she’d gotten up and built a different life. Not a lesser one. A different one.
She had friends and a garden and a husband who drove her to galas and a daughter she was proud of. She wasn’t sitting at that kitchen table anymore, and she hadn’t been for a long time.
I was the one who’d never gotten up.
I’d been there since I was fifteen, watching my mother quit, promising myself I’d never set the baton down.
But she hadn’t handed it to me. Nobody had.
I’d picked it up off the floor and started running, and I’d been running so hard for so long that I never turned around to see that she’d stopped not because she’d given up, but because she was finished.
She’d carried that baton as far as she could, and she’d set it down, and she was okay. More than okay. She was happy.
The kitchen table wasn’t her life anymore. It was mine.
I hung up the phone and sat in the quiet of 3B. The binder on the desk, the sticky notes, the framed photo of my mom on the bookshelf, the First Light mug with the pen marks on the rim.
I loved this work. That part was real—the kids, the mission, the late nights, the voicemails.
That was mine, and it always had been. But the part that said wanting something for myself was a betrayal, that choosing August meant abandoning everything I’d built—that wasn’t dedication.
That was fear. That was the kitchen table.
Through the wall, I could hear Tatum’s door close in 3A.
Down the hall, Saylor’s laugh carried through the corridor, muffled but warm.
This building was full of women who wanted things for themselves—careers and men and Friday nights on the rooftop and whatever came after—and it hadn’t made any of them selfish. It had made them brave.
I wasn’t there yet. I needed to get through Saturday first—the gala, the keynote, the two hundred people counting on me to make it work. I could figure out the rest of it after.
I picked up my phone and texted August.
See you Saturday night.
Four words. Neutral. Not warm, not cold. He’d feel the distance, and I couldn’t explain it yet.
I set the phone down and went back to the binder.