Chapter 19
Sloane
Joss has been letting herself into my apartment for fifteen years. The proof that I have exactly one relationship my armor’s never worked on: I gave her a key in year two and have never once regretted it. For me, that’s the equivalent of a tattoo.
It’s a Sunday. Not a crisis Sunday — those we both know the choreography of — just an ordinary one, which between us is rarer and harder, because crisis we’re both good at and ordinary asks for the thing neither of us advertises: that we simply like each other, plainly, with no fire to put out.
She comes in with the pastries she imports from the place that ships them frozen. The ones she pretends are about the pastries — and are actually about a standing appointment she’s been keeping with me since before either of us could afford a place worth letting yourself into.
“You reorganized the spice drawer,” she says, by way of hello, setting the box down. “Again. Sloane. The cumin doesn’t care.”
“The cumin was next to the cinnamon. It was chaos.”
“It was alphabetical.”
“It was alphabetical adjacent, which is worse than random, because it pretends to be a system.” I take the pastries out and plate them, two each, the way we’ve done it since a kitchen in our twenties with a counter the size of a laptop. “Random you respect. Almost-a-system you have to fix.”
“You have described yourself,” Joss says, “and not the cumin,” and steals the bigger pastry off my plate, which she’s entitled to, fifteen years buying her the bigger pastry in perpetuity.
This is the part I never tell anyone, because it doesn’t photograph and it isn’t a story: that the single most radical thing in my life is a woman who has watched me be every version of myself — the ambitious one, the armored one, the one who came out of the Lucas year so locked-down I scheduled my own grief into ninety-minute windows — and who has, across all of it, simply kept showing up with frozen pastries and opinions about my cumin.
She’s the disproof of my entire operating thesis.
My thesis is that to be fully known is to be eventually filed, sorted, and used.
Joss has known me down to the studs for fifteen years and has never once used a single thing. She just keeps the appointment.
“You’re being weird,” she says, eyeing me. “You’ve got a face on. The grateful one. You only get the grateful one when you’re about to do something terrifying.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re doing the winger.” She says it flatly, no malice, fifteen years of permission behind it.
“And it scares you in a way Lucas never did, because Lucas you saw coming — you’ve told me, you built the whole filing system after him so you’d never not-see one coming again — and this one you didn’t, and now you’re sitting in your alphabetized apartment trying to figure out how a person survives being seen by someone who isn’t going to make content out of it. ”
I don’t answer. I eat my smaller pastry. With Joss, not-answering is a complete sentence; she reads my pauses better than the podcast host ever could, because she’s had a decade and a half of footnotes.
“Here’s the thing you won’t let yourself extrapolate,” she says, gently, the friend and never the journalist with me.
“You already know it’s possible. You’re sitting across from it.
I have known you completely for fifteen years and I’m still here, still stealing your pastry, still right about the cumin.
Being fully known didn’t end us. It’s the whole reason we lasted.
” She licks sugar off her thumb. “You let exactly one person all the way in and the roof didn’t come off.
That’s not a fluke, Sloane. That’s data. You love data. Use the data.”
It’s the most unfair thing she has ever said to me, because it’s true, and arranged like a proof, and she knows I can’t argue with a proof.
“That’s a low blow,” I tell her. “Weaponizing my own epistemology.”
“Fifteen years,” she says, serene. “I know where all the doors are.”
We don’t make it a thing after that. We do the crossword — I do it in pen, she does it in pencil, which is the fundamental difference between us and always has been.
We argue about a clue. She tells me about a story she’s chasing that has nothing to do with me, and I tell her about a sponsor’s lawyer who tried to redline a clause I’d already deleted, and for an hour the most consequential relationship in my adult life is just two women on a Sunday being unremarkable at each other, which is the rarest thing I own and the only proof I have that the armor was always a choice and not a fact.
When she leaves she takes the empty pastry box, because she always takes the box, because fifteen years ago we decided my building had better recycling and never revisited it. At the door she stops.
“For what it’s worth,” she says, “I’ve been right about every man you’ve ever dated, and I was right to hate all of them.” Quiet. “I don’t hate this one. Do with that what you will. I’m not writing it down.”
She leaves. I stand in my alphabetized kitchen with one clean plate and one with crumbs, and I think about data, and proof, and a woman who has known me to the studs and kept the appointment for fifteen years — and how I have spent my whole life believing that being known is the thing that ends you, while sitting four feet from the evidence that it’s the only thing that ever lasts.
I don’t reorganize the spice drawer back. I leave the cumin where she’d want it. It’s as close as I get, tonight, to saying she’s right.