Chapter 4 #2
The café, the paper, the conversations around us—none of it disappeared, exactly.
It just fell farther away. That was the word under everything.
Not ambition. Not pride. Not even fear, really.
Visa. Status. Permission. The fragile architecture of belonging.
Those truths lived in my bones by now. They had shape and weight.
My visa status sat behind every decision I made, invisible to everyone who didn’t have to think about it and inescapable to me.
“Yes.”
There it was.
The truth underneath everything else.
It always came back to that. No matter how polished I looked. No matter how put-together I sounded. Beneath every professional goal, every late-night study session, every carefully worded cover letter, there was that harder truth: I could not afford to drift.
“If I don’t secure employment,” I continued carefully, choosing each word like it mattered—because it did, “my status becomes… complicated.”
“That’s a very calm way of saying ‘terrifying.’”
“I’m not terrified.” The denial came a little too easily.
Reflexively. Terror implied helplessness, and I had spent too many years learning how not to look helpless to wear the word comfortably now.
Terrified people froze. Terrified people unraveled.
I was still here, still functioning, still turning in papers and showing up to class and keeping myself in one piece. That had to count for something.
“You are.”
I met her eyes. “I don’t have the luxury of being terrified.”
Something in her face eased and tightened at the same time. Not disagreement. Recognition. She understood the distinction, even if she hated it. Fear was a privilege when your world gave you room to collapse. I didn’t have that kind of room.
She went quiet for a beat, studying me. Then—“Have you told Lo?”
My stomach dropped. “No.”
Of course she would go there. Of course she would name the one door I had been refusing even to look at.
Lo existed in my mind as both comfort and danger when it came to problems like this.
Comfort, because she loved me so completely it still stunned me sometimes.
Danger, because that kind of love came with reach.
Influence. The ability to make a phone call and change the temperature of a room.
“Bea—”
“No.” Firmer this time. “I’m not telling her.”
The answer came hard enough that the couple at the next table glanced over again before returning to their shared study guide. I didn’t care. My whole body had locked around the idea before my brain even caught up.
“Why not?”
“Because she’ll fix it.”
Micah blinked. “Isn’t that the point of having people who love you?”
That question cut cleaner than I wanted it to.
Love, in theory, was support. Safety. A place to go when the floor gave out.
But love from someone like Lo was also momentum.
She would not sit back and watch me drown if she thought she could throw a rope.
She wouldn’t even ask first. She would just move.
“I don’t want it fixed.”
“You don’t want a job?”
“I don’t want a job handed to me.”
Micah tilted her head, considering. “Lo wouldn’t just hand you something,” she argued.
“She would,” I countered immediately. “Or she would make Ezra hand me something.”
I heard the bitterness dripping from my tongue and hated it.
Not because Lo or Ezra had done anything to deserve it, but because even saying their names in this context made me feel tainted by association.
Ezra Thomas, billionaire team owner. Clementine Atha, all effortless glamour and social reach and the kind of presence that bent rooms. People would see that link before they saw me. Maybe they already did.
“And that’s bad because…?”
“Because I didn’t earn it.”
Micah exhaled slowly, leaning back again, her chair creaking softly beneath her. The wood gave a faint protest under her shift in weight. “Bea,” she started, choosing her words carefully now, “you are one of the most qualified people in this entire graduating class.”
“That doesn’t matter if people think I got there because of who I know.”
Because perception mattered. In PR, in sports, in any room where power and narrative touched, perception was half the battle.
Maybe more. I knew that better than most. It was practically the thesis statement of my entire paper sitting unfinished in front of me.
Once a story attached itself to you, it took on a life of its own.
The truth became secondary. Optics ruled.
“They already think that,” she pointed out bluntly.
That hit. I flinched before I could stop myself. It was tiny. Barely there. But Micah caught it because Micah caught everything. A muscle moved in my cheek. My shoulders tensed. The truth of what she’d said slid under my skin and found every exposed nerve.
Micah’s expression softened immediately. “I didn’t mean—”
“No, you’re right,” I cut in, forcing a small, humorless smile. “They do.”
Connected.
Lucky.
Spoiled.
The words lived in the back of my mind like a constant echo.
They had for years, if I was honest. Not always out loud.
Sometimes just in glances. In assumptions.
In that subtle recalibration people did when they learned who I knew.
It didn’t matter that Lo had earned her own life.
That Ezra wasn’t even in my direct orbit.
That my father’s money had never once written a paper or run an internship or sat me through brutal professors and impossible expectations.
People loved an easy story, and nepotism was an easier story than discipline.
Connections were easier to resent than competence.
I straightened slightly, pulling myself back together. “That’s exactly why I can’t go to her,” I continued. “If I do, then they’re right.”
“They’re not right.”
“They will be.”
Micah leaned forward again, her gaze locking onto mine.
Her intensity sharpened in a way that was almost physical.
She wasn’t going to let me retreat behind logic now.
Not when she’d made it this far in. “Or,” she countered, “you’re making this harder than it needs to be because you think you have to do everything alone. ”
I could feel the words before I answered them. Could feel the way they found the exact center of the problem and pressed. Alone. The ugliest part of it was that I didn’t even know anymore whether I was protecting myself or punishing myself. Maybe both.
“I don’t—”
“You do.”
The truth of it settled heavier than anything else had.
Around us, the café went right on living—orders called, chairs moved, students studied, someone laughed too loudly near the door—but at our table, everything held still.
I looked at Micah and saw no accusation there, only certainty.
The kind born from years of knowing me too well.
She knew how hard I worked. Knew how much I wanted to stand on my own merit.
Knew, too, that somewhere along the way I had started treating support like contamination—as if love only counted when it asked nothing back and offered nothing practical in return.
Before I could respond, my phone buzzed against the table.
I glanced down.
Lo.
Of course it was Lo.
Because of course she would feel it. Not literally—not in any mystical, cosmic way—but close enough that sometimes it felt like she could. She had always had that timing. That uncanny ability to call at exactly the moment I was least prepared to pretend I was fine.
Micah saw it immediately, her brows lifting. “Speak of the devil.”
“I’m not answering that.” The refusal came fast. Automatic. My thumb hovered over the screen anyway, betraying me, caught between instinct and resistance.
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
“You are.” She reached across the table and slid my phone closer to me. “Answer it.”
I stared at the screen for one more second. My reflection glared back faintly in the glass—composed on the surface, cracks just beneath.
Then—I answered. The call connected immediately. Lo’s face filled the screen, bright and alive and entirely too perceptive for my current emotional state.
Even through a screen, she had presence.
Effortless, radiant, impossible to ignore.
Her hair fell perfectly around her shoulders, her expression open and warm, her entire energy the exact opposite of the tight, controlled spiral I’d been sitting in.
Behind her, late afternoon light spilled gold across what looked like a broad kitchen counter strewn with evidence of a real life being lived—an open bottle of sparkling water, a vase of something white and fresh, a linen dish towel tossed carelessly near the sink.
Everything around Lo looked soft. Expensive, yes, but lived-in in a way that mattered more. Not curated. Comfortable. Safe.
“There you are,” she greeted, her voice warm and full and completely unaware—or maybe fully aware—of the storm sitting across from her. “I was beginning to think you’d decided to drop out of society and become a mysterious academic recluse.”
Micah leaned into frame, grinning. “Too late. She’s halfway there.”
Lo’s smile widened. “Micah, darling. Are you keeping her from turning into a spreadsheet with a pulse?”
“I’m trying.”
“That’s my girl.”
The familiarity of it—the rhythm, the teasing, the easy affection—slipped into the tension like a crack of light through a sealed room.
It changed the air around the table. Just enough.
My shoulders, which had been locked somewhere near my ears for most of the last hour, gave a fraction.
My grip on the phone loosened. Across from me, Micah settled back with the small, satisfied look of someone who knew this was exactly the interruption I needed, even if I was too stubborn to admit it.
I huffed out a breath, “Hi, Lo.”
Her gaze shifted to me fully then. And everything changed. Because she saw it. Immediately.