1. June #2
She laughs and says ten tomorrow. The paperwork’s coming — and June, wear flat shoes, it’s a lot of stairs. Then she’s gone, and I’m standing in the middle of my four hundred square feet with the ring light throwing its circle on the wall.
I don’t take it down. I’ve been hopeful before. Hope doesn’t pay rent. The page stays up, the light stays standing, and if tomorrow goes wrong, Friday is still Friday.
* * *
The NDA arrives by email that evening — nine pages, sign here, initial there.
I read all of it. I’ve signed exactly one contract in my life without reading it first, a gym membership, and I paid for that mistake until I was twenty-six.
The client is initials only. A.V. The initials mean nothing to me, which is apparently the point of initials.
With the NDA signed and sent back, I do the responsible thing anyway, because an interview is a maybe and rent is not.
Two hours of it. Resume updated, the eleven weeks at Harlow stretched as far as honesty allows.
Fourteen applications into fourteen websites that each want me to retype the resume I just attached.
One auto-reply lands instantly, thanking me for my interest in a position I applied to in March.
Here is what the responsible thing gets you: entry-level marketing roles want three years of experience and a portfolio.
I have eleven weeks and a degree I’m still two semesters short of.
The most profitable work I’ve ever done — two years of running a business by myself, marketing included — is not going on a resume. Ever.
Dinner is rice, a fried egg on top, soy sauce, done. I eat it standing at the counter and wash the pan before I sit down.
Before bed I check the bank app again, in case the final paycheck cleared early. It didn’t.
Bex texts while I’m brushing my teeth: you okay? words, remember. i was promised words.
I give her words. Interview at ten, nanny, live-in, Queen Anne, eighty thousand. She sends back a full row of capital letters, then — because she is Bex — and the page?
I look at the laptop, closed on the counter, and type: reactivated it this afternoon. insurance. it comes down tonight, the paperwork’s real.
then pull it, babe, she writes. you’re out. stay out. And a beat later: if the widower is hot i want a full report.
he’s a grieving man with two children, bex.
a full report.
I put the phone facedown and go to bed, but it doesn’t take.
Deep in the night I’m awake with the ceiling slanting over me, taking inventory of a house I haven’t seen.
A widower in Queen Anne. One kid who interviews people, and one who won’t look up — which I understand better than I’m going to admit to anyone tomorrow.
A man so private I’m nine pages deep before I get a name.
And a page that has been live since the middle of the afternoon with my whole other life sitting on it, restored, like April never happened.
I get up and open the laptop.
No new posts. Nothing sold, nothing sent. The page just sat here all evening, live and visible to anyone who thought to look. Nobody looked. Why would they? Ten hours of nothing.
The messages came back with it. That’s what I didn’t think through this afternoon. Two years of conversations, right where they were.
I don’t scroll. I tell myself I don’t scroll, and then I do it anyway — one thread, the one I knew I’d open before I touched the mouse.
FOURTEEN. Top tier, month after month for over a year, and in all that time he never once asked for a single thing the site sells.
No photos, no videos, no requests. He asked how my day went.
Whether I’d eaten. Whether the neighbor upstairs ever fixed the dripping sound, and whether I was sleeping, because he wasn’t.
Awake at terrible hours, courteous in all of them, and every single night he signed off with a proper goodnight, raised-right to the end.
There was a week last winter when I had the flu and posted nothing.
He didn’t ask where the content was. He asked if anyone was bringing me soup.
Nobody was bringing me soup. I told him a friend had it covered.
He wrote back: good. And I sat in this apartment with a fever, close to crying over a lie I’d just told a stranger.
His last message is from April. Four days after I’d already decided to close the page. I never answered it.
Quiet week. Hope that means something good is keeping you busy. Night, Juno.
Something good was keeping me busy. I’d hit the number — the debt number, zero — and I closed the page eleven days later without saying goodbye to anyone. Goodbye meant explaining. JUNO doesn’t explain. Neither do I.
The reply box is right there under his message. I could answer it, four months late, from a page that came back from the dead this afternoon and dies again tonight. And say what? “Sorry.” “I’m okay.” “It was never about the conversation.”
Two of those are true.
I get up and fill the kettle instead, because tea is something to do with your hands at two in the morning.
While it heats, I sit back down and go looking for the delete button, which Velvet keeps two menus deep, behind a screen that offers me a “creative pause” instead.
No. A discount on my platform fees? No. Then, finally, in red:
DELETE JUNO PERMANENTLY? Your page, archive, subscriber list, and all messages will be permanently deleted. This cannot be undone. To confirm, type DELETE JUNO.
All messages. I read that line three times. His too, then. Two years of somebody asking how my day went — the only person in the world who thought to — and the only copy of it goes down with the page.
For one second I think about saving the thread. Screenshots. A folder somewhere, for me, for nobody. Then I think about what I’d be keeping: proof. The one thing I’ve spent two years making sure doesn’t exist.
The kettle is starting to tick. In eight hours I have an interview in Queen Anne with a sad, private man and two kids who need somebody who won’t perform. That woman doesn’t have a page. That woman never did.
I type it the way the box wants it, capitals and all. DELETE JUNO.
Enter.
The screen holds for a second. Then it’s just Velvet’s front door, logged out, as if there was never anybody by that name.
Before the water boils, I take the ring light down. Tripod folded, lamp unplugged, mask zipped in with the cables, all of it back under the winter blankets. This time I peel the tape off the floor.
Eleven hours, start to finish, 3:40 to 2:40, and I never posted a thing. Nobody saw it but me.
Two years of my life go quiet in the time it takes to boil a kettle. I tell myself that’s the end of it. I am about to be extremely, catastrophically wrong.