Chapter 19
Room to Breathe
Jane
My phone buzzes. I glance down.
WEST: My housekeeper reorganized my kitchen. I can't find anything.
ME: Says the NHL center who tracks everything. Why are you really texting?
WEST: Thought I’d try something new instead of “I miss you.”
ME: West.
WEST: Jane.
I laugh and pick up my coffee. Take a sip and grimace. Cold again.
Anguilla spoiled me.
ME: I miss you too.
I set my phone down, and my brain immediately pivots to work.
Some days I swear Jane of All Services LLC is Bigfoot.
I’m out here hauling projects, leaving giant footprints across client deliverables, and people still act shocked when I show up in broad daylight asking to be paid.
So imagine my surprise when two invoices creeping toward thirty days past due clear without a single reminder email.
No passive-aggressive per my last message. No smoke signal. No carrier pigeon.
Just… money.
I briefly consider checking the sky for falling frogs.
Here’s the thing about running a business—a lesson I earned the expensive way:
Business solvency and personal survival are two different sports.
The company can be in the green while Jane Cooper, sole proprietor, is in the grocery aisle doing mental calculus over which greens are on sale.
Five years ago, at twenty-one, I convinced a bank I was credible enough for a small business loan. It bridged the gap between “receivables” and “reality.”
There was a market for my services. The contracts were small enough that most clients didn’t ghost me like a bad Tinder date.
I hustled for every account. Made the rookie mistake of not vetting all of them. A few turned into bad debts with excellent excuses and zero wire transfers.
Lesson learned.
I stopped chasing revenue and started protecting cash flow.
Deposits upfront.
Milestone payments instead of hopeful invoices.
Smaller, faster jobs threaded between long hauls so my cash cycle wasn’t based on vibes and good intentions.
And honestly? The business behaves like a model citizen.
It pays office rent on time.
Covers software subscriptions without blinking.
The loan payment leaves on the first of every month—automatic, disciplined, undramatic.
The principal shrinks a little more each quarter.
Taxes filed like a responsible citizen with a functioning frontal lobe.
Vendors kept happy.
From the outside, Jane of All Services looks like she knows exactly what she’s doing.
Then I pay myself.
That’s when the math stops being math and starts being… choreography.
On paper, my salary looks perfectly reasonable.
In real life, it has to stretch across:
An apartment I’m always five days late on.
Grace’s tuition. Grace’s textbooks.
Groceries. Healthcare. Insurance. Taxes.
And the five-month-old ceiling leak that’s been dripping into a bucket since October like a slow, sarcastic applause track.
So I get creative. I buy time in inches.
Tuition goes on the school’s installment plan.
I call the insurance company twice a year to “review coverage,” which is code for please lower something.
Grace supplements her campus meal plan. I supplement what the meal plan pretends is nutrition. We meal-plan like two generals mapping a battlefield.
Rice stretches. Chicken rotates. Soup becomes three meals if you season it with conviction.
The business is green.
Jane Cooper has to be… flexible.
And flexible has kept us afloat.
The landlord isn’t fixing the leak.
Possibly because I’m late on rent.
Possibly because the universe enjoys a good chicken-and-egg dilemma.
If I move, I lose my deposit.
If I stay, I own a decorative indoor rain feature.
Sure, I can recaulk a sink. I can even replace a garbage disposal.
I have industry-recognized drywall certification and a healthy respect for YouTube tutorials.
What I cannot do is open up the ceiling of a rental property and start rerouting plumbing without risking my security deposit, my housing stability, and possibly a lawsuit.
There’s a difference between being capable and being reckless.
If the landlord wants to ignore the drip, I’ll keep the bucket.
I don’t invest in assets I don’t control.
It’s the circle of life.
Except instead of lions and sunsets, it’s mildew and late fees… and me, conducting the orchestra with a spreadsheet.
So when the $50,000 from Katelynn cleared three days ago.
It hit the business account first—because that’s the rule.
Jane of All Services gets paid.
Jane Cooper gets a paycheck.
With a nice bonus.
Which I deployed with the ruthless efficiency of a woman who has been triaging bills since she was twenty.
First, three months’ rent—set aside and scheduled to be paid promptly and in full for the first time in eleven months.
Not in halves.
Not with an apologetic email asking for five more days.
That makes me feel embarrassingly good.
Next, Grace’s tuition—which I’d been paying in fragments small enough that the bursar’s office knows me by voice.
I paid the remainder in full.
Before the due date.
I also bought groceries without checking the unit price.
And I didn’t put anything back.
Grace and I bought winter coats that doesn’t leak wind through the seams.
I even funded a four-month emergency buffer—which is a calm, grown-up way of saying we won’t panic if work slows down.
Then I did something I’ve never done in my life.
I put $5,000 into a three-month CD.
Not survival money. Future money.
Which required me to research rates with the slightly unbridled optimism of a woman who has never, not once, had a reserve account.
A woman whose savings balance, seventy-two hours ago, rounded to the nearest nothing.
For the first time in eighteen months, my personal spreadsheet isn't a red-flagged emergency.
It's a plan.
An actual, forward-facing, color-coded plan with projections that don't make me want to crawl under the desk and breathe into a paper bag.
Instead, I’m standing. That counts.
Because now I have room.
Actual room—in my breathing, in my chest—to feel what I’ve been trying to suppress about one Weston Prescott.
And I’m going to use it.
It’s been three days since Anguilla.
Our texting has mutated into something I wasn't prepared for—not the tentative check-ins of new acquaintances, not the performative flirtation of people who are still pretending.
Something sharper.
A running commentary on each other's lives that assumes access, assumes interest, assumes permanence.
He texts like someone who notices everything but files it away in some internal database.
I text like someone narrating her own disaster reel in real time.
Together it works. Especially on a Wednesday.
ME: I’m at work, catching up on paperwork and calls. You?
WEST: Waiting for the game to start. USA through. Undefeated in preliminary play. Direct bye to quarterfinals.
ME: When is it starting? And is it Sweden or Latvia?
WEST: Thirty minutes. USA vs Sweden. I need them to win by at least two.
ME: You gambling now?
WEST: Relax. Just a little wager with a couple of longtime friends in Colorado.
I try not to read too much into our hockey conversations, but that doesn’t stop the small ache of knowing West is in New York watching other men play the sport his body is still built for.
He doesn’t say that.
There's just a texture underneath his messages—something compressed, something he's holding between the lines—and I've gotten good at reading the spaces.
I leave him to his game.
Work through lunch. Answer another call—a new client, a man who wants me to "rebrand his personality." I tell him that's a therapist, not a fixer. He asks if I know any who do house calls. I give him a number and charge a referral fee.
Then, a minute later:
WEST: You know, I just realized something. If I’d been in the Olympics this year… if I'd been on the roster, I'd have missed the whole thing.
I stare at my screen.
The cursor blinks. I read the messages twice. Three times.
He just—did he mean—that felt like a thought that got out before he could catch it. A door left open that he didn't intend to walk through.
If I'd been on the roster I'd have missed the whole thing. The island. The week. The wedding.
Us.
I type three different responses. Delete all of them. My fingers hover.
ME: Good thing you had time to relax then.
WEST: Yeah.
Neither of us says anything else about it.
I close the message thread.
Go back to my spreadsheet. Stare at the numbers until they blur.
Then I file I would have missed the whole thing into a drawer in my brain.
Carefully.
Because now, I have room for it.
Aday later.
I’m finalizing catering details for a client’s retirement when I notice a missed voicemail from West.
I tap it while typing. Half-present.
He’s saying something about scheduling a meeting with his coach advisor.
It doesn’t matter what he says.
His voice drops into a lower register—slightly distracted, that offhand rumble of a man thinking about something else while he talks—and something low in my body forms a very strong opinion.
I stop typing.
What was that.
I press my thighs together under my desk. It doesn't help.
I go back four seconds.
Play it again.
I did not imagine it.
The deeper register. The rough edge. The rumble I remember against my skin.
And just like that, I’m turned on—as if someone flipped a switch I didn’t know existed.
It's only been a few days and I am sitting at my own desk in my own office and my body just staged a full-scale insurrection over a voice message about a meeting with his coach.
I close the voice message. Open it again. Close it.
I stare at my laptop like it personally betrayed me.
This is fine. Proximity withdrawal. Bodies do this. It'll pass.
It does not pass.
Lunchtime. Home. Standing at the counter making a cheese sandwich.
Spreading mustard. Knife flat against bread. Thinking about nothing—truly nothing, a beautiful vacuum of nothing—when the memory arrives uninvited.
His mouth against my ear in the casita.
The exact register of his voice when he said you made me need you.