Chapter Twenty-One
VANNA
I get a new job in October.
Administrative coordinator at an architecture firm on the east side. It's a good job. My boss is a woman named Harriet who runs her department with the kind of matter-of-fact fairness that I apparently spent years not valuing highly enough.
I don't talk about Moore at work.
I don't talk about Moore anywhere, actually, which is a boundary I have established for myself because I have found that talking about Moore, even in the context of analyzing what I did wrong, has a way of making everything about him, which is exactly the pattern I am trying to move out of.
I talk to a therapist named Dr. Fayette, who is small and direct and has a habit of asking me to differentiate between what I felt and what I chose. It's the choosing, she says, that we have agency over. Not always the feeling.
I felt significant when Moore rushed to me.
I chose to keep manufacturing reasons to rush.
That's the distinction. And it's not a comfortable one.
I read Aviance's social media occasionally — not obsessively, not with longing or bitterness, but in the way of someone monitoring the consequences of their actions.
She is busy. She is building a design practice that from the outside looks healthy and serious.
She is with a man named Jayceon whose Instagram is predominantly woodwork and landscapes and the occasional photo with her, always candid, always — you can tell, just from the images — thoroughly present.
I am glad for her.
I want to be careful about that statement — I don't want it to read as performance, and I am aware that my gladness costs me nothing and does not repay what I was part of. But I can hold both: the accountability and the genuine wish that she's okay.
From everything I can see, she is much better than okay.
I close the app and go back to my work.
That's enough for right now.