Wrong Invitation For My Mr Right

The bills are the first thing I see when I open the door.

They're arranged on the kitchen table the way I left them this morning.fanned out in a precise row, as if organization might make the numbers inside them less real. The electric bill. The credit card minimum. The two past-due notices from a collections agency I've been avoiding calling back. And at the far right of the row, the one I always put last because saving it for last is its own kind of ritual: the envelope from Mercy General's billing department, the paper inside it bearing a figure so large it stopped feeling like money and started feeling like geography. A distance. An impossible distance between where I am and where my brother needs me to be.

I set my bag down on the floor and don't hang it up. I'm too tired to hang it up.

The apartment is exactly three hundred and forty square feet.I know this because the lease says so, and because I've measured it in the particular way you measure spaces you live in when they feel too small: counting steps across the kitchen (four), from the window to the door (six), from the bathroom to the bed (two). It's clean. I'm fanatical about clean, because clean is one of the few things I can control. But clean doesn't make the walls less close together.

I work as a junior assistant at Sterling Group. I have worked there for fourteen months. I make enough to cover the rent on this apartment, the electric bill, the credit card minimum, and approximately nothing else, and I have been making enough to cover exactly those things and nothing else since before my brother's diagnosis. Since before the world reorganized itself around the word relapse.

I change out of my heels into the single pair of flat shoes that have survived three years of regular use. I make tea. I stand at the kitchen counter and drink it standing up, looking at the bills.

'One thing at a time,' I tell myself. It's the only advice that has ever worked and it has stopped working.

My phone rings at seven-forty-two.

I know from the ringtone that it's my mother before I pick up, which means I also know, before I pick up, what kind of call this is going to be. There is a category of call that my mother and I have been having for the past eighteen months.the calls where she is trying not to cry and then cries, and I am trying to be steady and then the steadiness costs everything I have.and the sound of her ringtone has started to produce a specific physical response in me, a tightening through the sternum like a fist closing.

I pick up.

"Chloe." Her voice is already thin at the edges. "Dr. Yuen called this afternoon."

"I know," I say, which is a lie, but the right kind of lie. "Tell me what he said."

She tells me. The trial he'd been optimistic about hasn't produced the results they'd hoped for. There's another option.a newer treatment, still in the experimental phase, but showing real promise in the European data. The hospital that runs it is in Geneva. The cost, for the full course, is eighty-seven thousand dollars.

She says the number very quietly, as though saying it quietly makes it smaller.

"Chloe." Her voice breaks on my name.

"Mom."

"He's only twenty-three."

"I know."

"I can't."

"Mom." I press my back against the kitchen counter. The tile is cold through my shirt. "I'm going to figure it out. That's what I'm going to do."

"I don't know how you."

"One thing at a time," I say. "I'll call you tomorrow. Okay? Don't cry. I'll call you tomorrow."

After I hang up, I stay with my back against the counter for a long time. The kitchen is very quiet. The bills are still arranged on the table in their row, and the one from Mercy General is still at the far right, and the number inside it.thirty-four thousand in existing debt.has just been joined by a new, larger number that I have nowhere to put.

Eighty-seven thousand dollars.

My brother is twenty-three years old and he likes terrible action films and is learning to play guitar badly and sends me voice memos of himself playing it at one in the morning and expects me to be impressed.

I sink onto the sofa.

I don't know what I'm doing when I open the text thread.

Jade and I have known each other since the second week of college when she borrowed my notes and returned them annotated with suggestions and we've been friends ever since. She's the person I text when things are bad because she always knows what to say and sometimes what to say is nothing and she knows that too.

I start typing. It comes out not as what I mean to say.I don't know what I mean to say.but as the kind of dark joke that you make when the alternative is not making any joke at all.

bad day I type. thinking of reaching out to our esteemed ice-cold CEO for some cinematic recommendations. apparently a rich person's hobby. might help me forget i have a life

It's the kind of joke that's only funny to someone who knows how unfunny it is.knows that Alexander Sterling is the specific variety of unreachable, untouchable authority figure that junior assistants don't make eye contact with in the elevator, let alone contact directly. Knows that the idea of me asking him anything is absurd.

I add: pretty sure he only watches documentaries about people less inferior than himself

I type another line: or maybe war films. something to strategize to

I feel slightly better and slightly worse. I press send.

Then I look at the screen.

The name at the top of the conversation is not Jade's.

It takes my brain approximately two full seconds to process what my eyes are reading, because what my eyes are reading cannot be what my eyes are reading.

Alexander Sterling.

Under his name: the three messages I just sent. The timestamp. And beneath each one, a small gray icon I know intimately from months of using this messaging app.

Delivered.

The phone slips from my hand.

It hits the sofa cushion and slides to the floor, and I watch it go without moving, without catching it, because my hands have stopped working. All of me has stopped working. The room is perfectly silent except for the refrigerator's hum and the distant sound of traffic six floors below, and somewhere in this silent room I am sitting very still while the world does something that cannot be undone.

My CEO has three text messages from me making jokes about him.

The blood leaves my face from top to bottom, like a tide going out.