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I'll make sure I'm on shift.

My phone is on the counter. The scheduling app opens. Tomorrow night's overnight is covered by Anders, who doesn't like overnights, because he has a kid with an ear infection. He has said three times in the break room that the shift is a problem.

Hey, I prefer the late shift if you want to trade. Standing offer whenever you need it.

Send.

The phone goes on the charger beside my bed, alarm set for two p.m. My eyes shut but my brain keeps going.

Only minutes away, a man is editing a manuscript about a vineyard in Tuscany. Sitting at whatever surface he works at, in whatever room feels safest, back to whatever window shows the most October. The last voice he heard before he fell asleep this morning was mine.

He'll call again. When he does, the headset will be on. The notebook will be open. The entry will keep growing.

This cracked-open apologizing man with his dog and his bathroom floor and his hands that shake. This one will stay.

Anders texts back. Dude yes. Thank you. Take any of them you want.

Tomorrow night, the phone will ring. His breathing will come through first. Then his voice, thin and stripped and apologetic. Then the forty minutes or the hour or however long it takes for the laugh to surface, the real one, the one from the bottom of his chest.

Three years of voices that came and went.

This one is mine.

Chapter Three: Milo

Four chapters of the Tuscan vineyard novel before noon. The protagonist discovers the vineyard's previous owner was her estranged grandmother, a revelation telegraphed on page three that the prose is working overtime to sell as a surprise. Foreshadowing flags go in the margins. Pacing notes on the second act. A two-page sunset description that uses golden eleven times gets a comment bubble: Pick one. Kill the other ten.

Other people's words. Other people's problems. The vineyard isn't mine. The grandmother isn't mine. The protagonist's emotional crisis lives inside a document that closes with a click.

The kitchen table faces a wall. The desk that came with the apartment was under the bedroom window and the first morning at it, Ellis's yard was right there, and all those lives going past, and the visibility turned the apartment into a fishbowl. The desk went to the living room. Then the corner. Then out. The kitchen table against the wall, back to everything. White wall. Light from behind. Manuscript in front.

Bean is asleep on the couch with her chin hanging off the edge. Her morning walk was a quick one, before the neighborhood filled up. The route has to change every few days because new decorations keep appearing. The house on the corner has foam headstones now. Two doors down, a twelve-foot inflatable ghost sways on a porch.

Why is everyone so fucking obsessed with Halloween anyway?

Ellis's skeleton is the constant. There's no route from my front door to anywhere that doesn't pass it. Morning and night, the sensor catches us, the laugh plays. My hands go tight on the leash. My pace goes fast. Bean gets dragged past whatever she was sniffing. The whole thing is over in seconds. The seconds cost more than they should.

Noon. The manuscript. Too many adjectives. Can't focus. My brain keeps skipping back to last night. Not the panic or the skeleton or the floor. Past all of that, straight to the call.

His voice.

No face attached to it. No age, no body. Just the crisis center and the overnight shift and how the silence held after the greeting. However many seconds of dead air.

Just waiting.

Therapists ask what you're feeling. Friends ask what happened. Noor asks if I'm eating. He asked what I was hearing. The question went sideways past everything and hit me where it needed to.

Noor texts at noon. Care package ETA tomorrow. You better open the door for the delivery guy.

I open the door for delivery guys.

You open the door for Bean's vet and the Thai delivery guy and me. That's the list. I added Amazon to the list. You're welcome.

She's not wrong. The list is short and she knows exactly how short it is because she's been on it since college and she pays attention to who else makes the cut. She also knows I won't open the door on a bad day, so the delivery guy is her workaround. Last year's candle is still on my nightstand. Burned down to a nub. Kept the nub because it smells like clean sheets, which is the closest thing to Noor being in the room when she's three time zones away.

The vineyard novel sits open on the laptop. Cursor blinking in a comment bubble. Pick one. Kill the other ten. Good advice for the author. Good advice for the brain that keeps circling the same conversation from last night instead of doing its damn job.

Bean lifts her head off the couch, ears forward, then drops it again. She does this every time a car door shuts outside, the vigilance of a small dog in a building with thin walls. She was a rescue from the county shelter, six months old, found under a porch two streets over. The vet said she'd been on her own for weeks. She came home with me and hid under the bed for three days, then climbed up on the fourth night and pressed her spine against my legs and that was it, that was the decision, hers and mine, and the decision hasn't changed in two years.