Chapter 25 Emergency

Chapter 25 Emergency
POV: Lila Monroe

Eli's voice was careful in the way it got when he was trying to manage how something landed, which he had learned from watching me do it and which I recognised now in real time the way you recognised something you had taught someone without meaning to.
He had been at the clinic that afternoon for a follow-up scan. Routine, he said, something they ran every few months as a matter of course. The scan had flagged something, not serious, the doctor had been very clear about that, nothing acute, nothing requiring any immediate intervention. But they wanted to run additional tests. A specific panel that required a referral and a specialist and two different labs.
"Okay," I said.
"I am fine," he said. "Really. It is administrative, not medical. They are just being thorough."
"Okay," I said again.
"Li."
"I heard you," I said. "I know you are fine. I know it is administrative. I am listening."
He told me the rest of it carefully. The timeline, which was three weeks. The specialist his doctor wanted to refer him to, who was good, apparently, which Eli said in the specific tone he used when he had already researched the person and verified it independently, because Eli, at sixteen, researched his own specialists.
I stayed on the phone for another ten minutes after the information was all done, talking about nothing in particular, the documentary series, the book club nurses, a strong opinion he had about a film he had watched that afternoon. I laughed at the right places. I asked the right questions.
When I hung up I was standing in the stairwell of my building with the door to my floor propped open, which meant I had been pacing without deciding to pace.
I went back to my room.
I did not sit down. I stood at my desk and opened the bank app on my phone and looked at the emergency fund, which I had built over two years with the same methodical patience I applied to everything, small transfers when the arrangements paid, nothing spent on anything that was not necessary.
The number was there. I had looked at it recently enough to have it memorised.
I looked up the estimated cost of the specialist referral and the lab panels that Eli had named. Three different searches, three different number ranges. I averaged them and added the co-pays and the transport costs and the two weeks of adjusted care schedule that Eli's mother, meaning my mother, was going to need to navigate alone.
The math took about two minutes with the numbers I already had memorised.
The emergency fund covered sixty percent of it.
I sat down on the edge of my bed.
This was the part where I was supposed to plan through it. This was where the system activated, identify the gap, identify available resources, close the gap. I had done it before. I could do it again.
Available resources: the arrangement, which was paid monthly and the next payment was in eleven days. I could not accelerate it and asking to would change the terms in a direction I was not willing to go. My two regular clients, one still travelling and one still silent. Three other contacts in the forum directory that I had not used in months, two of whom I was not sure were still active.
The timeline was three weeks. The payment in eleven days covered a third of the remaining gap. The second payment, due at the end of the following month, would cover more. But the specialist needed a deposit to book the appointment, and the deposit was due in eight days, and the deposit alone was an amount that I did not have in any account that I could access quickly.
I transferred everything in the emergency fund to my main account. Then I stared at the number.
It was not enough for the deposit.
I put my phone down on the bed.
I had a plan for situations where the math did not work. It involved the forum directory and three phone calls and approximately forty-eight hours of waiting and it was a plan I had used once before, in my second month at Westfield, and it had worked and I had managed and I had not thought about it for a year and a half because I had managed.
I picked up my phone to make the first call.
A message appeared on the screen.
Ryder. Two words: "You went quiet. Talk to me."
I stared at the message.
He had been paying attention to my silence, which was not the same as surveillance and not the same as the way Marcus had watched me, it was different in a way I did not have the right words for, and the difference mattered and I was aware of it and I did not know what to do with it right now.
I had never asked anyone for help. Not once. That was not an exaggeration or a point of pride, it was a simple and accurate description of how I had operated for as long as I could remember, in every situation.
Not because I was too proud to ask, or because I did not trust people, or any of the tidy psychological explanations that would have made it a manageable fact about myself. Just because asking meant exposing the gap to someone who might use the gap, and the gap was the one thing I could not afford to have used against me.
But Ryder already knew about the gap. He had known since the coffee shop where I called him, since the signed list of terms, since the night I said Eli's name before I had decided to say it. He knew more about the gap than anyone else in my life except Eli himself.
I looked at the three contacts in the forum directory on my other screen.
I looked at the message on my phone.
The forum contacts were an option I had used before and could use again and which required nothing from me except the performance of availability, which I was very good at, and which would not change anything except the number in my account and the deposit in eight days.
I put my thumb on the screen.
Not over the message thread. Over the forum app icon.
Then I moved it deliberately.
And the gap between where my thumb had been and where it now rested was the longest distance I had crossed in two years.