Chapter 9 How it starts
I fill the bowl before Ember can scream at me for taking too long. She’s orange in that loud, unapologetic way that feels intentional. Five years together and she still acts like every meal might be her last. I watch her eat, crouched and feral, then collapse onto the couch with my phone.
I don’t tell myself I won’t look him up. That would be a lie. I let the curiosity take over because it already has. I just tap his name in. I’m not sure what I expect to find, maybe nothing, maybe a LinkedIn page with a blurry headshot and vague buzzwords.
This isn’t that.
He works for Knight & Rowe Publishing. One of those polished and powerful houses. The kind of firm that collects awards. Books that end up adapted, dissected, quoted. And there he is, right there on the page....senior editor, literary agent, credited across multiple bestselling titles.
I scroll.
There’s a list of books he’s shepherded from proposal to print. A debut novel that went on to win major awards. A memoir that dominated the charts for months. A literary fiction title praised for its “surgical emotional precision.” I recognize some of them. I’ve taught excerpts. I’ve recommended one to a student who needed proof that language could save you.
I try to map this man to the one who leaned against a hallway wall at my school like he didn’t care about anything at all. It doesn’t fit. Everything written about him is glowing. His dedication. His eye for talent. His ability to spot a story before it knows what it wants to be.
I frown at the screen. Because the man I met felt..... detached. Almost bored. Like passion was a thing he’d misplaced and decided not to go looking for. I set the phone down beside me and stare at the ceiling.
Is it an act?
The way he carries himself like nothing impresses him anymore. I wonder if it’s armor. Or some strange performance.....him pretending he’s unfazed, uninterested, uninvested.... when the evidence says the opposite.
Ember finishes eating and hops up beside me, I absently scratch behind her ears. Then I sigh when I catch the time on my phone. I stand, legs stiff, and head toward the bedroom, then the washroom beyond it. The pill bottles sit there like they’ve been waiting for me. I hate how routine this has become, how my hands already know which caps to twist, how many pills to shake into my palm.
Each pill I put in my mouth feels like a quiet announcement.... you are not okay.
I down one glass of water. Then a second, because the first never feels like enough. When I turn back toward the bedroom, Ember is right there. I lie down, exhale into the pillow, and she hops up immediately, curling on my chest as if she owns the space above my heart. I glance down at her, and she stares back with those knowing eyes.
“Do you think I should text him?” I murmur.
Her tail flicks once.
“Yeah. Bad idea. I know.” I stare at the ceiling. “Terrible idea, actually.”
She doesn’t move. Just keeps looking at me like she’s already read the ending.
“I wouldn’t be texting texting,” I add, defensive. “It’d just be.... insight. About the book. Something he could use for his piece. That’s it. Professional and completely harmless.”
She blinks slowly. Judging me.
“Oh, don’t do that,” I tell her. “You don’t get to judge me. You lick plastic.”
She settles more firmly on my chest, I stare at my phone, screen dark but loud in my mind. That’s all I’ll do, I tell myself. Just that and nothing more.
I don’t have to look up the number. That realization alone makes me hesitate, thumb hovering over the screen. Because memorizing strangers numbers belongs to a version of me that doesn’t exist. But it’s there, perfectly intact in my head, and that should probably alarm me more than it does.
I dial it in anyway.
The text screen opens, empty and expectant, and suddenly I don’t know what to do with it. I stare at the blinking cursor like it’s accusing me of something. And that’s when it hits me, I don’t really text anyone. Ever.
I call my parents every now and then. They’re retired, living quietly in West Virginia, tucked into a town where nothing really happens. Far from everything that feels sharp and loud and unfinished. We talk about weather, about work, and about whether I’m eating enough. That’s the extent of it.
Friends? I don’t have much of a bench there. Not even at work. The other teachers are friendly in a distant, hallway-nod kind of way. No one I’d think to text just because something crossed my mind. I notice these things more now. Little truths surfacing when I’m too tired to shove them back under. I don’t like it.
I push the thought aside and focus on the book. On the reason I’m supposed to be doing this.
I know the book by heart. I could teach it if I wanted to. But what would Michael want to hear about it? What would he find useful and not academically impressive, not something hollow that sounds good in a review, but something real?
Angel Jimenez. That’s where it always comes back to. The hospice volunteer chose six people everyone already knew were going to die. Not might. Not eventually. Soon. And somewhere along the way, she stopped being an observer and became absorbed.
By the time the sixth one died, she was gone too. She lost herself without noticing. Became a prisoner of death, orbiting it so closely she forgot what living felt like. Everything outside of loss dulled. Joy became irrelevant, the future meaningless. She’d been studying to become a nurse once....had plans, direction....but she quit. Slid back into her parents’ laundry business instead, folding strangers’ clothes while her own life stayed untouched.
I rub a hand over my face and exhale. Then I start typing. No hello and no preamble. He'll know it’s me.
“Angel isn’t just grieving them, she’s internalizing their endings. The book never frames it as martyrdom, and that’s what makes it brutal. She doesn’t burn out in some dramatic way. She erodes. Death becomes her language, her environment, her excuse. By the end, she isn’t afraid of dying, she’s afraid of living, because living would require wanting something again.
What struck me most is how quiet the damage is. No single moment breaks her. It’s cumulative, like exposure. The title feels literal....her body becomes made of quiet things: Restraint, absence, deferred dreams. She doesn’t choose numbness, it happens while she’s trying to be good.
The book doesn’t ask whether loving the dying is noble. It asks what happens when you forget to love yourself back into the world....”
I stop typing and stare at the screen. It’s more than I meant to send. More honest, too. But I don’t delete it. I just sit there, my thumb hovering again. Then I hit send.