Before that Thursday, I would have defended Minerva to anyone. I met her at a friend's game night two years earlier, when she took over a conversation about terrible first dates and made a dozen strangers laugh so hard the host came in from the kitchen to see what was happening. She had a way of making you feel chosen in a crowded room. She remembered small preferences, invented affectionate nicknames, and could turn a trip to the grocery store into a story worth retelling. When she wanted to be generous, she was genuinely generous with attention, and attention can feel an awful lot like love.
I was the quiet one. I worked in network systems for a regional insurance company, the sort of job that required planning for things nobody noticed until they stopped working. I paid my bills on schedule, changed the oil in my car, and kept a notebook of repairs I wanted to make to the house. My father used to say that I approached life like I was responsible for making sure the ceiling stayed up. Minerva said it was adorable when we first started dating. By the end, she called it boring.
She moved in after leaving a marketing coordinator job she described as toxic. I believed her when she said her manager had been impossible. She had told me stories about late-night messages, impossible deadlines, and coworkers who took credit for her work, and I knew workplaces could be awful. I told her she could stay while she found something better. I didn't ask her to sign a lease or contribute to the mortgage, because we were a couple and I thought the arrangement would be temporary.
Temporary quietly turned into six months. There were interviews that fell through, supervisors who apparently didn't understand her talent, and positions she rejected because the compensation was insulting. When I asked whether she wanted me to review her resume, she said I was making her feel like a child. When I asked whether we could set a budget for groceries, she said she had thought we were partners rather than roommates. Each conversation ended with me apologizing for the way I'd asked rather than with a plan for what would change.
I didn't immediately see the pattern. I saw someone I loved struggling, and I had enough money to help. My mortgage was manageable, I had an emergency fund, and my employer had recently given me a modest raise. I told myself that supporting a partner through an uncertain period was exactly what commitment looked like. I also told myself, increasingly often, that the irritation in my chest was just fatigue.