I asked Erica if she would prefer to speak outside. She nodded, and we walked past the front windows toward a quieter stretch of the dock. The breeze carried the smell of salt and motor oil, and somewhere behind us Ray was explaining a safety knot in a voice loud enough to be heard three docks away. Erica looked at the new office sign, the painted railings, and the boats lined up in storage. I could see her mentally comparing this place with the version she had decided was not refined enough to be part of her future.
"You look good," she said. I thought about the early mornings, the swims, the quieter evenings, and the fact that I had started eating breakfast again. "I'm sleeping," I told her. It was the most accurate answer I had. She looked down at the boards beneath our feet and said she was glad, though the way she spoke suggested the answer had hurt more than she expected.
"Damon and I are done," she said. I told her I had heard. She explained that he had moved on quickly and that their relationship had been less solid than either of them wanted to admit. He had spoken easily about freedom and living at a higher level, but the everyday business of sharing expenses had revealed limits to his generosity. She stopped, embarrassed, and said she supposed I had already guessed that part.
I did not correct her or remind her of the message I had seen on her phone. I had spent months trying to prove to myself that Damon was not better than I was, and now I discovered I did not care. Whatever had happened between them was theirs to reckon with, and I was no longer interested in using his failure as proof of my worth. I asked whether she had somewhere safe to stay. She said she had been staying with a friend and looking for an apartment she could afford on her own.
"Monique stopped answering my calls," she added. "She said my energy was too heavy." I looked at Erica for a moment, remembering all the things Monique had said in our kitchen with a glass of sparkling water in her hand. I could have made a joke. Instead I said, "That must have been a lonely feeling." Erica gave a small, surprised nod, and for a moment the conversation sounded like one we might have had years earlier, before everything became a test of who was winning.
She looked toward the boats. "I thought leaving you would make me feel free," she said. "I imagined I was walking toward this better version of myself, and for a while I kept telling people that was what was happening." Her voice shook slightly. "Then I started paying bills without knowing how much was coming in next month, and I realized how many things I had stopped noticing because they were always taken care of. I don't think I understood what that did to us."
I was quiet for a long moment. There were things I wanted to say about all the times I had tried to discuss our budget, about the contempt she had shown for work she once respected, and about the way she had used my willingness to help as an argument