"Why are you still here every night?"
He looked confused.
"Work."
"Whose?"
"The team's."
"That's not what I asked."
He gave me a defensive smile.
"I'm trying to show initiative."
I leaned back.
"Do you think being useful means no one can get rid of you?"
His face changed. There it was. I saw seventeen-year-old me at the kitchen table. I saw thirty-five-year-old me paying for a Range Rover. I saw the moment Sarah called me a checkbook and how much the word hurt because some part of me had built my identity around being the best checkbook available.
"Go home," I told Kevin.
"I'm not done."
"Then finish tomorrow."
"But-"
"Your job is to do good work, not make the company emotionally dependent on your exhaustion."
He stared at me.
"That's oddly specific."
"Experience."
I sent him home. Then I left too. By fall, Elena and I had been together nearly seven months. I had not proposed. I had not secretly visited jewelers.
That was progress. We talked instead. About marriage. About money. About children.
About careers. About whether she wanted to keep renting her apartment if we became more serious. Every conversation that would once have made me want a spreadsheet, I forced myself to begin with questions. What do you want? What are you afraid of?
What would feel fair? Only then came numbers. Elena, for her part, did not romanticize financial chaos. She had worked too many hospital shifts with families bankrupted by emergencies to think money was beneath discussion. One evening she looked through the budget I had built for a hypothetical future household.
"You made three scenarios."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"One if we both work full time, one if either person reduces hours for children, one if we stay child-free and travel more."
She looked at me.
"This is the least sexy thing anyone has ever done for me."
"Thank you."