I closed the laptop with two fingers and left the cameras staring into their own glass. The ring lights hummed once, thin as a mosquito, then settled into quiet. I felt the ghost-click of phantom notifications skim my palms even with everything powered down, like my skin hadn’t caught the memo.
“Office,” I said, and I guided Lyla behind the set, past the honeycomb shelves and the neon script that had looked so sure of itself an hour ago. Fog pressed its cheek to the warehouse windows and smeared the murals outside into soft geometry—QR codes dissolving into watercolor.
The office was small and unremarkable: beige acoustic tiles, a scuffed desk, a secondhand fridge with a magnet shaped like a gull. I loved it immediately because it didn’t know our names. The air tasted like old coffee and paper dust, and somewhere a condenser kicked a slow heartbeat into the vents.
I set the bakery bag on the desk. Steam didn’t rise this late; the buns were cool, the glaze stickier than sweet. I pulled out a napkin and, on instinct older than any platform, drew a quick honeycomb at the corner—six-sided cells, a net tidy enough to hold. The ink bled slightly on the cheap paper. I didn’t mind. I needed something handmade to trust.
Lyla sat without asking where, knees together, ankles touching like she was saving space even in private. Her hands didn’t know what to do. She rubbed one thumb over the other, gaze on the jar pattern I’d doodled, not on me. Her perfume had faded to vanilla and a tired citrus; ring-light ozone still clung to our clothes. I cracked the first bun and handed her half. The custard tugged like soft glue. We ate with the sound of the harbor in the pipes—wind, metal, a seagull’s bark that made us blink.
“Water?” I asked.
“Please,” she said, voice too even.
I poured from a dented pitcher into two mismatched mugs. The water was lukewarm and perfect. I waited for her to choose where to put her crumbs. She tucked them into the bag like evidence in a chain she could control.
“No cameras?” she said.
“None,” I said. “No mics. No captions. Just us and the taste of sugar we didn’t sell.”
She looked at the napkin. “You always draw that.”
“It keeps my hands where I can see them,” I said. “It reminds me that a hive can be haven or trap.”
She nodded, and her mouth trembled, not outward, but inward, a tremor that was more air than movement. She pressed her fingers to the napkin’s edge and aligned it with the desk like she could square the night by squaring paper.
“I—” She exhaled, and the word was a pilot light catching. “I’m sorry.”
I let the apology float a second without netting it. “For what?” I asked, not because I didn’t know but because cataloging is how I keep knives from turning on us.
“For charging love to the card,” she said, eyes still on the doodle. “For telling people to pay to prove they cared. For letting him make me a cliff everyone had to rescue.”
I broke my bun again and felt sugar lace my fingers. “He trained you to think care is a subscription.”
“I trained me,” she said, and the honesty was a small muscle flexing. “He just monetized it.”
I watched her shoulders, not her face. Her shoulders had always told me the truth. Tonight they sagged like wet canvas finally set down.
“I kept waiting for a bell,” she said. “Something in me that would ring when I’d done enough to be safe. I thought the bell was fame. Then I thought the bell was devotion. Then I thought the bell was ‘rescue.’” She swallowed, throat working once. “The bell was just me, alone, shaking.”
I slid the napkin between us so its honeycomb sat like a small, ordinary altar. “We can build a bell that isn’t for sale,” I said. “A stupid one that goes ding because you’re hungry or tired.”
She laughed in a dry, papery way that made me want to feed her soup. “Stupid sounds so good.”
Micro-hook:
The vent’s heartbeat slowed, and the neon outside softened from lickable candy to gentle bruise. My phone, buried in my pocket, vibrated twice—phantoms or real messages, I didn’t check. I wanted to know what my pulse sounded like without notifications dubbing it.
“I thought I had to be unmissable,” she whispered.
The sentence slotted into place like it had been waiting all year for an exit. She didn’t lift her eyes when she said it; she placed it on the napkin like a sticky spoon. The office’s cheap bulb hummed. Somewhere in the building’s ribs, the bay exhaled and took our weight.
“I know,” I said. “I taught you to run toward the center seam of a room and fill it, even when you didn’t want to. I taught you that the middle is power.”
“You taught me craft,” she said, quick, protective even now. “You taught me clean edits and clean lists and how to make a kitchen a stage. I turned that into—” She rubbed her hands together and made a face at the sugar thread gluing her fingertips. “—a hunger I couldn’t feed.”
I reached into the bag and found another napkin, blank. I placed it over the doodle like a gentle lid, then peeled it back again. “Let’s make a smaller stage,” I said. “A stage that fits in this room and uses our inside voices.”
“Inside voices,” she repeated, like we were kids again and Mom was asleep between pre-dawn steamers and lunch rush. “I loved the quiet between the prep and the door opening. Do you remember?”
“I remember the salted caramel steam from the pier sneaking in the back, and you stealing the first bun and burning your tongue every time,” I said. “I remember you swearing you could taste the ocean if you ate slow.”
“I could,” she said, and she smiled for real, corners only, as if testing the hinges. “Tonight I tasted metal. Cameras make everything taste like metal.”
“Turn your head,” I said. “Face the boring wall.” She did. “What do you hear?”
She closed her eyes. “The vent,” she said. “You breathing through your nose because you’re trying to look calm. The bay pretending to be a truck in the pipes. My heart.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s the flavor we keep.”
She breathed deeper, then said, “I was lonely, even when the chat was loud. The algorithm wanted me to confess to it. I did. It loved me in public and left me in drafts.”
“I wanted to pull you off stage a hundred times,” I said, “and I waited because I thought agency meant letting you stay until you wanted to go.”
“Agency is a door,” she said, almost to herself. “Not a cage with better lighting.”
Micro-hook:
The office door snicked when the building settled, and we both flinched in the way of animals who have learned to brace for a surprise soundtrack. I hated that this was in our bodies now. I wanted new muscle memories: doors that meant guests, not audiences; knocks that meant soup, not subpoenas.
“What happens next?” she asked.
I rolled the pen between my fingers and drew another hex, smaller, attaching to the first, then another, until a little hive grew in the napkin’s corner. “Tomorrow I write a statement,” I said. “Short, clean, no gore, no blame theater. Resources up top. Boundaries that don’t apologize.”
“And me?”
“You get to be ordinary and alive,” I said. I tasted the words before I offered them and decided they were right. “If you want to speak later, we do it in rooms like this, not under ring lights. If you want to be quiet—”
“I do,” she said quickly, then softer, “for now.”
“Then we build your quiet like a schedule,” I said. “We decline interviews without outrage. We make the algorithm think you’re on a long walk by the water with your phone in a drawer.”
She laughed again, less papery. “The cliff-backed harbor funnels fog into downtown,” she recited from a tourism blurb she once mocked on a reel, and in the office it sounded like a prayer for morning. “Maybe the fog can funnel me into ordinary.”
“Morning is gauzy,” I said, “and evenings are neon. We pick gauzy for a while. We let neon belong to people selling sneakers.”
“You’re mixing soup and sneakers in one metaphor,” she said, and something about her teasing unknotted my shoulders. “I like you better off-script.”
“Me too,” I said, and meant it in a way I don’t say out loud often. I don’t do vows; I do lists. But I held the sentence in both hands and didn’t drop it.
She touched her sticky fingers to the napkin and lifted them slowly, watching the little threads connect and break. “I kept thinking care was the same as consumption,” she said. “They trained me to think a hug was the size of a cart. I was so lonely, Mar.”
I didn’t reach across some cinematic distance and hug her because I didn’t need a camera to certify tenderness. I shifted my chair six inches closer so our knees bracketed the napkin’s edge.
“We make loneliness ordinary too,” I said. “Ordinary, not something to monetize. Tea. Walks. Ten minutes in the bakery before dawn with no talking. A book with the phone in the freezer.”
“Phone in the freezer,” she said. “I remember you doing that during finals.”
“It worked. It will work again,” I said. “We’ll tell the city we’re not making a scene, profitable or otherwise.”
“Can we still care about people who cared about me?” she asked, chewing the corner of the bun she’d been ignoring.
“Yes,” I said. “But the care can look like slow mode and resource links, not late-night confessions. Nessa’s good at boundaries. We’ll be boring until boring heals.”
We sat with that. The fridge clicked off and gave the room a soft sigh. The window carried a smear of neon from the murals outside, a gentle pulse that, with the blinds half-closed, felt like a sea creature sleeping. In the distance, the market’s power washed the alley with a low hum. No cheers. No raids. No countdown.
“Do you think Cass will turn himself into a story from jail?” she asked.
“He’ll try,” I said, “but he loses fabric when we stop stitching for him.”
“I was good at making thread,” she said.
“Make bread,” I said. “Make nothing some days. Make space.”
Micro-hook:
The honeycomb doodle had grown almost without me noticing. The cells touched in clusters, some full, some empty. I tapped one with my pen. “This one is for sleep,” I said. “This one is for therapy. This one is for Mom, and no cameras in the bakery for six months.”
“Six months,” she repeated, measuring the number like a hem. “I can do that.”
“We’ll want to backslide,” I said. “We’ll want the quick dopamine of being right online. We’ll recognize the itch and let it pass. We’ll go smell broth.”
“You always bring it back to soup,” she said, but she nodded. “I’ll need you to catch me when I reach for the live button.”
“I’ll be obnoxious,” I said. “I’ll take your phone the way I took your car keys when you wanted to drive after that flu.”
“You mean when I said I felt fine and then fell asleep on the stairs,” she said.
“Yes. We didn’t monetize that either,” I said.
We laughed, that quiet kind that repairs little tears. I remembered carrying her to the couch and tucking her in with a blanket that smelled like garlic and detergent and thinking that care shouldn’t need a comment section.
“I wanted to be unmissable because I thought if they missed me, I would vanish,” she said. “But I vanished anyway inside it.”
“You’re here,” I said, and her eyes filled without spilling.
“I am,” she said.
We ate the last sticky bites, drank the last lukewarm water, and sat long enough for our bodies to believe the quiet. The fog outside thickened into a white sheet along the window’s edge, as if the harbor had pinned privacy to the city for a change. I could smell salt even here, cut with dust and the faint lemon from a cleaning wipe Sloane’s team had used earlier. The honey on my fingers dried to a tack; I didn’t lick it off. I let sweetness be inconvenient.
“We’ll go home,” I said. “No Uber selfies. No updates. Just text Mom that we’re safe.”
“She’ll make congee,” Lyla said, and the certainty in her voice steadied the room. “She’ll pretend she wasn’t awake refreshing.”
“We’ll let her pretend,” I said. “We get to be ordinary and alive.”
“Ordinary and alive,” she echoed. “I want that more than unmissable.”
We stood. The chairs made small honest noises on the linoleum. I folded the napkin along the honeycomb lines and slipped it into my pocket. The paper left a damp circle where the ink hadn’t fully set; it felt like a seal pressed with a thumb.
At the door, Lyla paused. “What if silence feels like erasure?” she asked, and the question was not an excuse; it was a thing with weight and corners.
I opened the door a crack. The hallway smelled like cardboard and the ocean. “Then we’ll write a new way to be seen,” I said, “that doesn’t cost us skin. We’ll do it small. We’ll do it in rooms like this.”
She nodded. We stepped into the hall, and the quiet followed us like a loyal, awkward animal. I didn’t look back at the dead monitors. I didn’t need to. The timer could calcify at 00:12:07 forever for all I cared; my clock was her breath matching mine.
We moved toward the bay door where the neon gave way to fog. The city’s social compact—don’t make a scene unless it’s profitable—drifted off our clothes like a smell we’d finally washed out. I put my sticky hand on the push bar and left a small honeyed print there, nothing to trend, nothing to sell.
“Tomorrow,” I said, “we choose gauzy.”
“And soup,” she said.
“And soup,” I said.
We walked into a night that did not ask to be entertained, and the lingering question met us at the curb like a friend we weren’t sure about yet: when we speak next, can we keep the words from turning into content?