The rain had been steady for an hour. I'd been watching the same droplet track down the café window for an embarrassingly long time. It moved with that stop-start hesitancy catching on invisible imperfections in the glass, pooling in small trembling beads, reconsidering, and then, when the weight became too much to argue with any longer, simply surrendering. Merging into another droplet, then another, swelling heavier and faster until the only logical thing left to do was fall.
This is how it is. This is how I end up.
I pressed my fingertip to the cold glass at the edge of the trail it left behind and held it there.
"Cal."
I didn't turn.
"Callie, I can see you not listening. It's very visible."
I turned.
Across the small table, Petra had her arms crossed and her wet hair shoved over one shoulder — a gesture that managed to simultaneously communicate impatience, the fact that she had walked through actual rain to be here, and the implication that I owed her, at minimum, eye contact.
"I'm listening," I said.
"Then what did I just say?"
I thought for a second. "Something about cliffs."
"That was three minutes ago. Before the cliff."
"The suitcases?"
"The vibes, Cal." She uncrossed her arms to point at me, which was always a sign she was reaching the part of her argument she considered irrefutable. "You do not pack up your entire life into two suitcases and move to a place where you know virtually no one and call that a plan. That is not a plan."
"To be fair, I know you."
"I live forty minutes away on a good day."
"Still counts."
"It doesn't count." She sat back. "A breakdown disguised as independence, Cal. That's what I said. Write it down."
I didn't write it down. I picked up my hot chocolate and took a sip that confirmed what I'd suspected for the last twenty minutes: it was completely cold. I drank it anyway because I'd paid four euros for it and I had rent due next week and four euros was four euros.
The café was the kind of place that had opinions about itself. Mismatched vintage chairs, a chalkboard menu with the specials written in three colors, a shelf of paperbacks behind the counter that no one had touched in years. It smelled like burnt espresso and sugar syrup and, underneath it, something warmer and older, like wood that had absorbed decades of other people's conversations.
It was the sort of place Petra and I used to come to when we were studying for exams and pretending we were the kind of people who studied in cafés. We weren't. We mostly talked for three hours and then panicked about the exam separately.
I stirred the cold chocolate anyway, watching the foam dissolve into nothing.
How was I supposed to explain it?
I'd been trying to find the words for weeks — the right arrangement of sentences that would make someone who hadn't been inside my life understand why I'd left. And every time I reached for them they came out wrong. Too dramatic or not dramatic enough. Too self-pitying. Too vague.
The honest version was hard to say out loud because the honest version didn't have a villain. But there were incidents, explosions and moments where everything finally broke and the leaving was obviously justified. You almost don't notice the damage until one morning you wake up and do a quiet calculation and realize: there is approximately this much room left, and it is not enough.
The walls of that house had been inching closer for years. Not the literal walls. The house itself was fine, ordinary, sufficiently large. But the life inside it. The shape of the days. The particular density of a family that loved each other in all the ways that didn't require anyone to say anything real.
Dinner was a performance. That was the truest thing I could have told Petra. Every night, the four of us around a table, saying the words that filled the air without disturbing anything beneath it. My mother passing food to my father without quite looking at him. My father saying nothing to the table. My sister and I making eye contact across the plates — her small nod, my small nod — the silent sibling language of: yes, I see it too, no, we're not going to talk about it.
We had been running that routine so long we no longer needed to rehearse it.
And I knew — I had known for a long time, in the honest ugly part of myself — that if I stayed, I would slowly become the kind of person who was very good at performing a life. Very good at the words that filled the air. Very practiced at the face that said everything is fine in such convincing detail that eventually even I would believe it, and then one day I would be sitting at my own table passing food to someone without looking at them and I would not even remember how it started.
Leaving wasn't bravery. I wasn't brave. I was just scared of a different thing. Scared of the slow disappearing more than I was scared of the jump.
But try explaining that to Petra, who had a five-year plan and, I was fairly certain, a backup five-year plan in case the first one encountered setbacks.
"I just needed it," I said. Quiet. Barely a defense.
Petra stopped her next sentence before it started. "Needed what?"
Air, I almost said.
Instead I lifted one shoulder and let it fall.
She leaned forward and grabbed my wrist. The way she's always done since we were sixteen, when she decided that my tendency to float away from difficult conversations mid-sentence was a problem she was personally going to solve. "Okay. What are you actually thinking about right now?"
I looked at her properly.
The thing about Petra is that she loves loudly, in the register other people use for arguments. When she's scared for someone, it comes out as impatience. When she's worried, it sharpens into criticism. She's been doing this since we were kids and I've never once doubted that underneath every sharp edge is exactly the opposite of sharpness.
"I'm tired," I said. And then, because she was still looking at me with that expression that said I have time, I'm not going anywhere, try again — I kept going. "I'm genuinely, properly tired. Like, bone-tired. I didn't sleep well last night because the heater kept making this sound like a dying animal and I was too cold to turn it off and too anxious to sleep through it, so I just lay there doing math in my head about how much money I have and how much I need and how long the gap between those two numbers stays this size before something breaks."
Petra's arms uncrossed. A small surrender.
"The apartment is—" I paused, trying to find the word that wasn't catastrophic. "Small. It's very small. I can stand in the center of it and touch the kitchen counter with my left hand and the wardrobe with my right. I measured. Six full steps from the front door to the window. The shower doesn't so much spray water as it sort of suggests water. And there's mold in the corner of the bathroom ceiling that I've been staring at every morning trying to decide if it's getting bigger or if I'm just getting more paranoid."
"Callie—"
"I talk to the heater," I said. "Not like — I'm not having conversations with it. Just sometimes when it makes a particularly alarming sound I say okay, okay, I hear you like it's a person. Which I think means I've been alone in that apartment too much. Or possibly not enough, I can't decide which."
Something shifted on Petra's face that she was trying not to show me. She covered it quickly. "Have you eaten today?"
The question landed at a specific angle.
"I had toast," I said.
"Callie—"
"And half a banana. I wasn't hungry."
She closed her eyes briefly. "You're always hungry. You're one of those people who's hungry every two hours, it's actually impressive."
"Well." I looked at the table. "Things have been a little different lately."
A silence settled between us. Outside, a bus barreled through a deep puddle and sent a wave of water arcing across the pavement. A man in a beige coat jumped back a half-second too late, looked down at his shoes, looked up at the sky with an expression of philosophical resignation. Through the café window I watched him shake one foot, then the other, then carry on.
Right, his walk said. This is just how it is now.
"I've applied everywhere," I said, looking back at Petra. "And I mean everywhere. Cafés — the irony of that, applying to cafés while sitting in one, I'm aware. Bookstores, three of them. The grocery store on the corner. The pharmacy. The wellness studio, which I'm pretty sure doesn't actually sell anything, I think people just go there to be near the smell." I paused. "I applied at the pet grooming place. You know the one — on Folton Street, smells like wet socks from the outside—"
"I know the one."
"They didn't even email back. Not a no. Just absolute silence. As if my application went into the ocean and the ocean didn't find it interesting enough to reject."
"How many places total?"
I did a quick count in my head. "Nineteen, I think. Maybe twenty. There was one I applied to twice by accident because I forgot I'd already done it. Which is possibly a bad sign about my state of mind."
Petra absorbed this. "And you've heard back from—"
"Two. Both rejections. One of them was a form email they'd clearly sent to about a thousand people that started Dear Applicant and ended with we wish you well in your future endeavors which is corporate for please stop existing in our inbox."
"That's rough."
"It is rough. It's genuinely rough, Pet, and I'm saying that as someone who left home specifically because she didn't want to be the kind of person who complained about things being rough, so the fact that I'm sitting here telling you it's rough means it has crossed a certain threshold of roughness that I can no longer—" I stopped. Exhaled. "Sorry. I'm rambling."
"You're allowed to ramble."
"I'm not usually a rambler."
"No," she agreed. "You're usually a stuffer. You stuff things down and then you get very quiet and then two months later you move cities." She tilted her head slightly. "So frankly, the rambling is an improvement."
I laughed despite myself. Just a small one, surprised out of me. "That's a terrible thing to say."
"It's true though."
"It's true," I admitted.
The café had gotten a little louder around us while we'd been talking — a new table of people near the window, someone's phone playing music briefly before they shut it off, the grinding hiss of the espresso machine behind the counter. The barista, who couldn't have been more than nineteen and had the look of someone who had already decided today was a lot, moved back and forth performing the minimum number of movements required by their employment contract.
I would have that job, I thought. I would do that job so well. Just let me make coffee for people, I know how to make coffee, I took a whole course—
"You should've thought more carefully," Petra said, gentler now. "That's all I'm saying. Not that you shouldn't have left. Just — you went from zero to a hundred with nothing in between. No savings cushion, no job lined up, no—"
"I know."
"You don't jump off a cliff and expect to build wings on the way down."
"I know that too."
"And yet here you are."
"Here I am." I gave her a small, tired smile. "Falling. Wingless."
She sighed. One of her full-body sighs, theatrical and long-suffering in the specific way that meant she was about to do something kind and wanted credit for the inconvenience of it. "Okay," she said. "Okay. Fine. If you're determined to be reckless, we are at minimum going to make you reckless and solvent. Come here." She dragged her chair closer to my side of the table, orienting herself next to me rather than opposite, the way we used to sit when we were doing homework. "Let's think about this properly."
I turned to face her. "You have an idea."
"I have a very good idea."
"Why do I feel like I'm not going to like it."
"You're going to love it, you just won't know that yet." She tapped the table with one finger. "You love kids."
I blinked. "That's your opening?"
"Answer the question."
"It wasn't a question."
"Callie."
"Yes," I said. "I like children. They're — yes. I like them."
"You're not just okay with them. You're actually good with them. There's a difference." She pointed at me again — her evidentiary gesture. "Do you remember my cousin Dani's birthday party? The one two years ago, with the bouncy castle that deflated in twelve minutes because Dani's dad had a second glass of prosecco and sat on it—"
I started laughing properly. "The prosecco castle."
"The prosecco castle. There were nine children, ages four to eight, in various stages of meltdown. Three of them were crying. One of them had eaten something purple that nobody could identify. The adults were completely useless — we were all just kind of standing there looking at each other like witnesses at a crime scene. And you—" she pointed at me— "you sat down on the floor in your nice jeans and got every single one of those children sitting in a circle within ten minutes."
"I bribed them," I said. "I had stickers in my bag."
"You had stickers in your bag. Why did you have stickers in your bag?"
"I always have stickers. They're useful."
"For what, exactly, in your adult life?"
I shrugged. "Children. Apparently."
"Exactly. That's a skill, Callie. Having stickers and knowing when to use them is genuinely a skill. And then you—" she gestured in a circle— "you got them making paper boats out of napkins, and you convinced them they were going to have races in the bathroom sink, and they were thrilled. Genuinely. I watched a seven-year-old forget he'd been crying because he was so focused on the aerodynamics of his boat."
"He had good instincts. He folded the crease differently to the others."
Petra stared at me. "You remember the individual folding technique of a seven-year-old you met once, two years ago."
"It was a good fold."
"My point," she said slowly, "is that you have something. With kids. You have a patience and an attentiveness that most adults forget they're supposed to have, and kids can feel it, and they respond to it." She sat back. "So. Babysitting."
The word landed plainly between us.
"Babysitting," I repeated.
"Yes."
"Pet."
"Cal."
"I'm twenty-two."
"Babysitters can be twenty-two. There's no law."
"It's not—" I paused. I wasn't sure what my objection was, exactly. It wasn't pride — I had given up on a certain kind of pride the moment I chose the apartment with the dying heater. It wasn't that I thought it was beneath me. It was more that babysitting felt like something that happened to other people. People who were organized. People who had references and DBS checks and tote bags with their name embroidered on them.
"Walk me through the logic," I said.
Petra spread her hands on the table like a businesswoman presenting quarterly figures. "Parents in this city — working parents especially — are desperate for reliable childcare. Not agency childcare, which is expensive and impersonal. Actual human childcare. Someone they can call, someone their kid knows, someone who shows up on time and doesn't spend the evening on their phone while the child eats dry cereal and watches whatever comes up next on YouTube." She raised her eyebrows. "You would not do those things."
"Obviously I wouldn't—"
"No phone-scrolling, no dry cereal. You'd make the paper boats. You'd remember the individual folding technique. You'd have stickers." She counted these off on her fingers. "You are genuinely, actually good at this, which is rarer than you'd think. You put up a listing — community boards, one of those neighborhood apps — you write it like a human being instead of a cover letter, you mention that you're good with kids and you have experience and you're patient and you're available evenings and weekends. Someone will hire you within a week."
"You really think it's that simple?"
"I think it's simpler than what you've been doing, which is mass-applying to places that want someone with three years' retail experience for a minimum wage position and then being surprised when they don't get back to you."
That hit more accurately than I wanted to acknowledge. "Okay."
"And the money is better than you'd expect. Parents who are desperate pay well. Not tech-salary well, but better than minimum wage, often cash in hand, no tax forms, just—" she mimed handing over money— "direct transaction."
I was quiet for a moment. I let myself actually imagine it.
A different apartment building, the way they look in the evening with the lights on inside, warm and ordinary. A hallway with a small pair of shoes by the door. A kitchen with drawings stuck to the fridge. A child somewhere between three and eight, looking up at me with the particular directness that children have, the complete absence of social editing.
So you're the new person.
I suppose I am.
Bedtime. Reading something with enough pictures that we could both lose ourselves in it. The specific quiet of a child falling asleep — the way their breathing changes, slows, deepens, and suddenly they're somewhere else entirely and you're just the person sitting next to them in the dark, watching it happen.
It didn't sound awful.
It sounded, actually, like something I might be able to do on three hours' sleep and an empty stomach and still do well.
"What if they don't like me?" I asked. "The kid, I mean."
Petra's expression said this is not a serious concern.
"Kids always like you," she said. "You have a face."
"Everyone has a face, Pet."
"You have a specific face. You have the face of someone who returns extra change and has genuinely never cheated on a board game." She studied me. "You know what you look like? You look like the type of person who would go back into the rain to return someone's umbrella. That's the face you have. Parents see that face and they hand you their children."
I looked at her. "That might be the strangest compliment anyone has ever given me."
"It's not a compliment, it's a tactical assessment." She pointed at me one final time. "Post the listing tonight. Don't overthink the wording. Just be yourself in text form, which — despite everything — is a perfectly good thing to be."
Outside, the rain had begun to thin. Not stopping, exactly, but loosening — softening from steady to occasional, from gray curtain to something more like gauze. The street outside was dark and wet and reflective, headlights smearing long orange trails across the puddles. The man in the beige coat had gone.
I looked at my reflection in the glass again. Still unfamiliar. But maybe just slightly less so. Or maybe I was getting used to it. The face that returned extra change and walked back through rain for umbrellas. The face that had stickers in her bag.
"I just don't want to fail," I said quietly. Not looking at her when I said it — looking at my reflection, or through it, at the rain. "I mean — I know I'm going to fail at things. Obviously. I'm not — I know that. I just—" I paused. "I left. I actually did the thing I was always too scared to do, I actually packed the bags and got on the bus and found an apartment and signed the lease and I was so sure, Petra. I was so sure that once I did all that, the rest of it would start making sense. Like the leaving was the hard part and everything after would just — open up. And instead I'm sitting here with cold hot chocolate and a mold problem and a heater I've named—"
"You named the heater."
"I named the heater Jojo. He makes more sense to me if I think of him as a person." I finally turned to look at her. "I just don't want all of that to have been for nothing."
Petra reached across the table. Properly this time — not to shake me, not to grab my wrist, just to cover my hand with hers.
"You're going to fail at some things," she said, and the plainness of it was, paradoxically, the most comforting version of that sentence I had ever heard. No softening. No but. No I'm sure it'll all work out. Just: you will, and that's the actual deal, and I'm telling you because I respect you enough not to lie about it. "That's not a prediction, it's just how it works. You'll fail at some things and you'll figure out others and somewhere in the middle of all that the rest of it will start to make more sense. But—" she squeezed my hand— "you left. You actually left. And before you say that's not enough, I want you to think about how many people never do."
My throat tightened.
"You know how many people stay in the thing that's slowly killing them," she said quietly, "because the leaving seems impossible? Because the leaving requires too many steps, too much uncertainty, too much faith in a version of yourself that doesn't exist yet?" She paused. "You're here. You're already in the part most people don't get to. That counts."
I pressed my lips together. Nodded, because speaking felt inadvisable.
"You're not a burden," she added. "Not to your parents, even though they're being— well. They're being your parents. And not to me. You're just—" she searched for the word— "early. You're early in the part where it hasn't organized itself yet."
I cleared my throat. "That's still not comforting."
"I know. I'm better at true than comforting."
"You could be both."
"One skill at a time." She let go of my hand and wrapped both of hers around her own cup. "Also — condition, not suggestion — you do not spiral alone in that apartment. If the walls start closing in, if the silence gets the wrong texture, if it's two in the morning and you're doing the calculations—"
"I don't do the calculations."
She just looked at me.
"—I sometimes do the calculations," I admitted.
"If you're doing the calculations," she said firmly, "you call me. I don't care what time. I sleep with my phone on, you know that. I will answer. And we can do the calculations together, which is at least slightly less awful."
"Okay," I said. "I'll call."
"Promise."
"Pet—"
"Promise, Callie."
"I promise," I said.
I meant it. I also knew myself well enough to know I'd probably wait longer than I should on at least three separate occasions before actually picking up the phone. That I would convince myself at 2 a.m. that whatever I was feeling wasn't serious enough to justify the call, or that Petra was asleep, or that I should be able to handle this myself because I chose this. Because the leaving was my decision and the consequences are mine too, and needing help with them feels like retroactively admitting the whole thing was a mistake.
I knew that pattern. I had been running it for years.
But I'd made a promise. And promises to Petra were not the kind that quietly expired.
The café had grown quieter around us — the rush of whatever constituted the afternoon having passed, only a few tables left occupied, the barista doing something meditative with a cloth and the counter. The music had changed to something slow and acoustic that made the whole place feel like a scene from something.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
"Always."
"Do you think I made the right call?"
She was quiet for a moment. Longer than she usually let silences go.
"I think," she said carefully, "that I'm not able to know that yet. I don't think you can know it yet either. Those are the kind of decisions that only make sense from far enough away." She looked at me steadily. "What I can tell you is that you're not the same person you were a year ago. And a year ago, that person needed something to change." She tilted her head slightly. "Was this the right something? Maybe. Maybe it's a step toward the right something. Maybe the right something is still ahead, and this is just the part you have to go through to get there."
"That's very philosophical."
"The actual answer is often philosophical."
I looked at the window. The rain was barely there now — just a feeling of damp in the air, the memory of it more than the thing itself. The street was beginning to dry at the edges, the pavement returning from dark to its ordinary gray, unevenly, in patches.
"I'm going to post the listing tonight," I said.
"Good."
We sat there a little longer than we needed to. Neither of us in a hurry to be back out in the damp air and the ordinary demands of our individual lives.
What I didn't tell her — couldn't tell her, not because I was hiding it but because I didn't yet have the language for it — was that sometimes, in the new apartment, the silence had the exact same texture as the silence in my parents' house. The same quality of too much unsaid pressed into too small a space. I had assumed, somewhere between packing those suitcases and signing the lease on a place I could cross in six steps, that distance would mean difference. That breathing different air would teach me to breathe differently.
Some mornings it did.
Other mornings I lay in the gray early light and felt the walls doing the thing they'd always done, and understood, with the particular clarity that 6 a.m. delivers whether you want it or not, that the walls had never been the walls. The walls were something I'd brought in myself, packed carefully between the two suitcases, installed without noticing. Which meant they were going to have to be taken down differently — slowly, from the inside, probably with help, and definitely without any clean moment where I could point to it and say: there. That's when it was fixed.
The rain had stopped.
I hadn't noticed the moment it did.
"Come on," Petra said, standing, reaching for her jacket. "I'll walk you to the Tube. And I'm buying you something to eat first. Don't argue, I can see your blood sugar from here."
"You can't see blood sugar."
"I can see you. Same thing." She held out her hand. "Up."
I stood. I wrapped both hands around my cold empty cup for a moment, just for the shape of it, and then set it down.
We went out into the after-rain air, cool and sharp and smelling of wet stone and possibility which might just be the smell of a city after it's been cleaned, but which I chose, walking next to my oldest friend in the quiet of a Tuesday evening, to interpret more generously than that.