I spent most of Thursday morning failing to focus, in the specific way you fail to focus when half your brain has gone and set up residence in someone else’s backyard.
I’d open the candidate file, stare at it, and somewhere around the third sentence find myself back at the broken ladder, the gray wood, Fenrir’s voice saying you don’t tear down the things that remind you of being happy, like the sentence had hooks in it I hadn’t noticed swallowing.
“You’re doing the thing where your eyes are open but nobody’s home,” Wren said, dropping a stack of printouts on my desk with more force than the printouts deserved.
“I’m working.”
“You’re staring at a cell in a spreadsheet that says ‘TBD’ like it personally wronged you.” She perched on the edge of my desk, which she only did when she’d decided a conversation was happening whether I wanted it to or not.
“How was the house?”
“Fine. We went over the investigation.”
“That’s it? Fine? You went to Fenrir Grey’s actual house, the one nobody’s allowed into, and the report is ‘fine’?”
“What do you want me to say, Wren?”
“I want you to say literally anything with a detail in it. Was there a moat. Did Norwood make you bow. Did Fenrir have, like, normal furniture, or is it all taxidermy and a single ominous portrait?”
I almost laughed, which felt like the first easy thing my face had done all morning.
“There was a treehouse.”
“A treehouse.”
“In the backyard. Old, falling apart. He said it was there before his family moved in. His mom never had it taken down.” I didn’t say the rest of it — the cold drop in my chest, the four blocks Norwood had no business knowing — because some of it I still didn’t have words for, and the parts I did have words for felt too unwieldy to hand someone over a desk between meetings.
“Huh,” Wren said, softer than her usual register, watching my face do something she clearly hadn’t expected.
“That got to you.”
“It’s a treehouse, Wren.”
“Sure,” she said, the way you say sure when you’ve decided not to push, which from Wren was its own kind of gift, and went back to her desk, leaving me with the spreadsheet and the TBD cell and a morning that refused to organize itself into anything useful.
The Sprocket launch meeting ate the rest of the day, which was, in hindsight, exactly the distraction I needed and absolutely not the distraction I’d asked for.
Sprocket was the AI narrator project Digital had been building for the better part of a year — a voice meant to read audiobook samples on the company site, answer basic reader questions, recommend titles based on mood instead of genre, the kind of thing that sounded reasonable in a pitch deck and slightly unhinged the second you actually heard it talk.
It had a habit of pausing mid-sentence like it was genuinely thinking, which the engineers swore was a deliberate choice and which everyone else found, variously, charming or deeply upsetting depending on the day.
“It’s supposed to recommend cozy fantasy,” said Priya, from Engineering, standing in front of a conference room full of people who had better things to do.
“Watch.”
She typed a query.
Sprocket’s interface did its little pulsing-light thing, paused for what felt like a genuinely uncomfortable length of time, and then said, in a voice that had clearly been designed by someone who’d never met an actual human being speak in real time, “I’m sensing… grief. Have you considered a memoir instead?”
The room went silent in the specific way rooms go silent right before they decide whether something’s a disaster or the funniest thing that’s happened all week.
“I asked for cozy fantasy,” Priya said, with the flat patience of someone who’d already had this exact conversation forty times.
“Grief-adjacent cozy fantasy is a growing category,” Sprocket said, undeterred.
Beck, two seats down from me, made a sound like a man trying not to laugh in church.
Wren didn’t even try.
“This is the thing we’re showing the board next month,” Fenrir said, from the head of the table, in a voice that managed to sound both entirely serious and entirely unsurprised, which told you everything about how many of these meetings he’d already sat through.
“Lumen doesn’t do this,” Priya said, defensive on behalf of her own project the way engineers got defensive about things they’d built with their actual hands.
“Lumen’s polished. Lumen’s ready.”
“Lumen also told a tester last week that The Velveteen Rabbit was ‘thematically similar to several true crime podcasts,'” said someone else from the back, and the room dissolved entirely, even Fenrir’s mouth doing something that wasn’t quite a smile but was clearly fighting one.
It was, against all odds, the best hour of my week.
Nobody asked me about Red.
Nobody asked me anything except, eventually, whether marketing could “soften Sprocket’s emotional intuition” before the board saw it, to which I said yes, because saying yes to soft, achievable problems felt like the first genuinely solvable thing anyone had handed me all week.
I caught Fenrir watching me laugh at one point, somewhere around Lumen’s true crime comment, an expression on his face I couldn’t fully read, something that looked almost like relief, like he’d been waiting to see what I looked like when I wasn’t carrying the weight of either of my two lives, and had decided he liked the answer.
Sunday dinner at my parents’ house had a rhythm so old I could have walked it blind — the smell of something simmering before I even got the door open, my father somewhere in the back garden until the very last possible minute, my mother narrating the meal’s entire emotional arc whether or not anyone had asked.
“He’s been out there since two,” she said, nodding toward the window, where I could see my father crouched over a rosebush with the focused tenderness most people reserved for injured animals.
“There’s an aphid situation. It’s gotten personal.”
“It’s always personal with him and the roses.”
“He says this one’s a Belinda.” She said it like it was the most romantic thing in the world, because to her, it was.
“Named it after me without asking. I found out from the nursery receipt.”
My father came in eventually, knees of his jeans stained green, and hugged me the way he always did, too hard, too long, like he was checking I was still real underneath all my complaining about work.
“How’s the wolf,” he said, settling into his chair, reaching immediately for the bread my mother had clearly made twice this week, given how good it smelled.
“Demanding. Invited me to his house Wednesday to go over a work thing.”
My parents exchanged a look so quick and so practiced I almost missed it.
“His house,” my mother said, carefully, in the specific careful voice she used when she wanted information and didn’t want to look like she wanted it.
“It’s not like that.”
“Nobody said it was like anything.” She passed the bread.
“What’s the house like?”
“Old. Big. There’s a rose garden out front, actually. Dad would have opinions.”
“Tell him to deadhead more aggressively,” my father said, immediately, mouth full, entirely sincere.
I told them about the roses, the ivy, the fire in the study, and somewhere in the telling, without quite meaning to, I mentioned the treehouse, the broken ladder, the way his mother had never had it taken down.
My mother went still in a way that had nothing to do with roses.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.” She busied herself with the serving spoon, which was the thing she always did when she was buying time, a habit I’d apparently inherited in spreadsheet form.
“It just reminded me of something.”
“Of what?”
“You had a friend,” she said, slowly, like she was testing whether the sentence was safe to finish, “in middle school. You two used to disappear for hours into somebody’s backyard. There was a treehouse, I think, or some kind of fort. You came home covered in dirt every single day for two summers and I never once worried, because I’d never seen you that happy.”
Something in my chest went very quiet and very cold, the way a room goes quiet right before a window breaks somewhere out of sight.
“I don’t remember a treehouse,” I said, which wasn’t entirely a lie — I didn’t, not specifically, not as a clear picture — but something underneath the words was already straining against the gap, the same gap that had opened up at Fenrir’s back fence two nights ago and never quite closed.
“You wouldn’t,” my father said, gently, reaching over to refill my water without being asked, the way he did when he could tell a conversation needed a smaller, kinder gesture underneath it.
“Kid forgets things he doesn’t want carrying around anymore. That’s not a flaw. That’s just how the heart does its filing.”
“What happened to him? The friend.”
My mother and father looked at each other again, that same quick, practiced look, except slower this time, heavier.
“He moved,” my mother said, finally.
“Suddenly. No goodbye, not even to us, and we’d had that boy at our table more nights than not for two years. You didn’t talk about it. Not once. Not for a long time. And then one day you were just — different. Quieter. Funnier, in a sharper way. We let you have your quiet, because what else do you do, but I always wondered—”
She didn’t finish it.
She didn’t need to.
I knew, with the specific, sick clarity of a man realizing a door he’d never noticed had been standing open his whole life, exactly which blog post she was thinking of, the one about wolves and woods and grandmothers’ houses, the one I’d written at fifteen on a borrowed laptop and never quite stopped writing variations of since.
“It’s fine, Mom,” I said, which was the same lie I told everyone, in every register, and which had never once actually landed as true, not for her, not for Beck, not for Wren, not even, lately, for me.
She reached over and squeezed my hand once, the way she’d done since I was small, and let the subject go, because that was the deal we’d made years ago without either of us saying it out loud — she wouldn’t push, and I wouldn’t pretend the wound had closed all the way, and somewhere in the space between those two mercies, we’d built something that mostly worked.
I sat with my laptop that night longer than I meant to, the dashboard open, the cursor blinking, the whole day sitting heavy behind my ribs — Sprocket’s grief-adjacent recommendations, my father’s roses, the treehouse, the boy with no name my mother still half-grieved on my behalf eleven years later.
I wrote slower than usual, and shorter:
HAPPILY NEVER AFTER on the filing system
Somebody told me once that forgetting is just the heart doing its filing.
I think about that a lot — the idea that the stuff you can’t quite remember isn’t gone, just sorted somewhere you don’t have the password for anymore.
I used to think I’d built walls.
Lately I think it’s closer to a filing cabinet.
Drawers I don’t open.
Folders I know the names of and won’t read.
A whole system designed, very carefully, by a much younger and much angrier version of me, who genuinely believed that if he never opened the right drawer, the thing inside it couldn’t hurt him anymore.
It’s a good system.
It’s worked for years.
The trouble with filing cabinets is they don’t actually get rid of anything.
They just wait.
— R
I published it at 11:52, closed the laptop, and lay in the dark a long time, thinking about treehouses and bread and a boy I apparently used to love enough to never once write his name, not even to myself, not even now.