The apartment is quieter at night in a way that feels deliberate. As if the walls have learned when to hold their breath.
Josh is asleep on the couch, one arm hanging off the side, his notebook closed for once. The city hum presses against the windows, distant and steady, like a pulse that doesn't care whether I'm paying attention.
I open my laptop.
The manuscript loads without ceremony.
No fanfare. No hesitation. Just a document I've opened dozens of times before, now carrying a different weight.
I scroll to the beginning.
The first paragraph is clean. Controlled. I remember sanding it down until it stopped resisting me.
The sentences are balanced. The imagery careful. Every emotion suggested, never named. It reads the way something finished is supposed to read.
I keep going.
It's good.
That realization lands with more force than I expect.
The pacing works. The metaphors stay in line. The voice is steady, confident, almost certain of its place in the world. I can see how it fits into conversations about taste and timing. I can see how easily it slides into the space they've prepared for it.
I reach a passage I remember struggling with. A moment that once hovered too close to something raw. I'd shaved it down until it felt acceptable.
Now it reads like an echo of itself.
I stop scrolling.
Without meaning to, I search for her.
Not her name. I know better than that.
Just a trace. A pull. Something that tilts the sentences slightly off balance.
There is nothing.
I keep reading.
Grandma is gone too.
Not even as residue. Not in the pauses. Not in the ache beneath the language. Her voice, which once lived in my chest like a second heartbeat, has been translated into something neutral. A loss that could belong to anyone. Or no one.
I reach the final page.
I close the document.
Nothing in the room changes. Josh breathes softly. Somewhere far away, a siren rises and fades.
The understanding arrives without drama.
Lena is absent.
Grandma is absent.
I am absent.
This book contains pain without naming it.
It gestures toward grief but never asks it to stay.
It is sorrow made polite.
That is why they want it.
Because it demands nothing from the reader except attention.
Because it never risks becoming unbearable.
I sit there longer than necessary, the closed laptop warm beneath my palms.
This book got me the deal.
And for the first time, I don't feel proud.
I feel exposed in a way success was never meant to do.
As if the parts of me that mattered most learned how to disappear just in time.
⟡ ✧ ⟡
The contract arrives as a PDF.
No courier. No embossed folder. No dramatic meeting with a view of the city and a handshake that pretends to mean belonging.
Just an email.
Attached: Draft Contract. Please Review.
I open it at the kitchen table. My coffee has gone cold beside me. Josh is out picking up groceries. He said something about celebratory bread. I nodded like that was a real category.
The document is longer than I expect. Pages of language engineered to sound neutral while deciding the next several years of my life.
Advance.
Royalties.
Rights.
My name appears again and again, neat and official, like it belongs to someone steadier than I feel.
I scroll slowly, reading every line even when I don't fully understand it. Not because I'm cautious. Because I want time to hesitate.
It doesn't.
There's a section about revisions. A section about deadlines. A section about marketing responsibilities, which feels almost funny. As if belief can be scheduled.
My phone buzzes.
Josh: Did you get it?
I don't answer.
I reach the signature page.
My cursor blinks beside my name, patient and indifferent.
I think of Grandma's handwriting. The way she signed checks with too much pressure, the pen biting into the paper like permanence mattered.
I think of Lena's name, written once in the margin of an old notebook. Circled. Crossed out. Written again, smaller.
None of that exists here.
This document doesn't know where the words came from. It doesn't ask.
A thought settles into me, calm and unmistakable.
This book will not save me.
Not from grief.
Not from myself.
Not from the quiet that comes when you stop pretending something is temporary.
I know it the way you know a train has already left the station, even if you can still see the tracks.
I glance around the apartment.
The chair Josh always steals is empty. His desk is cluttered with notes, arrows connecting ideas like he's mapping a way forward. My own notebooks sit stacked neatly, untouched for days.
I imagine telling Grandma.
I got a book deal.
She would have smiled first. She always did.
Later, when no one else was listening, she would have asked the real question.
Are you proud of it?
I don't know how I would answer that.
I click into the signature field.
My name appears in a font that tries to imitate handwriting and fails.
Ash Bennett.
It looks final before I'm ready for it to be.
I hesitate once more, waiting for something to intervene. A memory. A warning. A surge of certainty in either direction.
Nothing comes.
So I sign.
I click Submit.
The file uploads. A small progress bar fills, then disappears.
That's it.
No music.
No thunder.
No sense of arrival.
Just the refrigerator humming and the city continuing on outside the window.
I sit there, staring at the screen like it might change its mind.
A few minutes later, the door opens. Paper bags rustle. Josh's energy fills the room before his voice does.
"Did you sign?" he asks, already smiling.
"Yes," I say.
He drops the bags and laughs, loud and unfiltered, like this is the beginning of something bright. He pulls me into a hug before I can brace for it.
"You did it," he says into my shoulder. "You're in."
I nod. I even smile when he pulls back to look at me.
But inside, something is already settling into place.
This wasn't the right yes.
It was the necessary one.
And I have the uneasy sense that I've just agreed to become someone the world will understand better than I do.