Karen moved into her own apartment six weeks after discharge, small but entirely hers, paid for with what was left of the casino money once the medical bills had finally stopped arriving. Watching her carry her own boxes up two flights of stairs — slow, careful, occasionally out of breath, but doing it herself — was one of the better moments of my entire year.
"I can't believe you're crying over a futon," she said, setting down a box labeled KITCHEN in handwriting that hadn't existed two years ago when she'd had nothing left to write.
"I'm not crying," I said, definitely crying.
Law helped too, more than I expected from a man who'd probably never moved his own furniture in his life. He carried boxes, assembled a bookshelf with more patience than I'd ever seen him show anything at the casino, and let Karen boss him around about furniture placement with a good humor that still occasionally caught me off guard.
"You're different around her," I told him later, once Karen had collapsed onto her new couch, exhausted and happy, and we'd stepped out onto the small balcony for air.
"Different how," he asked.
"Softer," I said. "You let her get away with things you'd never let me get away with."
"She's been through enough," he said simply. "I don't see the point in making her earn basic kindness on top of everything else."
I leaned against the railing, watching the city lights instead of him, working up the nerve to say something I'd been turning over for weeks. "I think I'm falling for you," I said finally, the words coming out plainer than I'd planned. "Actually falling. Not contract-falling. Real."
He went quiet for a long moment, long enough that my stomach started sinking before he finally spoke. "I've been falling for you since the night you brought me that beer and apologized for staring," he said. "I just didn't know how to say it without it sounding like manipulation, given how this whole thing started."
"It doesn't sound like manipulation," I said. "It sounds like the first honest thing either of us has said in months."
He crossed the small distance between us and kissed me — slow, careful, like he'd been waiting for permission he hadn't been sure he'd ever get — and for the first time since signing that contract, the whole arrangement stopped feeling like something I was trapped inside and started feeling like something I'd genuinely chosen.
We didn't tell Karen that night. It felt too new, too fragile, too much like something we wanted to hold onto privately for just a little while before letting anyone else touch it.
Looking back, I wonder if that secrecy — innocent as it was, just two people wanting one good thing to themselves before the world got its hands on it — was the first crack that let everything else through. If Karen had known sooner, maybe she'd have had time to adjust to it gradually instead of watching it arrive, fully formed, right as her own feelings had nowhere left to go but inward.
I'll never know for certain. I just know that somewhere in the month that followed, while Law and I were busy falling in love in private, Karen was falling apart in exactly the opposite direction, and neither of us noticed until it was already too late to do anything gentle about it.