Violet's POV
I looked back at the list Maddy had handed me. Read through it properly. She was right - these were good. Real companies, real positions, the kind I'd actually want.
Something warm started in my chest.
"I'm applying to all six," I said.
"Right now?"
I was already getting up. "Right now."
Maddy laughed - a real one, the kind that meant we were okay - and stood, moving back toward the kitchen. "Eat first. The rice is still warm."
"After."
"Before, Violet, you need actual food in your body before you do anything that matters…"
"After, Maddy, I need momentum…"
"Before!"
"I'll eat while I apply, that's a compromise, that's me meeting you halfway…"
She appeared in the doorway. Pointed at me. Then at the rice.
I took the rice.
She left me to it, heading downstairs to her own apartment with instructions to text her the moment I heard anything, and I sat at my desk with my laptop, the list, and a fork, and I got to work.
The mysterious WiFi was still connected.
I looked at it for approximately three seconds. Find@me33, sitting there in the corner of my screen like a question I hadn't answered yet.
"Not today," I told it.
And I genuinely meant it. Whatever that was - the number, the password, the masked men, the hotel with no record of me - it could wait in the corner of my life where I was putting all the things I didn't have the bandwidth to examine. I had six companies and warm jollof rice and Maddy had forgiven me and that was enough to work with.
I opened the first application.
It took three hours. Proper, focused, good hours - tailored cover letters, updated portfolio links, the kind of application effort that made you feel like yourself again. By the time I submitted the sixth one I had a small headache and an empty rice container and the satisfaction of someone who had done a thing correctly.
I closed the laptop.
Stretched.
Looked around the apartment.
"Okay," I said quietly to myself. "Okay."
That night I went to bed early and lay there in the dark and made a deliberate, conscious decision not to think about black masks or grey ones or blue ones or the things I may or may not have said. I was moving forward. The applications were out. Maddy had forgiven me. I had eaten an actual meal.
Forward, I thought firmly.
I was asleep before 10B even started up.
Which meant I heard all of it.
Around midnight the bass came through the wall with its usual cheerful nuisance, and sometime after that the other sounds started, and I lay in the dark with my eyes open and listened to my neighbor have a wild fuck session with an unfortunate woman.
I did not knock on the wall. I did not shout.
I just got up, put my earphones in, turned the white noise on, and went back to sleep.
Growth, I thought. That's growth.
By six in the morning I'd given up on sleeping and started cleaning.
Deep heaving cleaning. The kind I'd been putting off for weeks because I'd always been too tired, too busy, too focused on the next work thing to notice that the top of my wardrobe had collected enough dust to qualify as a surface.
I did everything. Floors, windows, the inside of the fridge which I discovered had been hosting a forgotten container of foul and horrible. I reorganized the kitchen cupboards. I vacuumed under the sofa and found three hair ties, a pen I'd been looking for since October, and a receipt from a restaurant I had no memory of visiting.
Sly got repotted into a slightly larger pot because he'd been due for it and he'd earned it.
"You're the most stable relationship in my life," I told him while I packed fresh soil around his base. "I want you to know that."
He said nothing. But he looked healthy, which was something.
By afternoon the apartment smelled like cleaning products and looked like a place a person with their life together might live. I stood in the middle of it and felt something quiet and solid in my chest.
I'd been holding my phone at intervals all day, the way you did when you were waiting for something - picking it up, checking, setting it back down, trying not to attach too much to the checking. The applications had been good. But good applications disappeared into silence all the time. That was the nature of it.
Just check, I told myself, around dinner time. Just look. Whatever it is, it's okay.
I picked up the phone.
Three emails.
I sat down on the sofa, which took a moment because my legs suddenly felt like jelly.
The first three companies - the rejections came in a similar format, polite, generic, the position has been filled, we wish you well. I read them quickly and set them aside. Fine. Fine.
Three left.
I opened the fourth email.
Dear Violet, thank you for your application. We would like to invite you for an interview on Monday…
I made a sound.
Opened the fifth.
…pleased to invite you to interview, Monday at…
I stood up involuntarily.
Sixth.
…Wednesday morning, we look forward to meeting you…
"YES," I said, to the apartment, at full volume, completely without apology.