Sweet Romance11 min read
The Agreement, the Night, and the Quiet Goodbye
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"I shouldn't have stared at his post," I told myself, clicking the screen closed.
"You typed and left it unread," Cadence said, looking at my phone. "Why are you so dramatic?"
"I was only asking why he didn't bring me any food," I said.
"Because, Jan—" Cadence stopped, shook her head, and smiled the way she always smiled when she wanted to protect me from feeling small. "Because he's Eben Compton."
"Because he is a coward," I muttered.
"He likes Kaori Taylor," Cadence said. "Everyone knows."
"I know," I said.
"I still don't," she said stubbornly.
"Then don't."
We sat on the office roof with cheap tea and cheap cigarettes while the city flushed orange at dusk.
"You could ask him," Cadence suggested.
"Ask him what?" I asked.
"To stop being a coward."
"Ask him to marry me?" I laughed. "No."
Cadence's smile slid. "You look terrible."
"Because I like money and I need it," I said.
"You're honest," she shrugged.
I closed my eyes. "That's the problem."
"January," she said, softer. "Promise me you won't do anything stupid."
"I won't," I said.
My phone vibrated once. A message from Eben Compton: "When you have time, I'll bring you there."
I didn't answer.
*
"You're home late," Eben said when I opened the door to our apartment.
"Your white moon is back," I answered.
"Her name is Kaori," he said.
"Her name is 'white moon' to you," I said, dropping my bag. "I quit."
"Quit what?" he asked, calm. Too calm.
"The arrangement," I said. "This charade."
"We agreed—" he started.
"We agreed on money," I cut in. "We never agreed on forever. I sold part of my pride and you sold part of your courage."
He looked at me like someone watching an experiment fail.
"Don't be dramatic," he said. "Come back and I'll double your pay."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because I care," he said.
"Double money," I said, "isn't the same as double heart."
"You want out, then out." He picked up his suit jacket. "Pay me the penalty for unilateral termination."
"Penalty?" My laugh came out too loud. "What penalty?"
"The agreement says it's valid until I am with Kaori Taylor," he said. "If you break it before, it's three months' pay."
"You wrote that?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. "You signed."
I thought about the summer when we were kids, the sand, the stupid childish promises we never kept.
"Fine," I said. "I'll pay."
"Then come back," he said.
"No," I said.
He swallowed. "Then pay."
"Not just money," I said quietly. "I will leave. But I take the gecko. The one you raised."
"You fed it for four years," he said with something like sorrow.
"I fed it too," I said. "We raised it together."
He laughed once, the sound full of a sudden small human shame. "You always knew how to push."
"I always took what was useful," I admitted.
"Don't be proud about it," he said.
"I'm not proud," I said. "But I'm not going to be your season for comfort while you wait for someone else."
Eben pivoted, walked to the window and stared at the street. "Three times the pay," he said again. "Three months. Or come back."
"Three months' pay," I said. "I'll take it."
I took the money. I packed an old suitcase. I left.
"I didn't cry," I told Cadence later. "Not once."
She looked at me. "Liar."
"Maybe," I said.
*
When Kaori Taylor called, she sounded like a song you remember from childhood.
"Jan!" she said. "Come have dinner. I'm paying."
"No," I replied.
"Why not?" Kaori chirped. "It's my treat."
"Because I moved out."
"Then I'm still coming," she said. "Be ready."
"I am," I lied.
That night, I wore an old dress. She lifted me like I was ten and the world had not yet learned how to be mean.
"To us," Kaori toasted.
"To you," I smiled.
Eben's call came in the middle of the night. "You brought her where?"
"She wanted to eat," I said.
"Don't bring her to places we... never mind." His voice was flat and—wounded.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because," he said. "Just because."
I hung up on him and blacklisted his number. It felt like freedom for five minutes, until the bill for the luxury dinner hit my account and I had to reconcile with reality.
"You're fine," Kaori said, like she believed it.
"I'm not fine," I said, and I meant it.
"Come drink," she said later.
We drank and laughed and pretended like the world could be bent gently to our wishes. We stumbled into a cheap hotel because the city's lights were bright and because she insisted.
"You okay?" Kaori asked when I woke up in the morning with my head pounding.
"Yes," I lied again.
"You're lying."
"Shut up," I said.
She drove me to the office and I told everyone I was 'being supported by a rich friend.'
"She'll make you look good," someone said.
"Good," I said to myself.
*
The workdays stacked up like a pile of unwashed dishes. People talked.
"She's been dumped," Elise Carpenter said in the break room, loud enough.
"What happened?" someone asked.
"They say she was a hired girlfriend," Elise smirked. "Drama."
"That's cruel," another said.
"It's life," Elise shrugged. "You sign your life and someone else pays for the props."
I heard their murmurs. I felt the cold levers of humiliation.
I quit the job the next week.
"You're brave," Cadence said.
"Brave?" I looked at her. "More like practical. I needed the money, so I got the money and left."
"You're breaking your own heart," she said.
"I told myself it's business," I said. "It still hurts."
"Then stop being a martyr," she said. "Be a woman who chooses."
"I did choose," I whispered. "I chose money."
"Then own it."
I did.
*
I moved back to my mother's small apartment. "Don't stay too long," I told Mom, then realized the words were for me.
"You look tired," she said.
"I am," I said.
"You need to rest," she insisted.
"I will."
"Are you still with him?" she asked.
"No," I said.
"Good," she said. "We both knew you don't need a title."
She meant it with the best possible love a mother could give.
"Mom," I said one afternoon. "Will you help me sometimes with the 'things'?"
"Of course," she said. She is steady like that, a harbor. "I'll be here."
"Promise?"
"Yes," she said, and I believed her like the ground believed the sky.
*
I started small jobs again. I slept badly. My hands shook.
"You're not taking care," Cadence scolded. "Stop being a ghost."
"People survive," I said.
"Do you know what you're doing to yourself?" she asked.
"No."
"Then stop."
"It's easier said than done," I said.
"Talk to a doctor," she insisted.
"I won't die," I said dumbly.
She didn't argue anymore. She just hugged me.
*
One afternoon, my legs failed me coming down the stairs. I clutched the railing and felt my whole world wobble like a poorly stacked bookcase. A stranger helped me up, eyes kind, then hurried away.
"Stop," I told myself. "Stop being stubborn."
I went to the hospital.
"You could have told us," my mother said, voice tight. "Why did you hide it?"
"Because I didn't want you to ..." I started and stopped.
"To let you be my daughter," she finished.
"I thought I could manage," I admitted. "I thought I could earn enough."
"You should have told me earlier," she said, softer now.
"I know."
The tests returned slowly, like a verdict.
"Genetic," the neurologist said. "You have a degenerative condition."
"Which one?" I asked, dry.
"Hereditary spinocerebellar ataxia," he said. "It affects balance, coordination, swallowing as it progresses."
I felt the room tilt, then right itself.
"Will I die?" I asked, desperate to tidy the question.
"It's progressive," he said. "We can manage symptoms. There are no cures yet."
"How much?" I whispered. "How much will this cost?"
He hesitated. "High."
"Then that's why," I said. "I see."
I left with papers I could not understand and an account balance that made my breath stop.
*
"Why didn't you tell me?" Eben said when he found out.
"Tell you what?" I asked.
"About the diagnosis," he said.
"Because that would have opened a box you weren't prepared to carry," I answered.
He looked at me like an accused man. "You could have asked for help."
"I did," I said. "With you."
He was silent.
"I wanted to protect you from the ugliness," I said. "From knowing that I was bargained for."
"You didn't have to be," he murmured.
"I signed the papers," I said. "I took the money. I promised myself I'd be practical."
"I'll help," he said.
"No," I said. "You can't buy time."
He blinked. "I can try."
"You can't." I said it with finality I didn't quite feel.
He left.
*
The days became a list of small humiliations. Stairs. Dishes shattering. Glasses slipping from my fingers.
"Eben," I said one night, voice raw. "Do you remember the beach?"
"Yes," he replied. "Do you?"
"Yes," I said. "You walked fifty steps and I walked forty-nine."
He didn't answer.
"Why didn't we take the last step?" I asked.
"Because maybe one of us had to protect the other," he said.
"From what?"
"From pain," he said. "From losing."
We were both quiet a long time.
"Do you ever think—" he started.
"Don't," I said.
"Promise?" he asked.
"No promises," I said.
"Why?"
"Because I learned contracts," I said. "They can be read two ways."
Eben laughed, a small sound like a cork popping. "You always were practical."
"Yes," I said. "I always was."
*
The pain got worse. I dropped plates. I fell. I stopped pretending to be strong.
"Go to the doctor," Cadence insisted.
"I did," I said.
"Then fight," she said.
"I can't fight forever," I said. "The cost is too much."
"Liberty and life," she said. "You are not a bank account."
"Maybe to me I am," I whispered.
She hugged me like she wanted to keep me in a bubble.
"I won't let you go," she said.
"I will not be loved for pity," I said.
"Who said anything about pity?" she responded.
"Everyone," I said.
*
I walked to the cemetery one summer afternoon. My hands found the bottle in my bag as if they'd been waiting for instruction. The sun was inattentive. My feet made slow prints in the grass.
"Mom," I said, and I felt ridiculous to address the empty.
I downed pills like I was finishing a workday. They scratched my throat. I choked and coughed and the world narrowed to breath and then breath again. I sat, dizzy, waiting for everything to go quiet.
It did not.
My phone vibrated. Eben.
"Where are you?" he texted.
"In the cemetery," I typed. I pressed send. Then I closed my eyes.
I slept in a way I had not in years. It was quiet and not painful.
When the ambulance came, it was Cadence who had called it. She had found my bag in the park and the note.
"Why did you do it?" she demanded, when I woke.
"Because I thought it would be easier for everyone," I said.
"That's a coward's answer," she said.
"You're being cruel," I said weakly.
"Maybe," she said. "But I am trying to be honest."
I didn't argue.
*
The funeral was a small storm of bodies and eulogies. People wore the dresses you buy when life becomes serious. Some cried, some posted photos, some filled their pockets with details to gossip.
At the front of the church stood Elise Carpenter, the one who had called me a hired girlfriend and had mixed words into people's mouths like poison.
"She left a note," Elise said before anyone could stop her. "It said—"
"That's enough," someone said.
"No," Elise continued. "She said she didn't want to be a burden."
The room inhaled her words and exhaled shame.
Eben stood like a soldier in a borrowed suit. He had on a pair of small bear cufflinks—simple, strange, childish in a way that made them painful. He had worn them to our college party once, and then disappeared them into a drawer. Now he wore them again like a relic.
He descended from the place where he had later been asked to sit.
He faced the small crowd of faces that had almost no courage of their own.
"She wasn't a tool," he said.
"What?" someone muttered.
"She wasn't a performance," Eben said, voice even and cold. "You who whispered and posted—listen."
Elise stiffened.
"You spread rumors," he said. "You used her life as truth in a game."
Elise's mouth opened. "I—"
"You said she was a hired girlfriend," Eben said. "You said she was living off others. You laughed about her like she was content to be someone else's prop."
"It was truth," Elise snapped.
"Truth?" Eben repeated. "You mistook money for meaning." He walked down the aisle toward her. "You think it's the same thing?"
"Stop—" Elise tried to interrupt.
"Do you understand what it took for her to sign that agreement?" Eben asked. He didn't wait for an answer. "Do you know why she left? Because she was afraid the disease would make her a burden. Do you know how she chose to spend the money she earned? Saving it for a life of her mother so that she would not worry."
A murmur rippled the room.
"You had the chance to help," Eben continued. "You chose to condemn."
I felt him stop in front of Elise. She had vanished one step shy of bravado. Her face paled like paper.
"Do you remember," Eben asked, "when you said that a 'hired girlfriend' could be a joke?"
"I—" Elise stammered.
"My professor used to say: 'Words are the smallest form of action.' You chose a small cruelty and made it huge."
People shifted. The air tasted like pennies.
"You know what she did?" Eben asked the nearest cluster. "She loved fiercely. She carried on even when the floor betrayed her. She worked through shame. She paid for her mistakes with dignity. And when the cost was too high, she tried to leave quietly so her mother would not suffer."
A woman sobbed. Someone else angrily stepped closer to Elise.
Eben stretched his fingers and took her phone—he took it like a judge takes a key piece of evidence—and switched it on, scrolling through messages with clinical efficiency. He revealed a thread of Elise's gossip, the messages where she had forwarded rumors, the jokes, the memes.
"This," he said, handing the phone to the funeral director, "is the small cruelty. This is the thing that corrodes souls."
Elise's face crumpled from confusion to anger to denial.
"I didn't—" she began.
"You did," Eben said. "You used her for spectacle."
"Stop it," she tried; her voice became smaller.
Eben spoke loud enough for everyone to hear. "You do not get to be cruel and then be comfortable. This is not justice. But this is consequence." He turned to the families present. "If you laugh at someone's downfall, understand that your laughter moves like a blade."
He walked away. Someone in the pews started to clap, then someone else joined; it became a small, furious sound. A man I didn't know, once amused by gossip, stepped forward and told Elise to apologize. She stuttered, and then, with the humiliating intonation of someone who had been caught thin-handed, she did it.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry, January." The apology was small and brittle. It bounced off the wooden pews and landed with little weight.
"I can't forgive you for everything," Cadence's voice rang from the side, "but I can ask you to try to be better."
People took photos. Someone filmed the moment. Others whispered. Elise's knees gave way and she sat, hugging herself as if to stop the shaking.
That was the punishment: public exposure, the stripping of masks, the silence that follows a mirror being smashed. It wasn't prison. It wasn't legal. It was raw and immediate and communal. It exposed the cruelty and asked for repair.
Eben's voice was quiet then. He came to sit in the front row, one hand flat on my coffin as if anchoring a boat. "She was kinder than a lot of you," he said into the hush. "She was braver than she had to be."
The room dissolved into a different kind of sorrow——one that held shame and compassion at the same time. People left with their cheeks wet and their steps slower. Elise walked out like someone who had been given a second chance but didn't feel worthy of it yet. The humiliation had worked a small revolution in her stare.
Somewhere in the small chaos, Cadence leaned over me and whispered, "You always did more than you owed."
"Yes," I thought, even as my breathing thinned. "Yes."
*
The days after the funeral were quieter. Eben organized things like a man who had made peace with not understanding everything. He wore the bear cufflinks again, small monuments to the tender foolishness of loving someone who had not asked to be loved on his terms.
"You look awful," Mom said, clutching my hand.
"Don't sound like Eben," I joked.
"Who else could have done this?" she asked, genuine.
"He did what he could," I said. "He loved me in his own way."
"That is enough," she said.
Enough was not the same as complete.
But I learned something in the aftermath. I learned that people could be cruel and then, when held to a mirror, sometimes gather the courage to fix themselves. I learned that Eben had loved me. I learned that I had loved him back, in ways that were messy and wrong and beautiful.
The gecko lives with my mother. Mom calls him "Bean." She sends me photos sometimes, and I like to think he remembers my small hand.
"I did what I thought would give you peace," I told myself once, somewhere between the hospital bed and the white funeral flowers.
"Did it?"
"Yes," I said.
"Then rest," Cadence said. "You're tired."
"I am."
We sat in quiet that smelled of rain.
"Promise me one thing," Cadence said after a long time.
"What?"
"Don't make them forget you for the wrong reasons."
"I won't," I whispered.
"You will be remembered for who you were," she said.
"Who was I?"
"You were January Finch," she said simply. "You were practical. You were stubborn. You were fiercely kind."
"That will do," I said.
"I'm tired," I told the world. "I'm sorry."
"You're not alone," Cadence said.
I heard footsteps. One step. Two. Eben's hand closed mine, finally, and this time it wasn't a deal. It was a clumsy, brave thing.
"Rest," he said, and I let myself.
The End
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