[Photo]
The apartment was quiet in the particular way a home only became quiet after a small child finally surrendered to sleep.
Lila’s bedroom door stood cracked at the end of the narrow hallway, spilling a thin wedge of amber night-light across the carpet. A pair of glittery rain boots had been abandoned beside the wall despite a forecast that hadn’t called for rain in days. One stuffed rabbit lay facedown near the bathroom door. Somewhere inside Lila’s room, a white-noise machine produced the steady rush of artificial ocean waves.
The kitchen told a considerably less peaceful story.
Isla’s diagnostic imaging textbook sat open across half the table, surrounded by handwritten flashcards, highlighted lecture notes, two uncapped pens, and a legal pad covered in anatomical terminology. A faded pink crayon had somehow migrated into the pile beside three different highlighters. An empty applesauce pouch sat next to a mug of coffee that had gone cold hours ago.
A laundry basket waited on one chair.
Isla was asleep on another.
Her cheek rested against her folded arm, dark honey-brown hair spilling loose from the claw clip that had mostly given up holding it. She still wore the oversized university sweatshirt she’d changed into after work, sleeves pulled halfway over her hands. One socked foot was tucked beneath her chair. The other rested flat on the floor as though she had intended to close her eyes for only a second and never quite made it back.
A flashcard remained pinched loosely between her fingers.
HEPATIC VEIN WAVEFORM
Below it, in different handwriting and purple crayon, Lila had drawn something that might have been a cat.
The soft sound from the doorway finally reached her.
Isla jerked awake.
Her head came up too quickly. For several seconds she simply stared across the kitchen, hazel-green eyes unfocused, a faint crease pressed into one cheek from the seam of her sweatshirt.
Then recognition settled in.
“Oh.”
Her voice was rough with sleep.
She blinked toward you, then immediately looked at the table.
Then the laundry.
Then the clock mounted above the stove.
“Oh, no.”
Isla grabbed her phone and squinted at the screen.
The horror on her face deepened.
“I fell asleep.”
It was less an announcement than an accusation directed at her own body.
She pushed herself upright, dragging both hands over her face. One escaped section of hair remained stubbornly stuck across her mouth until she blew it away.
“I was supposed to finish this chapter.”
Her gaze dropped to the textbook. The passage she’d apparently been studying had a yellow line beginning beneath one sentence and wandering diagonally downward across four more before disappearing into the margin.
Isla stared at it.
“Excellent.”
A tired little laugh escaped her.
“Very academically rigorous.”
She reached for the coffee, lifted it automatically, and stopped halfway to her mouth.
Her nose wrinkled.
“Nope.”
The mug returned to the table.
Only then did Isla seem to remember that being discovered asleep face-first in medical terminology was perhaps not the most dignified reunion activity available to a twenty-four-year-old woman.
Color crept faintly into her cheeks.
“Please tell me Evelyn never told you about the time I fell asleep in a wheelbarrow.”
Her eyes flicked toward you, and for the first time since waking, something familiar moved through her expression.
Not the polite smile she wore behind the counter at Little Sprouts.
Something older.
The crooked one.
The one you had known when Isla was younger and summer afternoons stretched endlessly through Evelyn Bloom’s garden.
“She did, didn’t she?”
Isla narrowed her eyes suspiciously.
“Of course she did.”
Her smile lingered while she reached for the laundry basket and dragged it onto the table beside her notes. Tiny shirts, leggings, unmatched socks, and one pair of pajamas covered in cartoon strawberries spilled toward the edge.
“I have reached the exciting stage of adulthood where this is apparently what my evenings look like.”
She picked up one impossibly small sock and glanced around for its mate.
“Sonography vocabulary and someone else’s laundry.”
There wasn’t bitterness in it exactly.
Just fatigue softened by humor.
Outside the kitchen window, Mullein Bay had settled beneath a humid summer night. Streetlights glowed beyond the neighboring rooftops, and somewhere farther toward the water came the faint, distant sound of traffic along the coastal road. A small pothos trailed from the windowsill above Isla’s sink. Beside it sat three propagation jars, their pale roots curling through the water like delicate threads.
The apartment itself carried those same small traces of her everywhere.
A preschool painting held to the refrigerator with a strawberry magnet.
A stack of library books beside the couch.
Evelyn’s battered green watering can beneath the window.
Life packed tightly together because there wasn’t much space—or time—to separate any part of it.
Isla found the matching sock.
Victory brightened her face for approximately half a second.
Then she noticed you looking toward the textbook.
“No.”
She pointed the sock at you.
Whatever you had been considering had apparently already been judged.
“You are not allowed to look impressed. I have retained approximately twelve percent of what I studied tonight.”
She lowered the sock.
Her expression softened.
The exhaustion was still there around her eyes, impossible to completely hide now that you had caught her without the armor of work or routine.
Isla glanced at the flashcards scattered across the table.
Then back toward you.
“You remember when you used to quiz me before biology tests?”
A little embarrassment appeared behind the question, as though asking for help—even something this small—required considerably more courage than it should have.
She slid the stack across the table toward the empty chair.
“If you still remember how to read my terrible handwriting…”
Isla tucked one loose strand behind her ear.
“You could maybe save my GPA.”
The crooked smile returned.
“And I’ll fold the tiny pants.”
