Emily sat still and looked at the folder and then at the credit card. The card was face-up on the table between them, and she could see her own faint reflection in its surface—distorted, small. She thought about two years ago. She thought about the specific evening she had sat with Ethan in the kitchen of his apartment—a cramped, cluttered place he rented at the time, with a broken burner on the stove and cardboard boxes stacked in the hallway because he hadn’t finished unpacking eight months after moving in—and he had spread his business plan across the kitchen table and told her about his vision. He had been animated then, genuine, his eyes bright with the particular light of a person who believes in something completely. She had listened for two hours. Then she had gone through his numbers carefully, found three critical errors in his projections, suggested six adjustments to his pitch, and stayed up until three in the morning helping him rebuild his presentation from scratch.
He had gotten the meeting because of that presentation.
She remembered the afternoon, months later, when his operating account ran dry ten days before a key product deadline, and the bridge funding he had expected had not come through, and he had sat in her kitchen—they were together by then, she had moved in—with his head in his hands and told her it was over. She remembered taking her savings account, the one she had built carefully over years of waitressing and managing every dollar with the discipline of someone who had grown up without excess, and transferring the money into his business account, because she believed in him. Because she believed in what he was trying to build.
She had never told him it hurt to do it. She had never wanted him to carry that.
“Do you really think I want your money?” she said.
He gave her a look of patient condescension. “Emily. Everyone wants money. Especially people with nothing.”
A beat.
“Sign.”
She reached into her bag.
Across the table, she saw Ethan’s posture tighten—a fraction of a second, just a flicker, as though he had braced for something—and she felt a distant, unwilling sympathy for the fact that even now, at the end of all of it, he was still managing his own fear.