Updated Apr 9, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 18: The Weight
Kennedy
The second Saturday of December she went on a date.
She felt strange about it. She felt strange about it in a way that was worth examining, which she did — in the coffee shop after Tatum had texted her *Iris set you up, go, you’ll regret it if you don’t* and she’d agreed out of a combination of social fatigue and genuine uncertainty about what she was doing.
His name was Marcus. He was a structural engineer, thirty-one, recommended by Iris with the specific enthusiasm of someone who had been waiting to deploy this recommendation. He was pleasant and direct and asked questions and listened to the answers and had opinions about things that were interesting and opinions about her work that weren’t reductive, and she spent two hours having a dinner that was by all external metrics a good dinner.
She drove home and felt like she’d been doing an impression of herself.
She texted Tatum: *It was fine.*
Tatum: *Fine like good fine or fine like you were elsewhere.*
She looked at the message. She typed: *The second one.*
A pause. Then: *Kennedy. Are you waiting for Vaughn.*
She didn’t answer that immediately. She sat in her parked car and looked at the steering wheel and thought about what she was actually doing.
She and Vaughn had been in a strange suspended state for three weeks. He’d texted on the day she’d talked to Blair — they’d been warm, real texts, and she’d said *I’ll see you Thursday,* and she had seen him on Thursday, dinner at the Thai place they’d gone to early on, and it had been easy and not easy simultaneously. He’d been careful with her in a way that was tender and also slightly maddening, like he was handling something he was afraid of breaking, and she’d wanted to tell him that she wasn’t breakable. That she’d been broken before and had rebuilt and what she needed from him wasn’t care so much as *action.*
He’d kissed her goodnight at her door and she’d let herself lean into it and then gone inside and thought about the fact that they were in a better place than they’d been three weeks ago and also still in no particular defined place, and she didn’t know how to want both more clarity and more patience without being contradictory.
She texted Tatum back: *I think so. I think I’m giving him a timeline in my head that I haven’t told him about.*
Tatum: *What is the timeline.*
*The end of the year,* she typed. Which was, she realized as she sent it, two weeks away. *If nothing’s changed by the end of the year I need to decide if I’m continuing to wait or letting it go.*
A pause. Then: *Does he know that.*
She thought about it. *No.*
*Kennedy.*
She knew. She knew that giving someone a deadline they didn’t know about was a form of withholding that didn’t serve either of them. She’d spent two years with Tyler having silent expectations she never voiced and then feeling betrayed when he didn’t meet them — and this was different, she was different, the situation was different, but the move of keeping the deadline to herself instead of saying it out loud was the same move.
She drove home. She made tea. She texted Vaughn: *Can I ask you something.*
He responded in three minutes: *Always.*
She typed: *Are we in the same place we were three weeks ago or is something different.*
A longer pause. Then: *Can I call you?*
*Yes.*
He called. She sat on her couch with her tea and his voice in her ear, and he said: “Things are different. I talked to Tyler last week — a real conversation. He’s not okay with it but he’s — I told him I wasn’t asking permission. And I talked to Owen. And I’ve been doing some thinking about the pattern with Tyler that I should have done years ago.” A pause. “I’ve been trying to get to a place where I could come to you with something solid. Not another apology.”
“What solid looks like,” she said, “for me — what I need — is for this not to be a secret anymore. I don’t mean announcing it. I mean that I need you to not be hiding it. I need to be able to say your name to my mother on a Sunday phone call without deciding not to.”
A silence.
“Okay,” he said. “That’s fair. And I want that too.”
“Vaughn.” She wrapped her hands around her mug. “I’m not going to wait indefinitely. I want you to know that. I’m giving this time because I think you’re worth giving it time. But I have a limit.”
“What’s the limit.”
“I don’t know exactly. But I’m closer to it than I was three weeks ago.”
Another silence. “I hear you,” he said.
“Okay,” she said.
“Kennedy.” His voice had something in it she couldn’t name over the phone. “I’m not treating you like a secret. I need you to know that. I’ve been trying to get the situation with Tyler to a place where coming public doesn’t give him a weapon to hit you with. That’s the whole of what I’ve been doing.”
She sat with that. “I believe you,” she said.
“But.”
“But believing you doesn’t make it feel less like waiting.”
“No,” he said. “I know.” A pause. “Give me a little more time. Not much. I promise you I’m working toward something, not just — sitting with it.”
She thought about Tatum: *the way you see him is clear.* She thought about the plant on the windowsill. She thought about the bench on Fletcher in October and the corner store and forty minutes she hadn’t planned.
“Okay,” she said.
“Two weeks.”
She’d given him the end of the year in her head. “Two weeks,” she said.
She hung up and sat in her quiet apartment and thought about what she’d said and whether it was the right thing to have said, and she decided it was, because it was true, and she’d stopped managing the true things.
She finished her tea. She thought about Marcus the structural engineer and his interesting opinions and the specific quality of being somewhere else for two hours.
She thought: *I know the difference between a person who is taking up space in my chest and a person who isn’t.*
She thought: *Marcus wasn’t.*
She thought: *That, too, is information.*
She washed the mug and went to bed.
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