Updated Apr 7, 2026 • ~8 min read
Chapter 1: Something Safe to Break
Emma
The restaurant is called Alma, which means soul in Spanish, which Emma has always thought was a lovely name for a place that serves truffle fries and artisanal cocktails to people who are pretending the prices don’t make them wince. She and Daniel have been coming here on the third Friday of every month for a year and a half. She knows the menu by heart. She knows that the candles are beeswax and that the bartender is named Paulo and that the corner booth by the window has a slightly uneven leg that wobbles if you lean on it wrong.
She does not know, until Daniel sets down his fork with that particular careful precision that means he has been practicing what he’s about to say, that tonight is the last time she will sit in this booth.
“Emma.” He says her name like a complete sentence. Like a verdict.
She sets down her own fork. The salmon is very good tonight. She will think about the salmon later, in the specific, sideways way grief attaches itself to irrelevant things — the fact that she didn’t finish it, the fact that it’s getting cold, the fact that Paulo is going to take it away and she will never order it again because she will never come back here and she hasn’t even had the last bite yet.
“I’ve been thinking,” Daniel says, “about us.”
“Okay,” she says, because she is nothing if not composed.
He looks handsome, which is cruel. He always looks handsome — blue eyes, good jaw, the kind of careful grooming that reads as effortless because he has spent considerable effort making it look that way. Two years ago she thought this was charming. She cannot, at this precise moment, remember the exact moment she stopped thinking so.
“I think we want different things,” he says. “I think we’ve been wanting different things for a while and I — I didn’t want to see it, but I have to be honest with you. That’s the least you deserve.”
Emma watches her own hands on the table — steady, she notes distantly, her hands are steady — and thinks about the engagement ring on her left hand, which is small and tasteful and exactly what she asked for. I don’t need anything flashy, she’d said. This is perfect. She had meant it.
“What kind of different things,” she says.
Daniel exhales. He has been rehearsing this; she can tell by the way he doesn’t stumble. “I want someone who — who takes risks, Emma. Who goes off-script sometimes. You’re so careful about everything. Every decision gets weighed and re-weighed and you never just — do anything. You never just leap.”
She stares at him.
“You’re safe,” he says, and the word comes out tender, as if tenderness makes it better. “You’re the safest person I’ve ever known. But I don’t want safe. I want — I want someone who surprises me. Someone I can’t predict. And I can predict everything you’re going to do. I can predict what you’ll order here. I can predict how you’ll spend your Saturday. I can predict—”
“Stop,” she says. Very quiet. Very composed.
He stops. He has the grace to look slightly ashamed, at least.
“I understand,” she says, though she doesn’t, not yet — understanding will come later, in waves, at inconvenient times, like while she’s reading to her second-graders and it hits her all over again. “I’d like to go home.”
She does not cry in the Uber. She does not cry walking up the stairs to Sophie’s apartment, which is three miles from her own and where she drives on autopilot without consciously deciding to. She knocks on the door and Sophie opens it in a UW Huskies t-shirt with her hair in a mess on top of her head, takes one look at Emma, and says, “Oh, shit,” and steps aside.
Then Emma cries.
She cries the way she does most things — thoroughly, all at once, committed to finishing it — sitting on Sophie’s couch with her cardigan pulled tight around her and Sophie pressed against her side making small furious sounds on her behalf. Sophie Chen has been Emma’s best friend since the third grade, when Sophie punched Tommy Garrett in the arm for saying Emma’s lunch smelled weird, and in twenty-two years she has never once told Emma to look on the bright side or that everything happens for a reason, which is the primary reason Emma loves her.
“He called me boring,” Emma says, when she has the breath for words. “He called me predictable.”
“He is a complete and utter—”
“He’s not wrong,” Emma says, and this is the part that stings most cleanly, this is the stone at the center of it: that she cannot entirely argue the point. “Sophie. I have eaten at the same three restaurants on rotation for two years. I wear the same five cardigans. I go to bed at ten-fifteen. I’m twenty-five years old and I go to bed at ten-fifteen.”
“You’re a schoolteacher who wakes up at five-thirty—”
“I know exactly what I’m doing every day for the next six months. I have it in a planner. A paper planner, Sophie, with color-coded tabs.” Emma stares at the ceiling. “He said he could predict everything I’d do. And I sat there and I thought: he can. I couldn’t even argue with him. I just asked to go home. I went home exactly the way he knew I would.”
Sophie is quiet for a moment. This is unlike her, so Emma looks over.
Sophie has her phone out. She is scrolling with intent, the way she scrolls when she has already decided something and is simply gathering ammunition.
“What are you doing,” Emma says.
“I’m showing you something.” Sophie turns the phone so Emma can see the screen.
It’s an Instagram page. Black Atlas Tattoo, Capitol Hill. The feed is a grid of artwork so detailed it stops Emma’s breath — portraits in black and grey with photographic precision, botanical illustrations that look like pages torn from a Victorian field journal, abstract geometric pieces that seem to move if she looks at them long enough. The artist: @ryderkingink. 47.3k followers.
“Sophie—”
“Look at the botanicals. The right side of his portfolio. Look at them.”
Emma looks. Roses climbing a woman’s shoulder, shaded in such exquisite gradation that the petals seem to have dimension. Ferns curling along a collarbone. A bird — a sparrow, wings open, feathers so fine they couldn’t have been made by human hands but were, were made by human hands — tucked at the crest of someone’s ribs.
Emma’s ribs ache. She presses her hand there, over her cardigan, over the place she has thought about for eight years.
“I’ve always wanted a tattoo,” she says, very quietly, as if saying it too loud might break it. “Since I was seventeen. I have a whole thing planned. Botanical. Roses and ferns and—”
“And a sparrow,” Sophie says. “I know. You drew it on your notebook all through junior year and then you put the notebook away and you never mentioned it again.”
Emma swallows. “My parents—”
“Are not your parents anymore, they’re your parents, but you’re twenty-five, and you just had your heart broken by a man who called you boring, and I think,” Sophie says, sitting up, “that it is time. I think it is time, Emma.”
Emma looks at the phone. At the sparrow on someone else’s ribs, wings open.
“He probably has a six-month waiting list,” she says.
Sophie is already loading the booking page.
There is an opening — a cancellation, just this past hour, the website says. A two-hour consultation slot, Tuesday at three p.m.
Emma’s heart is hammering. This is what reckless feels like, she thinks — this specific mix of fear and possibility, the sensation of standing at the edge of something with your toes over the lip.
She has always stepped back from that edge. She has been stepping back from it her entire life, and look where carefully stepping back has gotten her: sitting on her best friend’s couch at nine p.m. on a Friday with a ring on her finger that belongs to a life that apparently never quite existed.
She takes Sophie’s phone. She enters her name, her email, her number.
She hits confirm before she can think better of it.
“Oh my god,” she whispers.
“Oh my GOD,” Sophie shouts, and grabs her, and squeezes her, and Emma laughs — actually laughs, a real one, surprised out of her — and outside Sophie’s window the Seattle night is doing its usual thing, rain on glass and the amber blur of streetlights, and Emma Lawson, who is apparently boring and predictable and safe, has just made the least boring, least predictable, least safe appointment of her entire careful life.
Her ribs are still aching. She presses her hand there again.
Soon, she thinks. Soon that space will be full of something she chose.
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