“Sure.” It’s casual, but inside I’m steeling myself. The three-nights-a-week stuff has already been a concession, particularly since when he’s here I always worry I’m interrupting by breathing, and because I know—from one of my few longer-than-five-minute conversations with him—he prefers our place to the studio he’s got in Bed-Stuy, I’m expecting a big ask. Probably his lease is up, probably he wants to crash here for a while—

“He and I are moving in together.”

I almost drop the yogurt.

“We got a place in the Village. Not far from that oyster bar you used to like . . .”

What. The. Fuck.

Sibby keeps talking, something about tiny square footage but an updated kitchen, but I’m stuck on the essentials: she’s moving in with a guy she’s been dating for a few months, she’s moving out of here, she’s moving out of Brooklyn, she’s had the gall to reference an oyster bar I did not in fact like but did go to for a date awkward enough to deserve an entire Cosmo article.

“But don’t worry, I’m here until the end of summer, so you’ve got plenty of notice.”

I can’t seem to do anything but stare.

“I don’t figure you’ll bring in another roommate,” she continues, “but I wanted to give you lead time in case. You can take my room when I go, make yours an office. Run your business out of here, you know?”

Run my business? Sibby barely knows the half of it with my business, knows nothing about how many regulars I’ve picked up since the Times article, and she certainly knows nothing about the massive potential of the contract I’m trying out for, which now I absolutely have to get if I have any real hope of affording this place alone, even temporarily. Sure, I’m doing well with clients, have a couple of regular sponsors for my social media—but I’m a twenty-six-year-old artist living in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

What is she thinking?

I can hardly process what we’re talking about here, can hardly process that this conversation is so transactional, that we’re not going to talk about the fact that we’ve lived together in this city since we were nineteen, that every big move we made here—apartments, jobs, changing our regular laundromat—we’ve made them as a unit. That there’ll be a whole body of water separating us now.

My hold on the yogurt container now feels less a drop risk and more a smash risk. I breathe through my nose, try to settle down.

“What about your job?”

Sibby waves a hand. “I’m going to start with a new family in the city after Labor Day. It’s all set.”