When the doors opened on floor thirty-eight, I stepped out, looking around. Even though it was a Friday night, the office was far from deserted. These kinds of hours were one of the things my parents had fought about, even though they tried to keep it from me. As if I wasn’t sitting on the top of the stairs, or in the bathroom with the vent that led to their bedroom, straining for every word. As if I couldn’t sense that something was wrong. It was a slap in the face, honestly, that they’d tried to keep me in the dark for so long even when we all knew it wasn’t working, a horrible farce with stilted lines that we were all performing at the dinner table and on holidays. It was like they were saying they thought so little of me—what I could pick up on, what I could understand. When they finally came out and told me, on vacation in a rented vacation condo in Colorado, there was a big part of it that was a relief. That at least we didn’t have to go on pretending any longer.

But they’d argued a lot about the hours he worked. My dad telling my mom that he was a partner in a New York firm, that it was an hour for him to come back and forth from Stanwich each day, and if he’d missed dinner with us anyway, it was just easiest to stay in the city so that he could keep working. My mom protesting that he was missing everything, missing things with me, and I’d had to grip my legs hard so I wouldn’t jump up, burst in, and promise that he wasn’t missing anything, that I was fine, that there was no point in fighting. And it was the worst kind of fight to overhear, since it was the kind that went around and around in circles, the facts of the case never changing. My dad’s work was in the city; my mom’s was in town. She couldn’t change that and neither could he. All they could do, it seemed, was have the same argument over and over again, sometimes dressed up in different clothes, but always the same thing underneath. Until, finally, they’d decided that they’d rather not have it at all anymore. And they’d both walked away.

As I walked into the office, I stopped short—shocked by how different it looked. The color scheme was different, the font on the sign with the partners’ names had been changed, and all the décor was new. Had it really been that long since I’d been here? I knew everything had gotten busier in the last few years—school, rehearsals, my dad’s work… but I wouldn’t have thought it had been that long.