“It’s been a roller coaster since college,” she says, sipping her water. “But you don’t want to hear about that.”

I don’t, but I say I do.

“Well, I moved to San Fran like I said I would, thinking it’d be a cool art scene—except there’re no artists there anymore, just app designers and holograph-tech dudes, and rent was five K a month for an efficiency. I tried to make it work, but the city literally stank with fallout from the spill. Dead fish were washing up, and the wildfires made everything smell like rotten smoked salmon. It was like living in an expensive apocalypse where everyone’s dying slowly but drinking cold-brewed nitro lattes. I didn’t make any art, just worked a shitty job. So I finally applied for my MFA and got into Ohio.”

“You moved back to the Midwest?”

“I know. But Columbus was an okay place. I met a guy named Eric in the program, and when we graduated he got an offer at Cornell, so we moved upstate and I started adjuncting art classes. Then he proposed and we bought a house—”

“Oh my god, congratulations!”

“Well, that wedding never happened. A month after he proposed, I started getting awful headaches and was gaining all this weight and having weird nerve spasms. Finally the doctor sends me to get an MRI—and that’s when they found the tumor.” She points to her head.

“What?”

“Size of a golf ball. Meanwhile, I’m getting sicker and sicker and bigger and bigger, and that’s when Eric decides a lifelong commitment given my diagnosis was too heavy. ‘How about a commitment to be here next fucking week?’ I ask him. Too heavy. Heavy’s the key word. Meanwhile I was, like, vomiting. So he left me with the mortgage, no health insurance or sick leave from my job. Everything pretty much went to hell after that. I lost the house, lost my savings, my parents had to sell their place to help with the cost of treatments.”

I have a dim recollection of some posts she’d written about being sick, but I’d thought it was the flu. “I’m so sorry, I had no clue you were going through that.”

Katie’s flinch is almost unnoticeable, just a trace of sadness beneath her face. “Well, I got off social media after I got sick. It was mostly just photos of me in hospitals anyway—and no one was liking those. I tried calling you a bunch, I left messages—that must’ve been two or three years ago—but I guess you got a new number. I was in a pretty bad place, I was just so lonely. My parents were the only support I had left.”

And it’s right then that I realize what a mistake it was to invite Katie into my apartment. The long tragedy story, the subtle but effective guilt trip—it’s a by-the-book setup. Soon she’s going to ask for money.