“Please, Shawn. We need to talk about this.” Slowly, Katriina pushes herself up to her feet, her legs wobbly and stiff. She starts hobbling forward, thinking about how unnatural it feels to be away from the couch. But there is no way she is going to let Shawn walk out on her this time, not a chance in hell.

She stops in the doorway to the kitchen and immediately loses her breath. Shawn has opened every cupboard door in the kitchen: ten of them, to be precise, upper and lower, cheap white pressboard with fake brass knobs, raised panels, unfinished edges. The shelves are empty, save for an open bag of plastic cups left over from her last open house and a balled-up rag she uses for wiping the dust from the counter. But plastered there on the insides of all the doors, covering them from top to bottom, are her Post-it notes. Hundreds of them, fluttering there in the breeze from the air vent, like some kind of repulsive sea creature from the deepest, darkest parts of the ocean waving its tentacles, all with the same two words written on them.

Be better.

Be better.

Be better.

“What the hell is this, Katriina?”

She doesn’t know how to answer him. After the first one, she had just started writing, and with each new Post-it she started to feel happier. Lighter. But now she sees everything through Shawn’s eyes: him innocently opening the first cupboard and finding the notes, and then opening another and another, each one bringing with it a new kind of sickening horror.

“I bought this house,” she says. The words just come out.

“You…what?”

She walks over to one of the bottom cabinets and pulls off a Post-it. It’s the first one she wrote, with the crossed-off “a.” She flicks the edge with her finger, thinking about how there once was a time when she thought there were only certain aspects of herself that she had to fix, instead of her whole entire being. She hands the Post-it to Shawn, the adhesive making a snapping noise as he pulls it away from her fingers. She feels giving him this will explain it all, but almost as quickly understands that it won’t. He is almost comically baffled, a cartoon character with little question marks circling his head.

“I bought this house,” she says again.

He looks down at the Post-it note in his hand, and then back at her. “You bought this house,” he echoes.

“I couldn’t sell it, so I bought it.” She runs her hands along the edge of the counter. It sounds simple enough, logical enough: She couldn’t sell it, so she bought it. A good investment. A business decision.