I pressed “send” on Lily’s text—See you at 7—and sat back in the quiet of my one-bedroom. The room still smelled faintly of cardboard and lemon oil from the day I moved in, the day I decided that peace could be a place you signed for with your own name. The desk faced a west window; charts glowed on the screen in clean blues and reds. A second monitor was dark, waiting for London to wake.

I stood, stretched, and looked at my reflection in the hallway mirror. No sweatshirt today. Not because anyone demanded it, not because I had to be “attractive to” anyone. Because I wanted to mark the moment. I chose a soft black dress that felt like a good hug and swiped on lipstick the color of pomegranate. When I smiled, I saw someone I recognized—someone I had chosen, more than once, to be.

On the way out, I paused by the kitchen island. A small vase held three yellow ranunculus I’d bought myself at the market. Beside it sat Emmanuela’s note on embossed paper—Signora Amy, I am available Wednesdays if you ever need help. Otherwise, enjoy your freedom. I laughed when I’d found it tucked into the last moving box, tucked it into a drawer with my spare keys. I didn’t need a housekeeper in a place this small, but it was nice to know I could call her for coffee and a gossip about bread ovens and in-laws if the mood struck.

Lily’s friend’s name was Kenji. We’d agreed on a small café two blocks from my building—the kind with a chalkboard menu and a barista who knew how not to burn milk. Lily was already there when I arrived, all bangs and bracelets, drumming a spoon against her water glass.

“You look incredible,” she said, standing to kiss my cheek. “Also, proud of you for not letting me set this up as a double date; my boyfriend would have made it weird.”

“I make everything weird on my own,” I said. “No assistance necessary.”

She grinned. “He’s nice. You’ll see.”

Kenji walked in three minutes later carrying a paper bag and the kind of calm most people pretend to have. He was a software engineer, Lily had told me, the kind who could explain his job without devolving into acronyms. He set the bag on the table.

“This is wildly presumptuous,” he said, half-bowing. “But I brought bread.”

Lily choked. I blinked.

“House-baked sourdough,” he said, suddenly unsure. “My grandmother would haunt me if I showed up empty-handed.”

I cracked first, laughing harder than the joke deserved, a laugh that shook something loose between my ribs. “You have no idea how perfect that is,” I said, and took the bag.

We talked. He asked about trading, softly curious instead of performatively impressed. When he said, “Isn’t that emotionally exhausting?”, there was no accusation under it, only genuine interest. I explained liquidity and risk, that “easy money” is something people say about work they’ve never done. We traded stories—him about a disastrous product launch that went overnight viral for all the wrong reasons; me about the time I had to close a losing position with my hands trembling while my ex-husband texted me from a “business trip” in Itaewon.

“Do you still like Italian food?” he asked at one point, cautious in a way that said Lily had been brief.

“I do,” I said, surprised to realize it was true. “It wasn’t the food that was the problem.”

Mid-conversation, my phone buzzed. Unknown Number. Then a voicemail. I didn’t check it. Lily’s eyebrow arched. I flipped the phone face down.

“You okay?” Kenji asked.

“I’m good,” I said truthfully. “I’m…done performing other people’s emergencies.”

He raised his coffee. “To boring emergencies,” he said.

“To boring emergencies,” I echoed, and clinked my mug.

We walked after—down past the bookstore whose cat slept in the window display, past the shop that sold only antique lamps, their warm bellies glowing on shelves like small suns. He told me about the ocean clean-up project he volunteered with on weekends. I told him about the spreadsheet I kept just for fun—every book I’d ever read, rated and sortable.

“On a scale of?” he asked.

“Plot, prose, and pettiness,” I said solemnly.

He laughed. It was a good sound. The kind you could get used to without losing yourself in it.

At the corner, he said, “May I…call you?” the kind of question people forgot how to ask in an age of DMs and “u up?”.

“You may,” I said. “I should warn you: I wake up at 4 a.m. for London sometimes.”

“I should warn you: I once slept through three alarms and a fire drill,” he said. “We’ll meet in the middle.”

We said goodnight. I walked home with the paper bag under my arm and thought about the first conversation I’d had with my ex in which bread had been used as a weapon. Better ovens, his parents had said. Better wife, he’d meant. How strange and lovely, then, to get home and slice a still-warm loaf someone had made for the joy of making it, to eat buttered bread at my own kitchen counter in a dress chosen by me, for me.

When I finally checked my phone, two voicemails waited. The first was static, the second my ex-mother-in-law’s voice, thinned out by distance. “Amy,” she said. “We’re…leaving the city. Nicholas’s cousin has a room upstate. I wanted to…” A long breath. “I wanted to say I’m sorry for the things I said. The oven doesn’t make the baker. Goodbye.”

I sat with that for a moment—no heat, no triumph, just a quiet acknowledgement that sometimes the apology comes too late to change anything but not too late to stop hurting. I deleted the voicemail. I didn’t save it for rainy days. I didn’t need rain anymore to feel what weather I was in.

My alarm went off at 4:15. London session. Sweatshirt, hair up. The monitors came alive with their soothing chaos. I ran my playbook. Tight stops. Discipline. Take profit. Give yourself one. By seven, I was out with green numbers and hot coffee.

A new email waited when I checked my personal inbox—subject line: Interview Request, Women Who Built Their Own Tables. I stared at it for a second and smiled at the accident of phrasing. I didn’t say yes. I didn’t say no. I filed it under Consider Later. I had a blog post to write and a chart to study and a voicemail to ignore and a loaf of bread to share with Lily when she came by tonight to dish about Kenji.

Before I dove back in, I texted him: The bread survived. Barely. Thank you. Three dots. Then: Next time I’ll bring jam. Or better coffee. Your call.

Jam, I typed. I’ve got the coffee covered.

As the sun climbed higher, I thought about all the rooms I used to stand in feeling erased—at a table where my name wasn’t on the invitation, inside a marriage where my life was reduced to a wallet with a smile, under a roof where I bought the bricks and still couldn’t call it home. And then I thought about the rooms I stand in now—this little kitchen with its lemon oil and charts, a café with a kind man who brings bread, a trading day with edges to it that I choose for myself.

“New,” I whispered into the quiet, finishing the sentence I’d left dangling the night before. “I’m looking forward to my new.”

And then I went back to work.