No. She had not made them choose.
She had just been the one they chose.
I went to work the week after graduation.
Construction first. Brutal summer heat, frozen winter mornings, men who called you kid until you proved you could carry more weight than they expected. I learned how to wake up before the sun and move through a day where everything hurt by noon. Then came warehouse work, better hourly pay, worse hours, and supervisors who treated exhaustion like a scheduling issue. At twenty-one, I got into an electrical apprenticeship through a friend of my father’s coworker.
That saved me.
Trade work was not easy. It was crawling through tight spaces, standing on ladders until your calves shook, learning codes and load calculations and how to respect wires that could kill a careless man without raising their voice. But it paid. Not immediately, not luxuriously, but enough to make a plan possible.
The apartment came from a foreclosure listing a coworker sent me during lunch.
One bedroom. Third floor. Bad neighborhood. Old building. $127,000.
“Needs work,” he said, laughing. “But so do you.”
I went to see it on a Wednesday after a ten-hour shift. The realtor looked surprised when I arrived in work boots, jeans dusty at the knees, and a jacket with electrical tape in the pocket. The apartment had cracked tile in the bathroom, water stains near the window, and kitchen cabinets that sagged slightly at the hinges. But the bones were good. The brick wall in the living room had character. The balcony faced west. If you leaned far enough over the railing, you could see the top of the city skyline between two buildings.
The bank said I could afford it if I was careful.
So I became careful in a way that made my twenties narrow.
My friends bought trucks. I kept my 2008 Civic with the cracked bumper and the passenger window that whistled on the highway. Coworkers went to Vegas, Nashville, the beach. I worked overtime. People I knew got married and took honeymoon photos in places with blue water. I learned to patch drywall, replace light fixtures, refinish cabinets, and cook meals that could last four days. I dated a little, but not much. It is hard to feel charming when your idea of a nice Friday night is calculating how much extra principal you can pay if you skip takeout for another month.
I did not resent the work then.
Work was honest. Work did not promise fairness, but it gave results if you stayed long enough. Every mortgage statement was a ruler measuring my life in smaller debts. $118,000 left. $104,000. $89,000. I taped one statement inside my closet door and crossed off numbers with a pen after every payment.
Kara came to the apartment twice in the first five years.
The first time, she wrinkled her nose in the hallway.
“Do you feel safe here?” she asked.
“Mostly.”
“That’s comforting.”
The second time, she brought a friend and called the brick wall “urban.” By then a coffee shop had replaced the old pawn shop, and the liquor store had become a Pilates studio with frosted windows and a fern by the entrance. My rough little neighborhood was becoming attractive to people who would have once locked their car doors driving through it.
I was too busy working to notice I had accidentally bought early.
Kara’s life moved differently.
She graduated with a communications degree my parents were proud to mention at holiday dinners, then took a retail management job she quit after eight months because the manager “thrived on negativity.” She worked as a receptionist for nearly a year before leaving because the environment drained her energy. She tried being a barista, a social media assistant, a boutique associate, a nonprofit coordinator, and one job I never fully understood because the title had the word creative in it and lasted less than three months.
Every ending had an explanation.
The boss was unreasonable. The coworkers were cliquey. The commute was too much. The work did not honor her gifts. The workplace lighting gave her headaches. The customers were emotionally demanding.
At thirty, Kara announced she was chronically ill.