POISON IVY replies.

Sweet thing, you've diagnosed it yourself and don't even hear it. Logistics. Do you know what that word is? Concrete. Warehouses squatting on fields that used to breathe, trucks coughing soot over everything green. You didn't fall for a man, darling — you fell for an appetite that pours asphalt and calls it ambition. And now it's pouring you, too. Flattening you into one more loading dock he'll get to after this quarter. There's always another quarter. The rot is patient.

You asked if you've agreed to come in last. You haven't agreed to anything. You've simply kept watering a thing that gives you no shade and calling it love. Pistachio looks up because that creature — animal though she is — remembers what your Halvard forgot: you don't ignore the one who feeds you.

I had a vine once. It climbed toward a cracked window for a whole season, reaching for light that never came. I cut it loose. It came back fuller, turned toward the sun instead. Be the vine, not the window, little sprout. Stop watering dead things. Some relationships are compost — and compost still does one good thing. It feeds whatever blooms next.