Author POV

The rain hadn't started yet, but the sky outside had that heavy gray look that made everything feel smaller. Y/N stood at the stove, sleeves pushed up past her elbows, watching the eggs bubble at the edges of the pan. Her hands moved on autopilot-flip, season, plate-while her mind drifted somewhere she couldn't quite follow it back from.

"Y/N, I'm getting late!"

The voice cut through the kitchen like a blade, sharp and clipped in a way that made her flinch. She glanced at the clock above the fridge. 7:52. Hari's bus left at 8:05.

"Please wait a minute, I'm almost done with it, Hari!" she called back, her voice higher than she meant it to be, threaded with the particular panic of someone trying to make up for lost time that wasn't really lost, just slower than it needed to be.

In the living room, Hari was a blur of motion-checking her phone, checking the door, checking her watch, checking her phone again. She'd already put her shoes on. She'd already picked up her bag twice and set it back down, as if the act of holding it might make Y/N move faster.

"You know what?" Hari's voice rose, brittle at the edges. "I have work, not like you." The words landed before she seemed to register how they'd sound. "My boss will kick me out if I'm late today!"

In the kitchen, Y/N's hands stilled for half a second over the toaster. Just half a second. Then she kept moving, because stopping wouldn't get breakfast made any faster, and breakfast being made was the only thing she could control right now.

She plated the last piece of toast, wiped a stray crumb from the edge of the plate like it mattered, like presentation might soften something. "I'm sorry, Hari," she murmured, not loud enough to carry, more a habit than a message. Then she picked up the plate and hurried out.

"Here's your breakfast." She set it down on the table gently, like an offering, angling it so the eggs faced Hari the way she liked them. The toast was warm. She'd buttered it just right, the way she always did.

Hari looked at the plate the way someone looks at something that's arrived too late to matter. Her eyes narrowed, not with real cruelty, just the particular impatience of someone already halfway out the door in her head.

"I'm sorry, but I can't have it now, all thanks to you." She grabbed her bag off the couch in one motion, the strap catching briefly on the armrest before she yanked it free. "I'll grab something on my way." A pause at the door, her hand on the knob. "Thanks for nothing."

The door slammed. The walls shivered with it. A picture frame in the hallway rattled against the nail it hung from and went still.

Y/N stood in the entryway long after the sound had faded, the quiet afterward somehow louder than the door had been. Sunlight came in slanted through the window, catching dust in the air, catching the steam still rising faintly off the untouched eggs.

She didn't move for a while. She wasn't sure why she was still apologizing in her head, rehearsing it, refining it, as though there were a version of *sorry* precise enough to undo the last five minutes. The words had just become reflex. Something she reached for the way her hand reached for a doorknob-without thought, without asking whether it would actually open anything.

She looked down at the plate. The toast had gone from warm to merely present. Her shoulders dropped, slow, like something deflating.

Hari was the only family she had left, really-the only person who'd stayed after everything else had come apart at the seams. And Y/N had promised herself, somewhere in the wreckage of the last year, that she would take care of her. That she would be useful. That she would earn her place in this apartment, in this life, in whatever was left of it.

But lately it felt like no matter what she did, it landed wrong. Too slow. Too late. Not enough.

She picked up the plate and carried it back to the kitchen, scraping the eggs into the trash without really looking at them. There would be other mornings. She'd try again tomorrow-wake up earlier, get ahead of it, get it right.

There was a job application open on her laptop screen in the other room, half-finished, waiting. She'd get back to that too.

"Sorry," she said again, quieter this time, to no one. To the empty kitchen. To herself.

It didn't fix anything. It never really did. But

it was the only thing she knew how to say.