The coffee maker gurgles its morning sermon.

I watch Marcus move around our tiny kitchen in boxers and a faded MIT t-shirt, and I think: this is good. This is what good looks like.

Two years together. Eighteen months living in this cramped Brooklyn apartment with its pre-war charm and post-war plumbing. Long enough to stop being polite about morning breath. Long enough to have a side of the bed, a preferred coffee mug, an unspoken agreement about who showers first.

"You're staring," he says without turning around.

"I'm admiring."

"Same difference." He pours two cups, adds too much sugar to mine because he always forgets I cut back, and brings them over. "You have that meeting today?"

"The Henderson account."

"The cereal people?"

"The other Henderson. The pharmaceutical one."

He nods like he's tracking, but I know he's not. That's fine. I don't track his work either, something about backend architecture that makes my brain slide off like water on a hot pan.

This is what we do. We share space. We share coffee. We share the general shape of our days without needing every detail.

It works.

"I'm working late tonight." He says it as he's grabbing his bag, halfway out the door.

"Again?"

"Big project. You know how it is."

I do know. Tech deadlines are brutal. I've lived through enough of his crunch periods to understand.

"Okay. I'll save you some of whatever I order."

"You're the best." Quick kiss. "Love you."

"Love you too."

The door closes.

I stand in the kitchen, holding my too-sweet coffee, and try to identify the feeling settling in my chest.

Not worry. Not exactly.

Something adjacent to it. Something I can't name.

Work is work.

I design packaging for products I'll never buy, create brand identities for companies I'll never think about again, and attend meetings that could have been emails. Graphic design looked more glamorous in the brochures.

But it pays the rent. It gives me health insurance. It lets me live in a city where the subway smells like ambition and regret in equal measure.

My desk faces a window that faces a wall. Premium real estate in this open-plan hellscape.

"Zoe." My project manager materializes. "The Henderson deck."

"On your desk by four."

"Make it three."

"Three it is."

She dematerializes. I return to arranging pill bottles in aesthetically pleasing configurations.

This is my life.

It's fine. It's good, even.

So why do I keep waiting for something to go wrong?

I'm home by six.

The apartment is empty, which makes sense. Marcus said late.

I order Thai, eat it standing at the counter, and scroll through my phone without absorbing anything. The algorithm feeds me an endless stream of other people's lives, vacations I can't afford, apartments I can't have, relationships that seem to exist in a permanent state of golden hour.

I close the app.

Marcus texts at nine: Still at work. Don't wait up.

I don't wait up.

But I don't sleep either.

The thing about my parents' divorce is that I didn't see it coming.

No one did. They seemed happy, the kind of happy that doesn't need to perform itself. Dad made breakfast on Sundays. Mom laughed at his terrible jokes. They touched each other casually, constantly, the way people do when touch is habit rather than intention.

Then I was fifteen, and there was a woman. Not a crisis. Not a breakdown. Just a woman who wasn't my mother, who my father had been seeing for two years.

Two years.

While he made breakfast. While she laughed at his jokes. While they touched each other like everything was fine.

I was the last to know.

Everyone was the last to know.

Sometimes I wonder if that's why I can't quite relax into this. Into Marcus. Into the good thing we have.

I'm always waiting for the other shoe.

The shoe that might not exist. The shoe I might be imagining because I was taught that happiness is a setup for devastation.

Marcus isn't my father.

I know this.

I know it.

He comes home at eleven.

I'm pretending to be asleep, because it's easier than explaining why I'm awake. He moves quietly through the dark. Brushes his teeth. Slips into bed behind me.

"I know you're not sleeping," he whispers.

"I'm practicing."

His arm wraps around me. Warm. Solid. His.

"Sorry it was so late."

"Big project."

"Yeah." He's quiet for a moment. "It should calm down soon."

"Okay."

"Okay." He kisses my shoulder. "Goodnight, Zoe."

"Goodnight."

He's asleep in minutes. The way he always is. The way I never am.

I lie there, wrapped in his arms, staring at the ceiling I can't see.

This is good. This is what good looks like.

So why do I feel like I'm waiting for something to go wrong?