The Plan

She'd built the spreadsheet in February. Deleted it. Built it again in March, late on a Sunday when the apartment was quiet and she couldn't think of a good reason not to. Deleted that one too.

It wasn't that the numbers scared her. She'd grown up around numbers that didn't leave room for pretending. She knew how to look at a hard figure and not flinch. What scared her was something else — the fact that once you saved a thing, it existed outside of you. It could be found. It meant you were serious. And serious meant you had to decide what you were going to do about it.

Tonight she opens the tab again. Types the heading. Doesn't stop.

Tuition. Living costs. Lost income — three years of it, maybe more depending on how you counted. Loan repayment starting at month thirty-seven, assuming everything went the way it was supposed to go, which it never entirely did. She runs the total. Watches the number appear at the bottom of the column.

She runs it again. Same number.

It just sits there, the way an honest thing sits — patient, a little relentless, not asking anything from her except that she stop looking past it.

She sets the laptop aside and picks up her phone. Her mother's photo is still on the screen from this morning. Her mother, who worked two jobs for eleven years to keep the apartment warm, who never once described this as sacrifice, who called it just what you do. Lili had grown up knowing which numbers were allowed to matter and which ones people with more options learned to step around.

She hadn't learned to step around them. She'd learned to count them twice.

She picks the laptop back up. Moves the cursor to the top of the screen. Her hand is steady. One breath.

She names the file Plan. She saves it. She closes the laptop.

The number's still there. In the file, in her head, in the particular weight of a decision that's stopped being hypothetical.

So is she.

The committee's still meeting. So is Lili.