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Chapter 1. Certificate of Wasted Years

(Neville’s POV)

The certificate hung crooked on the break room wall, and I didn’t bother straightening it. Employee of the Month, it said, with my name printed beneath in a font that tried too hard to look important. I’d brought it home to show my parents, held it up like a kid with a spelling bee ribbon, and my mother had smiled the way people smile at funerals—kind, pitying, already looking past you toward something that mattered more.

“That’s nice, honey,” she’d said. Then: “When are you going to lose some weight?”

Twenty-nine years old. College degree gathering dust in a drawer somewhere. I made sandwiches for a living, and I made them amazingly well. That was it. That was the whole biography. Here lies Neville: he could really spread mayonnaise.

I walked home through the July heat, and Texas pressed down on me like a hand on a Bible. The sidewalk was cracked, split open in long jagged lines that ran parallel to the curb, weeds pushing through in stubborn little tufts of green—the only things in this city that seemed to thrive without permission. Strip malls lined both sides of the road: a vape store, a nail salon with half its letters burned out, a payday loan place with bars on its windows. The parking lots shimmered, heat rising off the asphalt in visible ripples, bending the air, making everything look slightly unreal. Like the whole city was a mirage and I was the only fool still walking toward it.

My scooter had died two weeks ago. I couldn’t afford to fix it. So I walked—twenty-five minutes each way, sweat soaking through the beige polo before I’d even made it three blocks. The uniform was the color of sand, of dry grass, of everything in this part of the state that had given up trying to be green. I fit right in.

The sun was low and mean, sitting just above the horizon line like it had nowhere else to be. A tumbleweed—an actual tumbleweed, because this was my life now, a country song without the truck—rolled across the street in front of me, and I stepped over it without breaking stride.

I thought about Lara.

I always thought about Lara.

We’d met at university, at one of those evening lectures nobody actually wants to attend but everyone goes to because there’s free pizza. She was sitting two rows ahead of me, dark hair pulled up in a messy bun, laughing at something her friend said, and I remember thinking: That’s the kind of girl who doesn’t know guys like me exist. But she did. She turned around and asked if I had a pen, and I gave her my only one, and she smiled—God, that smile—and I spent the rest of the lecture writing nothing, understanding nothing, completely ruined.

We were happy. For years, we were genuinely, stupidly happy, and I walked around campus like a man who’d gotten away with something, because someone like her had chosen someone like me. I couldn’t believe it. I kept waiting for the correction.

It came. Just not the way I expected.

I couldn’t balance survival with romance—that was the diagnosis, anyway. I was always working, always picking up extra shifts, always too tired for the dates she wanted, the trips she planned, the small daily demonstrations of love that she needed and I couldn’t seem to provide. I loved her. I loved her so much it felt like a physical thing, lodged in my chest, heavy and permanent. But I expressed it the way I expressed everything: internally, silently, assuming she could feel it through sheer proximity.

“You don’t feel it but you know, right?” I’d said once, near the end. “You know I love you.”

She’d looked at me with those dark eyes, and something in them had already left. “I used to know. I don’t feel it anymore, Neville. I can’t keep tolerating this.”

“Then go ahead,” I said. Angry. Stupid. Never believing she actually would.

She did.

The months after were... I don’t have a word for them. I didn’t get out of bed for days at a time. I cried until my face hurt, until my ribs ached, until I was just dry-heaving into a pillow in my dark room surrounded by beer bottles and dirty clothes. I replayed every mistake: every canceled dinner, every forgotten anniversary, every time she’d reached for my hand and I’d been holding a sandwich spreader instead. I followed internet advice—don’t show you care, make her miss you, play it cool. It pushed her further away. Of course it did. Everything I touched turned to entropy.

When friends told me to move on, I called her instead. Drunk, desperate, two in the morning.

Her voice was flat. Tired. “Get yourself together, Neville. Life with you was a struggle for survival, and I was the one getting destroyed. I have no health left to be with you. Stop calling. Stop trying to rescue something that no longer exists.”

That was the phone call. The one that taught me what a broken heart actually felt like—not the poetic version, not the song lyric, but the real thing: a physical sensation in my chest, like someone had reached in and squeezed, and everything that used to work in there just... stopped working right.

I still saw her around town sometimes. Last week, at the grocery store. Yellow sundress, hair longer now, laughing into her phone. Still beautiful. Still the kind of beautiful that made my throat close up. She didn’t see me. I stood in the cereal aisle holding a box of off-brand cornflakes and watched her walk past, and I thought: What if I had tried harder? What if I had been different? What if I had just once put down the goddamn sandwich spreader and taken her dancing?

But I hadn’t. And she was gone. And I was here.

My apartment was exactly what you’d expect. A den, basically. Beer bottles on the nightstand, the desk, the floor near the bed. Dirty clothes in a pile that had achieved a kind of geological permanence. Scattered papers, an old laptop with a cracked screen, a half-eaten bag of chips that had been there long enough to qualify as decoration. I didn’t clean. I’d stopped fighting it; everything goes toward entropy—that’s just physics, that’s just the second law of thermodynamics applied to a one-bedroom in Texas. The universe tends toward disorder. I was merely cooperating.

My parents’ house was ten minutes away, and every visit felt like a performance review I’d already failed. My father sat in his recliner watching the evening news, muttering about “idiots and thieves” in government, finding confirmation for every belief in whatever the television told him. My mother scrolled Facebook on the smartphone she’d just learned to use, showing me photos of people I went to high school with. “Look, Brandon got promoted. He’s a manager now.” Pause. “At a real company.”

They didn’t say I was a failure. They didn’t have to. Their silence on the subject of my future said everything; their careful avoidance of asking “What’s next?” told me they’d already decided there was no next. In their world, the world of steady jobs and pensions and houses bought on a single income, my situation was incomprehensible. A college graduate making sandwiches. A grown man who couldn’t afford to fix his scooter. Welcome to the twenty-first century, where the rules changed and nobody sent a memo to the parents.

I lay on my bed that night, staring at the ceiling, the Texas heat still radiating through the walls even after dark. Somewhere outside, a car alarm went off briefly and stopped. The strip mall across the street cast a pale glow through my window—the nail salon’s remaining letters spelling out something unreadable.

Tomorrow I’d go back. I’d put on the beige polo and the grease-stained apron and I’d stand at my station and I’d make sandwiches so perfect that even the lunch rush customers—the ones who ordered without looking up from their phones, who took their food and left without a word—even they would taste something. Precision. Care. The only love I knew how to show, directed at bread and lettuce and thin-sliced turkey.

Someone at work had mentioned a new hire starting soon. I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t care. New people came and went at Midway like tumbleweeds through a parking lot—briefly present, then gone, and the landscape unchanged.

But that night, lying in my messy room with Lara’s ghost pressed against my ribs, I felt something I couldn’t name. Not hope—I was too smart for hope, or too broken, which sometimes felt like the same thing. Just... a shift. Like the air before a storm, when the pressure drops and your ears pop and you know something is coming, even if you can’t see it yet.

I made sandwiches well. That was all I had.

It would have to be enough.

Chapter 2. The Girl Who Stepped Back

(Neville’s POV)

The new girl showed up on a Tuesday, during the dead stretch between the lunch rush and the evening prep, when the kitchen smelled like bread and industrial cleaner and nothing much happened. I thought she was a boy at first—short light-brown hair tucked behind her ears, no makeup, frame so thin the beige polo hung off her shoulders like it was still on the hanger.

Then she turned, and I saw the face. Soft features, gentle mouth that curved slightly upward even though she wasn’t smiling. Pale blue eyes that looked at everything and everyone like she was cataloging threats.

“Neville,” the boss said, jerking his thumb at me. “He’ll show you around.”

“Hi.” I stuck out my hand.

She looked at it. Then shook it—briefly, the way you’d handle something you weren’t sure was clean. Her palm was cold and dry.

“Bailey,” she said. Nothing else.

The tour lasted three hours. I walked her through the kitchen—the stations, the ovens, the walk-in freezer, the sink area, the break room with its crooked Employee of the Month certificate. I explained the sandwich assembly process: bread first, then protein, then cheese, then vegetables, then sauce, then top bread, then wrap. I demonstrated. I talked about oven temperatures, timer settings, the importance of consistent lettuce distribution. I made jokes. She didn’t laugh.

In three hours, she said maybe forty words. Responses came in fragments—“okay,” “got it,” “sure”—delivered in a quiet, careful voice that sounded like she was editing herself in real time.

I wrote her off. Unfriendly. Weird. Another body filling a position until she quit or got fired, like everyone else who drifted through Midway.

Then Ashley came back from her time off—copper ponytail swinging, silver boot earrings catching the fluorescent light, whistling something country. Ashley was the one normally responsible for the position Bailey had been covering, and the boss rearranged the line accordingly.

“Bailey, you’re next to Neville now. He’ll supervise your sandwich-making until you’re up to speed.”

She looked at me. I looked at her. Neither of us seemed thrilled.

I took the responsibility too seriously. I knew it even as I was doing it, and I couldn’t stop. Every sandwich she made, I watched. Every move, I had a note.

“The bread’s uneven. You want to center it.”

She adjusted.

“More lettuce on the left. You’re leaving a bald spot.”

She added lettuce.

“The turkey should overlap like shingles, not stack like pancakes. See?” I demonstrated, holding up a perfectly shingled arrangement of deli meat. “Structural integrity.”

She stared at the turkey, then at me.

“You want the sauce in a zigzag, not a straight line. Distribution matters.”

For three hours, I did this. Three hours of micromanaging another person’s relationship with sandwich components. She said nothing. Her jaw tightened slightly each time I spoke, but I was on a roll, delivering the accumulated wisdom of years of sandwich excellence to someone who clearly needed my guidance.

Then she finished a sub, reached for the wrapper, and I said, “The tomatoes are clustering on the right side. You should—“

“This sandwich,” she said, turning to face me fully for the first time, her pale blue eyes suddenly very present, very cold, “is for my lunch.”

She picked it up, walked to the break room, and sat down to eat it alone.

I stood at my station holding a spreader, mouth open, heat creeping up my neck. Mike, passing behind me with a tray, patted my shoulder.

“Smooth,” he said.