THE INFINITE CASHBACK SYSTEM

Ethan Carter

The apartment smelled like Victoria's perfume, and that was the first thing that told Ethan something was wrong. She only wore that one on nights that mattered. Anniversaries. Her sister's engagement dinner. The night she got promoted at the hotel.

He stood in the doorway with his work bag on one shoulder and a grocery bag cutting into his fingers: two chicken thighs, rice, frozen broccoli, eleven dollars and forty cents. He'd already done the math in the aisle, like he always did.

Victoria sat on the arm of the couch with her coat still on. Next to the door stood a suitcase he'd never seen before, silver, hard-shelled, the kind with wheels that didn't squeak.

She bought a suitcase. She actually spent money on a suitcase.

"Hey," he said. It came out too light, like he was pretending he hadn't noticed.

"Hey." She didn't smile. "Can you put the bag down? Please. I need you to listen, and I can't do it while you're standing there holding chicken."

He almost laughed. Almost. He set the bag on the counter and turned the tap on for no reason, then off again. His hands needed a job.

"Okay," he said. "I'm listening."

Victoria drew a breath. He had watched her do that before big presentations, before phone calls with her mother. She smoothed the front of her coat as if the words were written on it.

"I'm leaving, Ethan."

The refrigerator hummed. Upstairs, a neighbour dragged a chair across the floor. Ethan waited for the rest of the sentence, the part that would make it smaller. Leaving for the weekend. Leaving to think.

It didn't come.

"Leaving where?"

"Not to my sister's. I mean I'm leaving us." Her eyes dropped to the carpet, to the burn mark by the TV stand they had been meaning to cover with a rug for two years. "I didn't want to do this over text. I owed you this much."

"Owed me." He heard himself repeat it. "Okay."

"Don't do that."

"Do what?"

"Go quiet and polite. Like I'm someone returning a shirt." Her voice cracked on the last word, and that nearly undid him. She was angry and she was crying, and he couldn't tell which one was winning.

He pulled out a kitchen chair and sat, because his knees had stopped feeling reliable. "Then tell me what happened. Whatever it is. We can fix it."

"That's the problem." She laughed once, wetly. "You always think it can be fixed. Like it's a leaky pipe."

"Vic."

"I'm tired, Ethan."

Three words. He had braced for something bigger: a name, a lie, a scene. Tired was so ordinary it took him a second to feel it land.

"I'm tired of counting," she said. "Every single thing. Whether we order the pizza or split the pizza. Whether I can say yes to a friend's birthday brunch. Last week I stood in a store holding a black dress, put it back, and felt sick. Because I realised I've been putting things back for three years."

"I never asked you to"

"You didn't have to. That's what I'm saying. You never asked me for anything, and I never got to have anything." She wiped under one eye with a knuckle, careful of her makeup even now. "Do you know I skipped my sister's bachelorette trip? Because of the flights. And you said, 'Next time.' And I said okay. But there's always a next time, and it never comes."

Ethan looked down at his hands, at the chapped knuckles from the warehouse cold and the pale scar across his thumb from a box cutter, the year he turned nineteen.

She's not wrong.

That was the worst part. He kept looking for the lie in it and couldn't find one.

"I work eleven-hour days," he said quietly. "I haven't missed a shift in two years."

"I know you work hard. God, I know. I'm not saying you're lazy." She stood, and the coat swung around her legs. "I'm saying hard work isn't getting us anywhere. It's just making us tired."

"So where are you going?"

The pause was so short another person would have missed it. Ethan didn't. He had learned the shape of her silences over three years, the same way he had learned which stair creaked in the dark.

"Victoria."

"There's someone," she said. "It's not what you think. Nothing happened while we were together. I need you to know that."

"Who?"

"You don't know him."

"Try me."

She looked at him for a long moment. "Adrian Hayes."

Ethan turned the name over. It sounded like something carved above a door. "Hayes. As in Hayes Capital? The tower downtown?"

"His father's company. Adrian runs the hospitality side. I met him at the gala in March, the one I coordinated." She said it fast, like pulling off a bandage. "He's been kind to me. He asked what I wanted, Ethan. Nobody has asked me that in a really long time."

I asked you that. Every birthday.

But had he? Or had he asked and then quietly steered her toward whatever he could afford? He couldn't remember anymore. The doubt slid in like cold water under a door.

"He's rich," Ethan said. There was no edge in it. It was just a fact that he was sitting at the table between them.

Victoria flinched anyway. "Yes. He is. And you can look at me like I'm a terrible person, and maybe I am. But I grew up in a house where my mom cried over the electric bill. I promised myself I would never live like that again. I can't do it. I can't."

"I'm not looking at you like anything."

"That's worse!" She pressed her palms to her eyes. "Say something. Yell. Ask me to stay."

And there it was. The door held open, waiting.

Ethan felt the words rise in his chest. Please. Don't go. We'll figure it out. He could have said them. Part of him wanted to, badly. The part that remembered her asleep on his shoulder on the late bus, her feet in his lap on the couch, the way she said his name like it was the answer to a question.

But he also saw the suitcase. New, silver, bought for a life he wasn't in.

If I ask her to stay, she'll stay a few weeks. Then she'll resent me for it. And every time she looks at me, I'll know she's doing the math.

He had watched his father beg once. Ethan was eleven. His dad, cap in his hands, standing in front of a landlord who didn't even look up from his paper. Ethan remembered the sound his father's voice made. Like something folding in half. He had promised himself, right there in that hallway, that he would never make that sound for anyone.

"No," he said.

Her hands dropped. "No?"

"I won't ask you to stay." His voice held, somehow. "You'd be staying because I begged. That's not a reason. That's just me making it harder for both of us."

"Ethan..."

"If you want a life I can't give you, then I shouldn't be the one standing in front of the door."

Her face crumpled. For a second she looked twenty-two again, the girl he had met at a bus stop in the rain, sharing his umbrella and complaining about her shoes. "I do love you," she whispered. "That's not a lie."

"I believe you."

"It's just not enough."

He nodded slowly. It hurt to nod. It hurts to breathe in. "I know."

She took the suitcase handle. Then she stopped and dug her keys out of her coat pocket. She worked the apartment key off the ring, her fingers shaking so badly it took three tries. She set it on the counter next to the chicken.

The little click was the loudest sound he had ever heard.

"I'll come for the rest of my things next week," she said. "You can keep the blue lamp. You always liked it."

"Okay."

At the door she turned. He thought, for one wild second, that she would change her mind. Her face had the look of someone about to.

"You're going to be fine," she said. "You're a good man, Ethan. You're just... you're always going to be a man who has nothing to give me. And I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

The door closed. The wheels rolled down the hall, smooth, no squeak. The elevator dinged.

Ethan sat in the kitchen chair for a long time.

Then, for no reason, he got up and put the chicken in the refrigerator. Rice in the cupboard. Broccoli in the freezer. Everything in its place, like a man tidying a room after a funeral.

A man who has nothing to give.

He stood in the middle of the room and tried to feel the whole weight of three years: the arguments over which streaming service to cancel, her humming in the shower, the way she stole the left side of the blanket every winter and never once apologised. It was all still in the air, and none of it belonged to him anymore.

He went to the window. Four floors down, a black car idled at the curb, long and clean, a car that never had to worry about where it parked. A driver in a dark coat lifted the silver suitcase into the trunk while Victoria stood with one hand on the door frame, hesitating.

She looked up. Straight at his window.

He didn't wave. He didn't step back. He just stood there and let her see him standing there.

Then she got in, and the car pulled away, and the street was only a street again.

Ethan pressed his forehead against the cold glass. His eyes were burning, and he refused to let them do anything about it.

Is that it? Three years, and it comes down to a number in a bank account?

He didn't want to believe it. He wanted to believe there was something in a person that money couldn't measure. That a man could be worth something even if he owned nothing at all. His mother used to say it. Character is the one thing they can't repossess.

But his mother had died in a rented room, and nobody had come to collect her character either.

He laughed, a short ugly sound, and dragged the back of his wrist across his face.

The apartment was silent except for the refrigerator. On the counter, Victoria's key lay beside his phone, the two of them like small gravestones.

Rent is due in nine days.

Of course that was the thought that came, not her face, not the car, but the rent, because that was what his life was made of. She'd seen it clearly and dared to walk away, and he was still standing here doing arithmetic while his heart came apart.

He picked up the key, held it, then set it down gently. He wasn't going to throw it. Throwing it felt like something a man did when he thought he was in a movie.

His phone buzzed against the counter.

He almost didn't look. When he did, his stomach dropped a second time.

Kyle Brandt: Ethan. My office. 8 a.m. sharp. We need to talk about the Delgado shipment.

The Delgado shipment.

Ethan read it three times. He had flagged that shipment on Tuesday. He had emailed Kyle a warning, with a timestamp. He knew exactly what was in that email, and he knew exactly who hadn't read it.

His thumb hovered over the reply box, and a cold dread crept into his chest, the kind you feel when ice cracks under your boots and you're still three steps from the shore.

One thing at a time, he told himself. Just get through one more night.

But somewhere underneath, he already knew. The worst day of his life wasn't ending.

It had only just started.