She Called It Three Episodes Ago

The text came in at around six. Not a question, just: 'tonight?' I said yes before I'd even looked at what I had going. That is a thing Simone has managed to do consistently for years and I don't think she knows she does it.

We'd been working through the last season of something I'm not going to name because I know at least a few of you are still two episodes back and I have some decency. What I will say is that there's a specific episode, the second-to-last, where the show does a thing it has been quietly building toward for three seasons, and when it happened Simone made a small sound that was not quite a word, and I looked at her, and she had the expression of someone who has been keeping a secret without technically lying. I said: 'you knew.' She said: 'I suspected.' There is a difference, apparently.

still processing

Afterward we sat in the kitchen and let the mugs go cold in the way you do when something has happened on a screen that feels like it happened somewhere adjacent to real life. I've been thinking about why that is, why certain endings land that way while others don't, and I think it has something to do with whether the story trusted you the whole way through. This one did. It earned the thing it did. That doesn't make it easier; it actually makes it a little harder, which is the right outcome.

Simone left around nine. The prints are still leaning against the wall. The cord's shadow reached most of the way across the windowsill by the time I turned the kitchen light off. October is doing something specific with the light this year and I keep meaning to write about it separately, but maybe this is that.

the windowsill in October light, which is its own category of light