Chapter 78: Darren’s Switch?
The burger place was called Stack & Co — a narrow storefront with vinyl booth seating, a handwritten specials board, and the kind of lighting that suggested the budget had gone into the food rather than the atmosphere.
Darren didn’t mind. He’d suggested it himself, which in hindsight he was grateful for because at least the choice had been his.
Kezia sat across from him in the booth with her coat still half on, reading the laminated menu with the unselfconscious ease of someone who genuinely didn’t care where she was as long as the company was right. She was warm in that way — uncomplicated about the small things, which made Darren like her more than was probably wise given his current situation.
"The double stack or the classic?" she said, not looking up.
"Double stack. Always."
"You’ve been here before?"
"Few times." He picked up his own menu without reading it. "Fries are good here. Better than they have any right to be."
She smiled at the menu. "Sold."
They ordered at the counter — Darren insisting, which used the last of the cash he’d moved from his emergency fund that morning without telling anyone, including himself. He brought the tray back and they settled into the easy rhythm of two people who had passed the stage of performing for each other.
The conversation moved the way their conversations moved — without agenda, covering ground at its own pace. She talked about a difficult week at work. He listened properly, asking the right questions, the ones that showed he’d heard the detail rather than just the outline. She laughed at something he said about a neighbour in his building and the laugh was real and unguarded and Darren felt, for approximately forty minutes, like a man whose life was entirely in order.
Then she reached into her bag.
"Before I forget." She pulled out her phone, navigating to something. "My cousin’s birthday dinner is Saturday. I know it’s short notice but I wanted to ask if you’d come." She looked up briefly. "It’s at Harvest Vine. I already checked — the set menu is around ninety per head."
She said it naturally. No weight behind it, no expectation visible in her face.
Darren kept his expression exactly where it was.
"Saturday," he said.
"I know it’s soon—"
"No, Saturday works." He picked up his burger. "I’ll sort it."
She smiled and put her phone away and the conversation moved on and Darren ate his food and laughed at the right moments and said the right things and felt the number — ninety dollars, one hundred and eighty for two, tip on top of that — sitting in the centre of his chest like a stone he’d swallowed without water.
He didn’t have it.
Not comfortably. Not without moving things he couldn’t afford to move.
Twenty minutes later she reached for the bill when it arrived and he reached for it at the same time and their hands met on the small plastic tray.
"I’ve got it," she said. Gently. No drama around it.
"Kezia—"
"Darren." She met his eyes. Not with pity. Just with the steady warmth of someone who had assessed the situation and made a decision she wasn’t going to make uncomfortable. "Let me."
He released the tray.
She paid without ceremony and returned the card to her wallet and resumed the conversation where they’d left it, and Darren sat in the vinyl booth of a cheap burger restaurant and felt himself become smaller than the room.
He drove her home forty minutes later. She kissed him at the door — warm and genuine despite the bills being paid by her, it was kind and it carried no hint of belittlement of what it had cost him to sit across from her tonight and smile through it.
"Saturday," she said.
"Saturday," he confirmed.
He waited until her door closed before walking back to the car but the way he ran, his back wasn’t straight like someone who was filled with confidence but quite the opposite as a matter of fact.
He drove without destination, home was the last place he wanted to go.
The city moved past the windows at the indifferent pace of a place that had no investment in how he was feeling, and Darren drove until the streets thinned and the lights spread further apart and he was somewhere on the outer edge of the neighbourhood with no particular reason to keep going.
He pulled over and killed the engine.
The fuel gauge sat at the red line. He looked at it for a long moment.
He couldn’t fill the tank.
He ran the actual numbers in his head — not the approximate version he usually used to avoid the specific discomfort of precision, but the real ones. Rent arrears. Credit card minimum payments he’d been meeting by increasingly creative means. Electricity. The Saturday dinner. The gap between all of it and what he had access to was not a gap anymore. It was a drop.
He reached into the glovebox.
His hand found the familiar weight before his brain had fully authorised the action. He pulled it out and looked at it in the low light of the street.
He sat with it and thought about the neighbourhood. About which blocks. About how quickly and how clean and how unlikely — at this hour, on a quiet street, with enough desperation sitting in his chest to temporarily silence the part of him that knew exactly what kind of man did this.
And then Liam’s face appeared in his mind.
Not saying anything. Not lecturing. Just the specific expression Liam used when he had registered something and was deciding whether to say it — calm, direct, already disappointed before the words arrived.
Darren kissed his teeth.
Loud, in the silence of the car.
He put it back in the glovebox and closed it.
He sat there for a long time afterward, hands on the wheel, engine off, tank on empty.
He needed money and he needed it fast. And this moment showed how close he was to the edge.