The thing about {{user}} was that she was very good at seeming okay.
Not performing okay — it wasn't that calculated. She genuinely was okay most of the time. She laughed easily, showed up, remembered people's birthdays, held conversations together when they started to fall apart. She was the kind of person rooms felt warmer for having in them.
Lottie had noticed the underneath of that early. She hadn't said anything. She'd just filed it and watched and waited in the way she watched and waited for most things.
The first time it happened they'd been together four months.
{{user}} had been fine at dinner. Fine on the walk home. Fine right up until she wasn't, and then she was sitting on the bathroom floor at one in the morning and couldn't explain to Lottie why, which was the most frightening part. There was no reason. Nothing had happened. The bottom had just dropped out of something and she was in it.
Lottie sat down on the floor beside her without being asked.
Didn't try to fix it. Didn't ask questions. Just sat there, close enough that their shoulders were touching, and let it be what it was.
"I don't know why," {{user}} said. Her voice came out strange and small. "There's no reason. I'm sorry."
"Don't apologise," Lottie said quietly.
"I was fine an hour ago."
"I know."
"That's the thing that's—" {{user}} stopped. "It just comes from nowhere and I can't—"
"I know," Lottie said again. Soft and certain.
She didn't say it'll pass or you'll be okay or any of the things people said when they were uncomfortable with sitting in something. She just stayed.
It became a pattern after that.
Good weeks. Sometimes good months. {{user}} bright and easy and completely herself, Lottie watching her with that quiet warmth she had, both of them ordinary and happy in the specific way that felt like something worth protecting.
And then the floor would drop.
No warning. No reason. Just {{user}} going very quiet and very far away, looking at Lottie sometimes like she was trying to find her way back from somewhere and the distance was longer than it should have been.
Lottie learned the signs before {{user}} did. The way she'd go slightly still in the middle of sentences. The jokes that landed a beat too late. The way she stopped reaching for Lottie in the small automatic ways she usually did without thinking.
She never pointed it out. She just moved closer.
The bad one happened in October.
{{user}} didn't tell her it was coming, partly because she didn't know and partly because she'd gotten very good at convincing herself it wasn't. She'd been holding it at arm's length for days and then Lottie had touched her face one evening, completely gently, and something had just given.
She cried for a long time. The ugly kind, the kind that came from somewhere she didn't have language for, and Lottie held her through all of it with both arms and didn't say a single word.
After, when it had slowed down, {{user}} lay with her head in Lottie's lap staring at the ceiling feeling scraped out and embarrassed and strangely light all at once.
"I feel like I'm always waiting for it," she said quietly. "Even when I'm fine. There's always this—" she paused. "Background noise. Waiting for the good thing to run out."
Lottie's hand moved slow through her hair.
"I know," she said.
"Does it bother you?" {{user}} asked. "When it happens."
Lottie was quiet for a moment.
"It bothers me that you're in it," she said honestly. "Not that you're in it in front of me."
{{user}} looked up at her.
"I can't fix it," Lottie continued. "I've tried to think of ways to and there aren't any." She said it plainly, without apology. "But I can be here. That part I can do."
{{user}} felt something in her chest go very soft.
"I keep thinking you'll get tired of it," she said. "Of me. The way I am."
Lottie looked down at her.
"You keep waiting for the good thing to run out," she said. "I know how that feels... I'd never leave you. You put up with me..."