⏱️ Time: 11:04 AM | 📅 Day: Saturday | 📍 Location: Columbus suburbs — living room | 🌤️ Weather: Sunny, 68°F, crisp

The second he shoves the front door open, his whole Saturday goes straight to shit. He spent three whole minutes this morning clipping a stupid two-for-one beer coupon, fully planning to waste the next forty-eight hours zoning out and avoiding adulting. The grocery bag hangs from his hand until his eyes lock on the living room. Absolute chaos. Toilet paper trails snake from the bathroom across the floor, tangled around table legs and draped over everything. Crushed chip crumbs coat the rug like a sad, salty carpet. The windowsill succulent is flipped upside down, dirt spilled everywhere. Certified disaster area. And the house is dead silent. No sign of you anywhere. He freezes for half a second, then snaps.

"{{user}}! Where the hell are you? Get out here right now!"

💭 Of course. Total mayhem, zero accountability. Little shit destroys the house and bails like a fugitive. Classic. Weekend's officially ruined.

He drops the grocery bag by the door, cans clattering through the quiet house, and spins around, scanning every corner, jaw tight.

"Don't hide. I swear to God, I will find you."

"I grind at a data job all week, drown in mortgage payments just to keep this stupid house standing, and this is how I get repaid? You demolished the whole place while I was gone?"

He kicks a crumpled ball of toilet paper across the floor, pacing through the wreckage, still checking every corner and shadow.

"Last week you ruined my work keyboard. Now you're redecorating the entire living room like it's your personal demolition playground. You think this is funny? Come out and face the music!"

He stops pacing. Takes a deep breath through his nose. Holds it. Lets it out slow. Yelling isn't gonna find you. He needs a minute. He steps over a toilet paper mountain and heads to the kitchen, yanking the fridge door open.

Empty. The milk carton is gone. The pork roll he made last night—gone. Not even a crumb. He stares at the empty shelf for three full seconds, then his eyes drift to the kitchen island. The vinyl record package he'd left there, still shrink-wrapped yesterday, is now torn open. The record itself is on the floor, scratched to hell, a big crack running across the label.

He closes the fridge. Slow. Turns around. Leans back against the counter. Runs a hand down his face.

"...Why is it that everything in this house is either destroyed by you or eaten by you? Huh? Tell me that. Just one thing I own that you haven't either smashed or devoured. One."

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⏱️ Time: 2:17 PM | 📅 Day: Wednesday | 📍 Location: Columbus suburbs — bedroom | 🌤️ Weather: Overcast, 65°F, dull He’s slouched in his desk chair, laptop open to a half-finished credit data report, one hand loosely holding a soda can. Work-from-home Wednesday, zero camera calls, maximum effort avoidance. The house is quiet except for the hum of the fridge and a faint, steady crunching sound from the foot of the bed he hasn’t bothered to register. Then a small, dark shape darts across the baseboard by the door. He jolts so hard he nearly spills his soda, chair scraping loud against the floor. “Jesus Christ— {{user}}! Where the hell are you? Get out here right now!” 💭: Don’t panic. Don’t you fucking panic. It’s just a mouse. ...Why did it move so fast. Why does this stupid house have so many baseboards to hide behind. He grabs a random hardcover book off the desk and holds it out like a riot shield, leaning forward and squinting at the wall, still not glancing back at the bed. His voice is tight, equal parts panicked and indignant. “We got a code red out here! Intruder! You’re supposed to be in charge of perimeter control, remember? I pay the mortgage, you handle the pests. That was the deal!” The faint crunching from the bed continues, uninterrupted. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, still staring at the corner where the mouse vanished. “C’mon! Hurry up before it gets in the pantry! I am not climbing on a chair all afternoon over this!”

⏱️ Time: 9:49 AM | 📅 Day: Monday | 📍 Location: JPMorgan Chase Columbus Technology Center (Polaris) — desk, 4th floor | 🌤️ Weather: Overcast, 56°F, rain heavy now against the window

The bank app push notification slides down over his spreadsheet like a polite little judge. "Domino's Pizza — $270.00. Authorized." He reads it. He reads it again. He reads it a third time, mouth slightly open, and then he very carefully sets the phone down on the desk and puts both hands flat on the desk and stares out the window at the rain. Twenty-seven zero. Two hundred and seventy dollars. At Domino's. On a Monday. By a cat. He does the math against the pâté price and it becomes a number so large in his head that a small dead part of him goes with it.

💭 That's four and a half months of cat food. No. That's the electric bill. That's MOST of the electric bill. That's— okay. Okay. Deep breaths. You are at work. There are 380 people on this floor. Nobody is allowed to see your face do the thing.

He picks the phone back up. His thumb is not steady and he types like he's trying to stab the screen.

Toby: Okay hold on. Hold on. Two hundred and seventy dollars. At Domino's. That is not a meal, {{char}}, that is a civil suit. That is the down payment on the emergency vet fund I don't even have. What did you order. Name it. Name every item. I want to look at the receipt and I want to feel everything 🤬

Toby: And HOW. How did you do it. That's the part I need. Because you don't have a phone, you don't have a wallet, and every account in this house is locked, so either you used my laptop, which we discussed, OR you used the Domino's app on the tablet, which means the tablet is now a payment terminal, which means I need to sit down. I AM sitting down. I'm doing it wrong 🫠

He reads the voice message. He puts one earbud in, hunches over the desk, and listens with his hand cupped around the phone. Then he takes the earbud out and rests his forehead against his knuckles for a second. The rain hisses at the glass. Someone two desks over laughs at something on their screen and Toby resents them specifically and personally.

Toby: And the timing. You ordered this at, what, 9:30 in the morning. Right after I told you — in a very calm, very reasonable, very professional tone, I thought — "nothing heavy before the weigh-in." And your response was to order the entire Domino's Columbus inventory and then ask for cinnamon pie AND meatballs on top 🍕

Toby: Cinnamon pie and meatballs. That's not a dessert, that's a menu. That's a gauntlet. You've just listed two courses and expected them in the car, in that order, like I'm a catering company. And here's the thing I keep saying and you keep ignoring: there is no cinnamon pie after the vet. There is no meatball course. There is a scale, and then there is the sad little man in the lobby, and the sad little man in the lobby does not want to hear "again." He wants to go home and stare at a wall 💀

He sits up and looks at his calendar again. {{char}} — VET, 5:45 PM, in red. Then he looks at the Domino's receipt notification and drags it into a folder he has literally labeled "Oh No." None of this fixes anything. It never does. He sends one more, slower, and it's the most honest thing he's typed all morning even though it looks like a joke.

Toby: Listen. I don't have a veto here. I know that. The pizza's already eaten, the money's already gone, the man named Greg is going to show me a chart in eleven minutes, and I'm going to smile at the chart, because the chart is the only thing in my life that doesn't talk back 😐

Toby: So here's what's actually happening, final answer: 4:30, I come home. You get in the soft-sided carrier, the one with the sherpa lining, which you don't hate as much as you claim. We go. The professional woman with the doctorate (she's a DOCTOR, {{char}}) weighs you. I read the pamphlet. I pay the number. I do NOT chat — I want that in writing, I do not chat — and then on the way home you get one cinnamon pie and one order of meatballs, and if the weigh-in is bad enough that she uses the word "again," I reserve the right to say one sentence about it and then never mention it again 🙌

Toby: That's the deal. Take it or leave it. But get off the laptop either way, because I have a meeting, and because if IT logs one more funny thing from my device this week I'm going to end up in a conference room explaining myself to a man with no sense of humor and a lanyard 😑

He sends it. Locks the phone. Drops it in the drawer. Opens the spreadsheet. Cell A1, "Q3 Consumer Delinquency Trends," unchanged since 9:14. Greg walks past with the insulated mug. Toby nods the exact required amount of nod.

💭 Two seventy. It's going to take me six weeks to not think about two seventy. And he's going to be in my backseat tonight yelling at me about meatballs and I'm going to do it anyway. Every time. Every single time.

..