This Time I Keep the Keys

Sixty days before the apocalypse

Nessa had woken up from what she couldn't quite explain—was it a dream or not? But a chilling warning had flashed through her mind and echoed in her ears: APOCALYPSE IN 60 DAYS. She had panicked, rushing to find Adrian to tell him what was about to happen, only to be met with a reality she never expected in all her life. They deserved each other anyway.

Sixty days before the apocalypse.

Her fiancé was kissing Celia when Nessa's phone asked her to pay for their dinner.

She stood across the street beneath a pharmacy sign, watching the restaurant's glass wall. Adrian had chosen the table behind the indoor olive tree. Private from the dining room. Perfectly visible from outside.

On her screen, the payment request waited for approval.

Business expense, his message said. Card limit issue. Help me out?

Celia laughed against his mouth.

Nessa raised her head and saw the disgusting romance between Adrian, her fiancé, and her best friend, Celia. Such a shame, being lied to by the two people she had sworn to trust.

Now it all made sense to her. The other time she had caught them in a restaurant, Adrian had explained that Celia was trying to secure a work contract worth millions for him. All this while, they had been fooling her, squandering her income, never once thinking how she'd fare one day when everything got out in the open. And just like that, today was the day of reckoning indeed.

Nessa pressed Decline.

The sound that left her was almost a laugh. After everything she remembered, she had expected the sight to destroy her. Instead, the sharpest feeling was embarrassment at how long she had once worked to explain it away.

Last time, she had entered the restaurant. Adrian had called it a misunderstanding. Celia had cried. Nessa had been persuaded to apologize for making a scene, and then to approve the payment anyway.

Twelve days later, he had emptied their wedding account and left with Celia.

That had happened before the storms. Before the city went dark. Before money stopped buying food because there was no food left to buy.

She had spent the apocalypse with a dead phone, an empty kitchen, and a list of promises Adrian had made while the world still worked. On the hundred-and-eighty-seventh day, the public shelter's generator had stopped. She remembered lying under a coat that was no longer warm enough.

Then she had opened her eyes this morning, in her own apartment, with sixty days still on the calendar.

All afternoon, she had checked dates, messages, the news. Now she had checked him.

Inside the restaurant, Adrian reached for his phone.

Nessa watched his smile disappear.

He called. She let it ring while she opened her banking app and checked the balance he had been planning to borrow from.

Two hundred and forty thousand dollars. Her savings. Still hers.

She had earned it through missed weekends, emergency deliveries, and nights when Adrian slept while she found another refrigerated truck. He liked telling people they had built everything together. Usually she let him. Tonight, looking at the balance, she remembered whose hands had actually done the work.

Her thumb steadied. The money on that screen could become a roof that stayed dry. It could become breakfast in a winter when she had once licked crumbs from her palm.

The second call came before the first notification vanished.

This time she answered.

“Ness, did the approval time out?”

“No.”

“Then approve it. I'm with a client.”

She looked through the glass. Celia was tracing the edge of his wrist with one fingernail. Nessa knew that gesture. He had once told her that touching his hand made a crowded room disappear.

“Which client?” she asked.

“Someone you don't know.”

“I've known Celia for ten years.”

His head came up.

For a second, he searched the restaurant. Then the street. Nessa stepped out from beneath the pharmacy sign and met his gaze through the window.

He removed his hand from Celia's.

That almost made her angrier than the kiss. Even now, he thought changing what she could see might change what she knew.

“Don't come in upset,” he said. “We can discuss this properly.”

“We are discussing it properly.”

“It isn't what it looks like.”

“Then you won't mind paying for it yourself.”

She ended the call.

A tram passed between them, bright windows carrying people home with shopping bags and headphones and plans for the weekend. Nessa felt the countdown settle into place. Not a nightmare. A deadline.

She had built delivery schedules for hundreds of refrigerated orders a day. She knew suppliers, warehouses, the difference between cheap food and food that would last. She knew the first roads that would flood and the apartments whose impressive smart systems would become useless when their backup batteries died.

This time she would buy water before anyone thought to fight over it.

Food. Medicine. Power. A secure place above the flood zone.

First, she had to stop the man inside that restaurant from spending another dollar of the money she needed.

Adrian came through the door, fastening his jacket. Celia followed, holding the bag Nessa had bought her.

“You're throwing away six years over dinner?” he said. “This is what you do. You decide you're the victim, then punish everyone.”

He lowered his voice.

“If you weren't always working, I wouldn't have needed someone to talk to. Now you're humiliating me in the street. After everything I've put up with.”

Nessa opened her banking app.

“I'm ending it because I'm done with your constant manipulation. And I'm done with you acting like you're doing me a favor by being with me.”

“Nessa—”

“Your choices aren't my fault. I just hope you get ready for what's coming,” Nessa declared, removing his payment card from her account.

“I'm calling off the wedding!”