WHAT PRIYA SAID

Priya had worked at Sunridge for five years, which was two years longer than Ada, and she had the particular exhaustion of someone who had stayed past the point where love alone could sustain it.

She was funny  genuinely, wickedly funny  which Ada had always thought was either the best armour care workers could have or the most dangerous, depending on when you put it on and whether you ever took it off.

She found Ada in the break room at half past twelve on a Thursday, eating leftover rice from a container with the focused attention of someone who had twelve minutes to consume five hundred calories.

Shut the door, Priya said.

Ada shut the door.

Priya sat down across from her, poured them both tea from the pot that was always slightly stewed by lunchtime, and said: I'm thinking about leaving.

Ada set down her fork. "Sunridge, or care work?"

Both. Priya wrapped her hands around her mug. She had small hands  small hands that moved very fast and were capable of extraordinary gentleness. My sister keeps sending me job adverts. HR positions. Office hours, consistent salary, no one dying on you.

People die in offices too, Ada said. Slowly, of spreadsheets.

Priya almost laughed. Almost. "Ada."

I know." Ada picked up her fork again. Put it down again. "How long have you been thinking about it?"

Since Mrs. Griffiths. Since I drove home that night and sat in my car for forty minutes and couldn't make myself go inside because I knew my husband would ask how my day was and I wouldn't know how to answer.

Mrs. Griffiths had been in January. Ada had driven home that night too, slowly, taking the long route.

That's not a reason to leave," Ada said carefully. That's a reason to talk to someone. Or to take some time.

Or it's a reason to recognise that I've given this job everything I have and it keeps asking for more. Priya looked at her steadily. Don't do that thing where you make me feel like wanting less than this is a failure of character.

Ada opened her mouth. Closed it.

You do it, Priya said, not unkindly. "You make care work feel like a calling, and maybe for you it is. But some of us are just  people. Who need weekends. Who can't always give our best when our best is half-empty.

The truth of it settled between them like something physical.

I don't think wanting less is a failure, Ada said finally.

You think it's a failure for yourself though.

Ada didn't answer.

When did you last take a day off just because you wanted to? Priya pressed. Not sick. Not training. Just a Tuesday, because you felt like it?

Silence.

That's what I thought. Priya drank her tea. You give everything here. And then you go home and give the rest of it to your mother on the phone and your residents in your head. What's left for you, Ada?

Ada thought about her yellow throw and her succulents and the recipes on the corkboard she hadn't made yet.

Quite a lot, actually, she said, and it sounded less convincing than she intended.

Priya gave her a look that communicated several paragraphs' worth of scepticism without a word.

You do this, Priya said finally. You give everything to everyone in here and then go home and starve yourself of the same thing. One day the people around you are going to notice before you do.

Ada thought, later, about that word. Starve. It was too precise. The kind of word that arrives when someone knows you well enough to be accurate in ways you'd rather they weren't.

She went back to her round.

That night she looked up what HR roles paid. She closed the browser after four minutes. She was not ready to want less. She was not entirely sure that was a virtue.