in case of emergency, pt. 5

I've never fallen for anyone quite so quickly as I did Clara. For the next several months it felt like we were never separated. And then her lease expired and I didn't even think twice about asking her to move in with me. It just felt right, and the economy was still pretty bad. It made sense. She moved in while I was out of town. I came home and it felt more like home than it ever had.

I'm really not sure how you're supposed to describe it. It's not like everything was perfect, but it felt like one of those one-in-a-million things. We were seizing the moment because it was something you couldn't pass up.

But times were tough and the money got tight, and my savings were starting to look a little thin, and neither of us were pulling in enough to add any more to it--we could get by, but an emergency would bankrupt us both. I was out of ideas.

She suggested she could sell some of the little statuettes and trinkets she had. She had a lot of them--boxes and boxes of them, and a lot of them she used to decorate the house. "They're from my grandma. She'd travel a lot and she always came home with something for me."

"You don't have to do that."

"They're just trinkets. What am I going to do with a little statuette? I don't need a paperweight."

"I guess."

There was a spare room that was ostensibly a study that I mostly used for storage, and she set up camp in there. She'd spend a few hours doing inventory and listing them for sale online after she came home every day. "Don't ever interrupt me though," she said. She insisted on it several times. "If you interrupt I'll get distracted and I'll never get anything done. This is for both of us."

And if I knew one thing about her, it was that it's never good to argue when she was this insistent. And I never went into the room anyway, so it wasn't much work to agree.

"You have to promise," she said.

"I promise."

"Then I'll get you your savings back."