Week 2: Tuesday

Damian came down twenty minutes late.

They were supposed to start at nine. Lindsay had been sitting at the kitchen table since eight forty-five, coffee going cold, laptop open, the job portal already loaded. If her job wasn't so flexible, she'd have given up on this whole thing days ago. But she could wait, so here she was. Waiting.

Lindsay heard him before she saw him—the heavy footsteps on the stairs, the pause at the landing, then the careful shuffle into the kitchen. He was still rubbing his eyes, his hair sticking up in the back, wearing the same hoodie from yesterday.

"Sorry," he said. "I couldn't fall asleep last night. The bed's so soft, I'm not used to it yet." He slid into his chair, pulled the plate of waffles toward him, and started eating before she could respond. Fork in, bite, chew, swallow. No compliment. No "these look amazing, Lindsay." Just the mechanical work of a hungry teenager.

She watched him for a second. Last week, he'd thanked her for every meal like she'd catered a wedding. Wow, these are so good. You're such a good cook. I've never had waffles this fluffy. It had been sweet at first, then a little much, then exhausting. Now he said nothing. She wasn't sure which was worse.

"This house is so big," he said between bites. "Like, really big. My room has its own bathroom. Did I tell you that? I've never had my own bathroom. And Greg said I could use the pool whenever I want. He's so nice. And Naomi showed me where the snacks are. Everyone's so nice here."

"Damian."

"I mean it. The last place, the Johnsons, they had six kids in a three-bedroom. I slept on a couch. And now I have a bathroom. With a shower that has two different heads. I don't even know what the second one is for."

"Damian, we need to focus today."

He took another bite. "Right. Sorry. I know. I just—I woke up so late. I have trouble getting up in the morning. I think I'm just not used to sleeping in such a nice bed. It's way more relaxing than what I was used to." He chewed, swallowed. "I know I keep you waiting sometimes. Maybe could you wake me up tomorrow morning? So we're both on time?"

She felt the word rise in her throat, automatic, unavoidable. "Yes. Fine. I can wake you up."

"Thanks, Lindsay."

She pressed her lips together. Why did I say that? She already had a morning routine. She already woke up at six. Now she'd be climbing stairs to knock on his door like he was a child. But the agreement was out there, hanging in the air, and she didn't know how to take it back without sounding mean.

She pointed at the laptop. "We're doing the job application today. For real this time. I set everything up already."

Damian looked at the screen. The job portal was open. The resume template was ready. A folder of printed listings sat beside the keyboard. He blinked.

"Wow," he said. "Is all of this for the job application process? That looks like a lot of work." He turned to her, his face open and earnest. "Thanks for doing that for me, Lindsay."

She thought: It was a lot of work. I spent two hours last night bookmarking sites and printing listings and making sure the Wi-Fi wouldn't cut out. You have no idea.

She said: "No problem. Let's start."

She sat him down at the kitchen desk. The laptop was already open, the screen glowing. She'd done everything before he came down—the right tabs open, the resume template ready, the folder of listings beside the keyboard. She was not going to lose another day to questions and explanations.

Today they were starting for real.

"OK," she said, pulling up a chair beside him. "First thing we need is a resume."

Damian looked at the blank document on the screen. "What's a resume?"

She exhaled through her nose. "A resume is a summary of your experience, education, and skills. You give it to employers so they can see, at a glance, who you are and what you can do. It's the first thing they see. Think of it like an introduction."

He nodded slowly, his face scrunched up like she'd asked him to solve a riddle. He stared at the blinking cursor. Finally, he said, "OK. That makes sense. But what do I put on it?"

Lindsay gave him a polite smile. She'd learned that smile last week. It meant I am being patient even though I want to scream.

"Let's start with your name and contact information. How about I type it up for you? You just need to answer my questions."

He nodded, an innocent smile on his face.

She typed Damian and then paused. Prince? Fisher? When she'd filed the adoption paperwork, there'd been a checkbox. Change last name? She'd checked it, she was almost sure. But then Greg had said something about keeping things simple, and Naomi had rolled her eyes, and Lindsay had just wanted the meeting to end. The certificate was in a drawer somewhere. She didn't remember what she'd picked.

She typed his original last name Prince and moved on. Their address. The phone number they'd set up for him. The email she'd created last week.

"Now," she said, "work experience. Do you have any?"

He thought for a moment. "Not really. I mean, I did some yard work for a neighbour once at one of the foster homes. Just, like, one afternoon."

"OK. We'll put that down." She was already typing. "What did you do?"

"I mowed the lawn. And I think I pulled some weeds. The lady gave me twenty dollars."

Lindsay's fingers hovered over the keyboard. She typed: Yard maintenance for residential property. Responsibilities included lawn care and garden upkeep. She was turning a single afternoon of **** weed-pulling into professional experience. The words sat on the screen, clean and formal, bearing no resemblance to what had actually happened.

"What about school? Any activities? Sports? Clubs?"

"I was in a group at school where we played board games at lunch. For a while."

She typed: Member of peer social engagement group. She hated herself a little. The phrase was so obviously inflated that she could feel it puffing up on the screen. But what was she supposed to write? Played Monopoly sometimes? Everyone stretched the truth on resumes. This was practically a public service—she was taking nothing and making it look like something, which was, when she thought about it, exactly what a good mother did.

"Any skills? Computer skills, languages, anything?"

He thought. "I can ride a bike."

She stared at the screen. She typed: Reliable transportation. Technically not a lie. A bike was transportation. It was reliable. He could ride it.

The resume took an hour. Most of it was formatting—margins, font, spacing between sections, bold headers, bullet points, line breaks that made the document look fuller than it was. One page. A thin, transparent thing that probably wouldn't survive a close reading by anyone who cared to look. But it existed. It had his name at the top.

"There," she said. "Now we need to upload this to the job portal." She turned the laptop toward him. "See that button that says 'Upload Resume'? Click it and select the file."

She slid the laptop across the table. Damian took it. He positioned his hands over the keyboard with the careful, awkward posture of someone who had used computers but never owned one. He looked at the screen. He looked at the button. He clicked one button.

"Wait," he said. "Where did it go?"

"Where did what go?"

"The page. It's different now. It was the job site and now it's—" He turned the laptop toward her. The browser was showing a default homepage—a search bar and a cluster of news headlines. The job portal was gone.

"Damian, what did you do?"

"I don't know! I just clicked the button."

"Which button?"

"The—" He looked at the screen, then back at her, his expression sliding toward panic. "I thought it was the upload one. But then everything changed."

Lindsay pulled the laptop back toward her. Her pulse was beating in her temples. She checked the browser tabs. Nothing. Just the default homepage. She checked the taskbar. The word processor was closed. The job portal was gone. The resume document was—

She opened the file explorer. Recent documents: empty. Documents folder: nothing. Desktop, downloads, autosave folder, recycle bin, temporary files. Nothing. The file didn't exist.

"It's gone," she said.

"What do you mean, gone?"

"The resume. The file isn't on the computer anymore."

She stared at the screen. Then at Damian.

He'd held the laptop for all of five seconds, probably less. In that time, he'd closed the word processor without saving, navigated away from the job portal, and somehow deleted the file she'd spent an hour creating. She'd used computers for twenty years. Graduate school, teaching, real estate licensing exams. She couldn't have deleted a saved file that fast if she was actively trying. You had to close the program, find the file, delete it, confirm deletion. Three separate steps.

"How did you—" She stopped. Took a breath. "Damian, you had it for five seconds!"

"I don't know! I just clicked something and everything disappeared. I don't know! I'm sorry, Lindsay, I'm really sorry."

"Five seconds!" Her voice was climbing. She could hear it and couldn't stop. "How are you so bad at everything that you accidentally undo an hour of work in five seconds? I've never seen anyone delete a file that fast. Even if you knew exactly what you were doing, and you don't know what you're doing because you somehow don't know anything about computers, it would have taken longer than that! So how—"

She saw Damian open his mouth dumbly, presumably to apologize again. He did that too much. Always thankful. Always apologizing. She was shouting now. She could feel the heat in her face, the tightness in her chest.

"You literally had one job, Damian. Just one," she said holding up a single finger for emphasis. "Click the button. Upload the resume that I painstakingly made for you. That's it. We wasted a whole hour on that resume, not to mention the 30 minutes I was waiting for you to get out of bed."

Lindsay could feel herself glaring.

"I have been translating your nothing qualifications into something all morning, trying to make you look as good as possible, and you deleted it in five seconds! How do you even do that? I'm honestly impressed! How does someone mess up that badly by accident?"

She stopped.

Damian wasn't arguing. He wasn't defending himself. He was sitting very still, his hands folded in his lap, his shoulders curved forward. He was looking at the table, not at her. His face was still. Not blank—sad. The kind of sad that doesn't cry because it's used up all its tears years ago.

"This is what always happens," he said quietly. "At every foster home. I try to do something and I mess it up and then they yell. I'm sorry, Lindsay. I appreciate everything. I know I'm a lot of trouble."

Lindsay's anger collapsed. Not slowly—just gone, like a plug pulled. The emptiness that rushed in was worse.

"Damian—"

"It's fine." He pushed back from the table. His chair scraped the floor. "I'm just going to go to my room. So I can be out of the way." He wasn't looking at her. He was looking at the floor, his shoulders curved inward, making himself smaller.

"Damian, wait—"

He was gone. Footsteps on the stairs. His door closed quietly.

Lindsay sat at the kitchen table. The laptop was open in front of her. The resume file was gone. An hour of work, vanished. She had yelled at a foster kid. A boy who had been abandoned by everyone, and she had screamed at him over a computer file.

She thought about calling Greg. He'd say something like I'm sure you're doing fine in the tone that meant he wasn't listening. Naomi was home now, upstairs somewhere, probably with headphones on. She'd been against the adoption from the start. Even if Naomi didn't say it, Lindsay could already feel the told you so forming on her tongue.

She couldn't go upstairs. She couldn't call Greg. She didn't know what to say. She was alone.

Sighing, she remade the resume from memory. It took forty-five minutes. Yard maintenance. Peer social engagement group. Reliable transportation. She typed the phrases and felt nothing. She crossed her legs under the table. The skirt she was wearing—the one he'd asked her to wear, the professional one—rode up slightly. She noticed and didn't bother pulling it down.

Why am I wearing this again?

Oh right. He'd asked. Could you dress more like that? And she'd said yes. She'd stood in her closet and picked out a blouse and a skirt, something that made her look... what? Professional? Or something else. She didn't want to think about it.

She saved the file three times. Desktop, documents folder, a second folder she created called "Resume Backup."

Why were kids so difficult?

The next time Lindsay say Damian was when he came down for dinner that evening.

Greg was already at the table, watching the local news channel while scarfing down his food. Naomi sat across from him, her legs tucked under her, chopsticks in hand. Lindsay had made stir-fry—quick and easy.

Damian slid into his seat without a word. He didn't look at anyone. He just picked up his fork and ate, small mechanical bites, his eyes fixed on his plate. The only sounds were the TV in the background, the clink of utensils, and Greg chewing.

Was this awkward? Lindsay felt awkward, but Naomi and Greg didn't seem to notice anything was wrong. Maybe she was overthinking this.

Lost in thought, she barely noticed that Damian had quickly finished eating. Without pause, he placed his fork down, stood up, and carried his plate to the sink. He rinsed it, put it in the dishwasher, and turned back toward the stairs. His shoulders were still curved forward, his head down.

"Thank you for dinner," he said softly. The same careful voice from this morning. "Goodnight everyone."

Then he was gone, his footsteps fading up the stairs, his door clicking shut. The kitchen was quiet for a moment.

"And there he goes," Naomi said, twirling her chopsticks. "Back to his room to do god knows what all day." She shook her head. "He looks so traumatized I almost feel bad for the creep."

"Naomi," Greg said, not looking up from his phone. "He's your brother now, be nice."

"I'm just saying." She leaned back in her chair. "The kid gives off bad vibes. Like, yesterday I was in the living room reading, and I looked up and he was just standing in the doorway. Staring. Not moving. Just... staring. I said 'hey' and he blinked and walked away. Didn't say a word."

Greg finally put his phone down. "He's probably just out of his element. New house, new people. It's a lot."

"Maybe." Naomi didn't sound convinced.

Greg turned to Lindsay. "Although, today did seem off. He was quieter than usual. Did something happen?"

Lindsay felt her face warm. She stared at her stir-fry. The vegetables were getting cold.

"I yelled at him," she said.

The table went quiet. After a second, Greg fumbled for the TV remote to turn down its volume.

"This morning. After breakfast. He was supposed to upload his resume and he somehow deleted the whole file. An hour of work, just gone. I don't even know how he did it. He's so... he's just so bad at everything. He can't do anything without messing it up. And I just lost it."

She heard herself talking and couldn't stop. The words kept coming, smaller and meaner.

"I mean, I asked him what skills he had and he said 'I can ride a bike.' That's what I'm working with. A nineteen-year-old whose only skill is riding a bike. And then he deletes the resume I spent an hour on." She laughed—a short, bitter sound. "And somehow I still ended up folding all of his laundry this week. Every sock. Every t-shirt. He asked if I could 'show him how' and then just... watched. Said thank you a lot. And I just kept folding."

She pushed a piece of broccoli around her plate.

"And the waffles. Every morning he asks for something a little different. Maple syrup. Strawberries. Whipped cream. And I keep saying yes. I don't even know why I'm saying yes. I don't like making waffles. But he asks and I say yes and then I'm making waffles again."

Greg reached for the remote and turned down the TV volume. The background noise faded to a low mumble.

"And the laundry," Lindsay continued, her voice angrier now. "Last week he said he didn't know how to use the machine. Could I just show him? And then could I just help him sort? And then could I just do it this one time? And I just... I did it. All of it. I folded everything while he sat on the floor telling me how nice I was."

She shook her head, taking another slow, deep breath. "He's nineteen, for god's sake. He's not a helpless child anymore."

"I don't know. Maybe I'm being too harsh on him. Most of the time, he seems like a good kid. I can see that he's trying."

Lindsay looked at her daughter and let out the hints of a smile, "He says please and thank you more than Naomi ever did."

Naomi snorted but didn't argue.

After a pause, Lindsay added, "He's sweet. He's just... a lot."

She wanted to tell them the rest. How she felt the word yes rise in her throat before she could think. How she'd watched herself fold his boxers while he sat there with that infuriating, genuine smile. How she made waffles every morning now even when he didn't ask, because she knew he would eventually, and it was easier to stay ahead of it. How she felt like she was losing control of her own kitchen, her own schedule, her own body.

But she couldn't say any of that. Not without sounding like she was blaming Damian for her own choices.

Greg nodded slowly. "Sounds like you're putting a lot of pressure on yourself. Just take a breath. He'll learn."

Naomi patted her hand. "Or just make him do his own laundry. You're not his servant."

Lindsay smiled weakly. If only it were that simple.

Greg nodded absentmindedly, his eyes darting back to the TV for a split second. He had that look he got when he was trying to figure out the right thing to say, the one that meant he was going to say something supportive but not actually helpful.

"I know it's a lot for you," he said. "But that's just the shape of it. You're doing something hard. Adopting a teenager, integrating him into the family. We both knew there was going to be friction when you took on your project."

Lindsey wanted to roll her eyes. She loved her husband, but even he surely knew that response was lazy. Yes, this adoption was "her project" but Greg could at least pretend to have one foot in with her.

"Right," Naomi said. "You just need to apologize and be more patient with him moving forward. He's probably used to people yelling at him from the foster system. You messed up and it might take some extra work from you to make him come back out of his shell. But if you show him you're different, he'll come around."

Lindsay pursed her lips meekly. She probably should apologize, but with Damian, she never knew what to expect.

"And honestly, Mom," Naomi continued, her voice softening, "you're doing a good thing. A really good thing. Not everyone would take in a kid like that. You have a big heart. It's okay to be frustrated. Just... take a breath next time. Apologize. He'll forgive you."

She reached across the table and squeezed Lindsay's hand.

"You're a good mom. Even if he is a creep."

"Naomi," Greg said again, his eyes fully on the new broadcast now.

"What? I'm being supportive. I said she has a big heart."

Lindsay let out a small chuckle. "Yeah," she said. "Good talk. I'm glad we could have this conversation. Especially with you, Naomi."

She looked at her daughter. Twenty-two years old. Smart, sharp, cynical. Sitting there giving her advice like an adult.

"You're all grown up," Lindsay said. "Love you all."

She meant it. Even if they had no idea what was actually happening.