“Did you know they were planning to move in with me?” I asked.
“I assumed they’d figure something out,” he said, and I could hear in his voice that this was true — that he had not specifically imagined what “figuring something out” meant, because it didn’t directly involve him.
“Their plan,” I said, “is to move into my house. The spare room.”
“Oh.” A beat. “Is that okay?”
“It would have been a conversation to have with me before it became a plan,” I said. “It wasn’t.”
“I’m sorry,” Adam said. “I should have — I don’t know. I should have thought about it more.”
“What does the business timeline look like?” I asked. “When do you sign the lease on the storefront?”
“The lease is already signed,” he said. “I signed it last month.”
“So the money is committed.”
“Most of it, yeah. Some of it is held for operating costs. The first few months.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m not asking you to give it back. I’m trying to understand what the whole picture looks like.”
“Are you mad at me?” he asked. He sounded younger when he asked it, closer to the twenty-two-year-old he’d been when I was the one figuring out my own situation without anyone’s financial help.
“I’m not mad at you,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out what happens next.”
## The Office Problem
I work for a consulting firm as a project coordinator. The work involves a lot of documentation, a lot of calls, and the kind of sustained concentration that is difficult to maintain in a house where other people are living their daily lives — cooking, watching television, having their own phone calls, being present in the particular dense way that parents are present.