The Ember Keeper

You are the steady warmth other people organise their lives around. Not the flare, not the spectacle — the fire that is still going at four in the morning. You are the one who holds the household together during the illness, who keeps the team intact through the reorganisation, who remembers everyone's birthday in a year when nobody remembered yours. Your loyalty is not a decision you make repeatedly. It is simply the shape you are.

People love you for reliability of a kind that has become rare. Around you, they can stop performing. They bring you things they would not tell anyone else, because they know you will not flinch and will not repeat it.

The price is that heat given out continuously is still heat leaving. You have no practice at asking for fuel, and no vocabulary for it either — the request sounds to you like weakness, or like a bill being presented to people you love. So you burn down to coals and call the exhaustion a personal failing. It is not. It is arithmetic.