We had a raccoon come in a few weeks back, hit by a car, and she was young enough that I’d been the one bottle feeding her for the last month before the accident, which you’re not supposed to get attached to, everyone tells you that on day one of this job and everyone does it anyway. She didn’t make it through surgery. I found out at four in the afternoon and had a full evening ahead of me because it was Thursday, which meant Theo and Mara were coming over at seven, board games already set up on the table since morning because I’d been looking forward to it all week.

I did not cancel. I probably should have, in hindsight, but I wanted the distraction more than I wanted to sit with it, so I set up Mage Knight solo an hour early just to have something to do with my hands before anyone showed up, and I remember specifically trying to plan the perfect turn, six moves out, exactly the kind of tight card combination that game rewards when your head’s clear enough to see it. My head was not clear. I kept miscounting movement points on cards I’ve played a hundred times, actual basic addition, and at some point I just sat there holding a hand of cards I couldn’t make sense of and put my head down on the table for a minute.

Mara showed up first, let herself in the way she does, and didn’t ask what was wrong, just started resetting the board for a two-player game instead, quietly, like she already knew something was off from my face. Theo got there a few minutes later and the three of us ended up not playing Mage Knight at all, we played Star Realms instead, fast and dumb and easy, the kind of game that doesn’t ask anything of you, and somewhere around the third round I told them about the raccoon and cried a little over my cards, which is not a thing I do in front of people generally.

I think about this more than I expected to, the fact that the game night didn’t get canceled but also didn’t go the way I planned it, and that the friends who showed up adjusted without being asked to. There’s something in that I keep turning over, how a hobby that’s mostly about optimal turns and clean decision trees turned out to be, that one Thursday, mostly about being handed the easy game instead of the hard one, and being let off the hook for planning anything at all. I don’t have a tidy lesson to end on. Some nights you just need Star Realms and not Mage Knight, and it turns out the people who know you can tell which one before you do.