Gold Digger – Story 3 – THEY KNOW EVERYTHING
Sunday. Just got home.
I need to tell you about my friends.
Not because they’re relevant to the plan – they’re not, technically – but because they’re the reason the plan exists and also the reason it will probably one day spectacularly collapse and you should probably know who’s who when that happens.
There are three of them.
Sara has known me since we were seven years old and sharing a wall in a terrace that smelled like other people’s cooking. Same street. Same school. Same hand-me-down everything.
She married at 24. Has a baby now. Part-time work, small house, a husband who fixes things on weekends and means it when he asks how her day was.
She is genuinely, completely, almost offensively happy.
I love her for it and I find it slightly baffling and I would suffocate inside her life in approximately eleven days and she knows this about me and loves me anyway.
Sara is the only person who knows where the plan actually came from.
Not the spreadsheet part. The underneath part.
She was there before the spreadsheet. Before the targets. Before I decided money was a personality trait I needed to acquire by proximity.
She doesn’t bring it up.
I don’t explain it.
We don’t need to.
She gets updates over cheap wine after the baby goes to sleep.
She listens with her whole face.
She never once says Mila, are you sure about this?
She already knows the answer.
Loves me anyway.
What I perform for Sara: the girl who made it out.
What I actually feel with Sara: like I never had to make anything up.
Claire I met at work three years ago.
- Corporate. The version of put-together I am actively performing toward. She has shoes that cost more than my first month’s rent and she wears them like she hasn’t noticed.
Divorced once. Quietly. Doesn’t talk about it.
Claire finds the plan strategically sound. She gives tactical advice with zero emotion and I mean zero – last week she looked at my acquisition timeline over a flat white and said you’re moving too fast on the dinner frequency, scarcity drives value with the same face she uses for quarterly forecasts.
It was genuinely helpful.
I took notes.
What I perform for Claire: the colleague who has it together.
What I actually feel with Claire: slightly nervous and also slightly competitive and I would never tell her either of those things because she would absolutely use them.
Zoya I met at a rooftop party eighteen months ago. We bonded over a cocktail that tasted like regret and haven’t stopped texting since.
24. Works in something creative that barely pays. Perpetually, disastrously in love with someone wrong. Currently it’s a musician. Before that it was a poet. Before that it was, genuinely, a man she met on a train who she followed to the next stop.
Zoya thinks the plan is the funniest thing she has ever heard in her life. She supports it completely and undermines it constantly by bringing up D at moments specifically designed to derail me.
Two weeks ago I was telling her about Richard and she waited until I finished and then said but does he make you feel like D does and I said that is not the point and she said okay but does he and I left shortly after.
What I perform for Zoya: the older friend who knows what she’s doing.
What I actually feel with Zoya: completely seen and mildly terrorized.
So that’s them.
Sara would worry. Claire would strategize. Zoya would make it about D.
None of them get fully unfiltered Mila.
That’s what you’re for.
Spreadsheet status: Sara → knows the underneath. handle with love.
Claire → knows the strategy. handle with performance.
Zoya → knows too much. currently being managed. D → [row does not exist]
Zoya keeps opening it anyway. – Mila
My friendships are great. My personal life is a disaster. But that’s a next time story.