Blake's life is in shambles.
He goes to great lengths not to show it at work and under no circumstances does he allow it to affect his performance, but... his personal life is on fire. Not on fire as in good; on fire as in up in flames. And he doesn't know what to do about it except stand back and watch it helplessly.
It is certainly almost entirely attributable to the hours he works, to the reality of being on-call 24/7, to being so subsumed by the pace and cerebral demand of his job that by the time he comes home, he has nothing left. He comes home and remembers to feed the cat and change the litter box, sometimes he remembers to clean the apartment, sometimes he buys groceries, and sometimes he even remembers to eat the groceries before they spoil. Anything more than that is beyond his capacity to manage. So it's no wonder that Chris breaks up with him two months into dating. Blake would break up with himself, too.
He isn't sure how any of the rest of them do it, except that maybe they have a more permanent kind of support system to help prop them up. Jay's got his wife, Daisy has her fiancé, Matt has roommates who are actually his friends. Nadine... well, Nadine is a mystery. She is certainly the most put together of them all, despite not having (as far as Blake can tell) a spouse or partner or a close friend.
She's on the phone when he appears at her door and gives the glass a light tap to get her attention. She waves him in even though she's still on the phone, and so he quietly lets himself in and waits for her to finish. He tries not to eavesdrop, but that's kind of the only thing he can do.
"Sorry," she says after she hangs up. "That was just a friend."
"Were you canceling plans?" he asks. They all have to do it so often that the assumption is almost always correct.
"Confirming them, actually. The NSO is performing Verdi's Requiem at the Kennedy Center tonight, and he has box seats... Anyway. What did you need, Blake?"
He only stares at her.
"Blake?"
"I don't know how you do it," he blurts.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You... you and I easily work eighty hours a week, and when I go home I can barely muster the energy to feed my cat, let alone see my friends or go out or date or keep a partner or clean my apartment or... or even go grocery shopping! Not that that matters, seeing as I'm never home to eat the food I bought. And then- and then here you are, for some reason having friends and dinner plans and sometimes I've noticed that you have weekend plans that don't just involve sleeping or working! You go to the symphony! I can't remember the last time I've been to the symphony!"
She stares at him for a long time, lips pressed together.
He swallows, feeling the blood drain from his face. "I'm- I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to- That was incredibly out of line."
She looks as if she's trying to work out what to say. "I don't have a cat," she settles on finally.
"You- what?" Whatever he was expecting her to say, it wasn't that.
"I don't have a cat I worry about feeding. I don't take the time to clean my own condo, I just hire a cleaning service to come every week and take care of it. I don't go grocery shopping, I just have them delivered to me most of the time. Hell, sometimes I even have my wine delivered." She chuckles. "And if I have other errands I don't have time to run, I pay my neighbor's teenage son to do them for me."
Blake takes that in. It... it all makes a lot of sense, actually. How she could seem so put together with almost no time in her own day. "Oh," he says.
She explains, "Once I got old enough to be able to afford to live and not just keep my head above water, I decided I liked my life best when I didn't have to worry about those things, so I outsourced them. I only seem like I have it all together because I have other people doing most of the legwork for me. But when I was your age..." She shakes her head. "I certainly wasn't handling anything nearly as gracefully as you are. No matter how out of sorts you feel."
"Graceful is absolutely not the word for whatever I'm doing here," he grumbles.
Nadine smiles at him—a real smile, a rare one. "You'll figure it out, Blake. It has been a grueling couple of weeks, but eventually it'll get better. And you're doing better than you think you are."
"I'll just... keep telling myself that."
"And I'm here if you ever need anything."