Characters

SAM EDWARDS, 36 | White | Lincoln Square, Chicago

Relationship status: Three years out of a five-year relationship that didn’t end badly enough to feel clean. He wasn’t cruel — he just kept not proposing, and eventually she stopped waiting. She’s been casually dating since, mostly via apps, with the low-grade exhaustion that comes from being good at first dates and not much further.

Children: None. This is the thing that lives in the back of her chest. She wanted kids and still does, and the math is not lost on her. She doesn’t talk about it much because people always say you have time and she’s tired of being reassured by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.

Mental health: Eating disorder — specifically a restricting pattern she developed at 15 that went formally undiagnosed until 28. She did a partial hospitalization program in her late 20s and has been in recovery since, but “recovery” for her means managed, not gone. Periods of stress bring old habits back. She knows her own warning signs. She doesn’t always act on them.

Sexuality: This is where it gets complicated and interesting. Sam is straight, but her relationship to sex has always run through her relationship to her body, and her relationship to her body has always been a war with a ceasefire. In her twenties, sex felt like a referendum — was she desirable enough, thin enough, present enough. She performed confidence she didn’t have and then lay awake afterward not sure what she’d given away. Recovery changed some of this. Therapy helped her locate desire as something that belonged to her rather than something she owed. By her mid-30s she’s reached a place that feels like genuine reclamation — she knows what she wants, she’s capable of asking for it, and she has a particular, hard-won pleasure in her own body that coexists with the days when the old voices are loud. The tension is unresolved. That’s the honest version. She’s had one hookup in the past year that was genuinely good — a man she met at a conference, two nights, no follow-through — and she thinks about it more than she’d admit.

Friend group: Her closest friends are mostly from MSU. A few have drifted — marriages, kids, moves to the suburbs. Her Chicago social life is newer and thinner than she’d like. She’s always the one who plans things.

ENROLLMENT

Sam’s enrollment is the most cerebral of the five and the most ironic. She is, professionally, a research compliance officer — someone who reads agreements for a living, who understands what it means to sign something. She starts reading the Arbitration documentation the way she reads everything: methodically, looking for the catch. She doesn’t find one she can name. What she finds instead is an assessment that identifies her, with unsettling accuracy, as someone whose cognitive load has been quietly consuming the life she meant to be living.

The specific moment: she’s at her therapist’s office, and her therapist asks what she actually wants her life to look like in five years. Sam opens her mouth and finds she has no answer. Not because she hasn’t thought about it — she thinks about it constantly — but because every version of the future she can imagine requires a series of decisions she hasn’t made yet and can’t make under current conditions. She goes home, pulls up the Arbitration documentation she’d set aside three months earlier, and starts reading again. The section that gets her is the one about mismatch — the idea that most suffering isn’t caused by cruelty but by people being in the wrong configuration for who they actually are. She has spent her entire adult life being very competent at a life that doesn’t quite fit. The eating disorder, the stalled dating life, the job that uses her skills without engaging her — she has always understood these as separate problems. The Arbitration framework names them as the same problem. That reframe is what undoes her. She enrolls not with hope exactly, but with the particular relief of a diagnosis.

LIFE UNDER ARBITRATION

The Arbiter probably keeps her in Chicago — she has genuine roots there now — but moves her out of research compliance entirely. Her actual profile is someone with extraordinary attention to detail, genuine ethical instincts, and a care for systems working correctly that research compliance uses only bureaucratically. The Arbiter likely places her in patient advocacy or healthcare ethics — a role where her precision has human stakes and her work feels like it matters. She’s probably been two doors away from her right job for years.

On relationships: the Arbiter doesn’t pair her immediately. It places her in a community where compatible people exist and lets the proximity do its work. There’s probably someone in her new professional circle — not a dramatic love story, just a slow accumulation of the right kind of attention from someone who isn’t frightened by her.

Children: the Arbiter’s assessment almost certainly flags this as something she genuinely wants and has been deferring through circumstance. It doesn’t force the question but it structures her life so the obstacles that kept it theoretical are no longer present.

The confrontation moment: the Arbiter’s assessment of Sam names the eating disorder not as a personal failing but as a rational adaptation to a life of chronic mismatch — the body regulating what the circumstances couldn’t. That reframe is either the most healing thing she’s ever read or the most threatening. Probably both.

ABBIE FOSTER, 41 | White | South Shore, MA

Relationship status: Divorced. Married at 31 to a man she met at a bar in Providence who turned out to be the same man at 35 as he’d been at 28, just less charming about it. They were together seven years total, married four. The divorce was mutual in the way that means both people were exhausted. She got the dog and the debt.

Children: One daughter, Mia, age 9. Abbie has primary custody. The ex has Mia every other weekend and sometimes forgets to show up. She is the kind of mother who is doing everything right and is too tired to know it. Mental health: High-functioning anxiety — triple-checks everything, wakes at 3am running through scenarios. Low-dose SSRI. A therapist she sees when she can coordinate childcare.

Sexuality: The marriage killed something in her that she’s been slowly trying to locate again. Sex with her ex went from good to dutiful to infrequent to absent over about three years, and she spent that whole decline telling herself it was normal, it was stress, it was the baby, it was everything except what it was — two people who had stopped being curious about each other. Since the divorce she’s had two sexual experiences. The first was a disaster: three months of dating a perfectly acceptable man that felt, physically, like going through motions she’d memorized from a previous life. The second was a surprise — a woman, a colleague she’d known for years, one night after too much wine at a work retreat. Nothing came of it. She hasn’t fully metabolized what it meant. She doesn’t think she’s gay. She also can’t stop thinking about it, not with guilt but with something more unsettling — a recognition that her desires might be less mapped than she thought at 41. She hasn’t told anyone. She barely tells herself.

Friend group: Mostly other South Shore moms now — not by design but by gravity. One URI friend she texts constantly but sees twice a year. She misses having friends who knew her before she was someone’s mother and someone’s ex-wife.

ENROLLMENT

Abbie’s is the most practical and the most heartbreaking. She is holding together a full life with both hands and there are not enough hands. Single mother, primary earner, managing a house, a custody schedule, a dog, a job that requires travel she has to beg her mother to cover, and the low-grade anxiety that never fully turns off. She is not looking for meaning. She is looking for margin.

What tips her is something small: Mia gets sick on a Thursday night — fever, nothing serious — and Abbie has to be in Worcester by 8am Friday for a client presentation she cannot reschedule. She spends four hours on the phone trying to solve the problem, calling her mother (unavailable), her neighbor (can’t), Mia’s dad (doesn’t pick up until the third try, then says he’ll try to move some things around, which means no). She ends up taking Mia to the presentation. Not a disaster. Mia sits in the corner with her iPad and Abbie delivers the presentation in the clothes she drove two hours in. On the way home, Mia asleep in the backseat, Abbie pulls into a rest stop and sits in the parking lot for twenty minutes not crying, just — stopped. Not a breakdown. Just the body saying: this is too much.

She’d heard about Arbitration from a coworker who enrolled two years prior and whose life had, visibly, smoothed out. She’d filed it under not for me — too much, too permanent, too strange. In the parking lot she pulls it up on her phone and reads the section on single-parent provisioning. The Arbiter, it turns out, treats single parenthood as a specific category with specific resource considerations. Childcare, scheduling, community placement near family support networks. She reads it three times. Then she submits an Expression of Intent, because she has nothing left to lose by reading more.

LIFE UNDER ARBITRATION

The Arbiter moves her. Not far — but out of South Shore. Her assessment identifies that her support network is too thin and too dependent on her mother, that her proximity to her ex creates low-grade chronic stress, and that Mia’s development would benefit from a more structured community environment. The Arbiter places her in an enrolled community somewhere in the greater Boston area with robust childcare infrastructure and other single parents nearby — not as a social engineering project but as a provisioning decision.

Work changes moderately. Loss control consulting stays — she’s genuinely good at it — but the Arbiter restructures her schedule around Mia’s needs rather than around client demands. She probably moves to a more regional role that eliminates the travel that’s been breaking her.

The ex: the Arbiter can’t control him, but it can structure the custody interface so that his unreliability has less operational impact on Abbie’s life. The community she’s placed in probably has people who can absorb what he drops.

Relationship: not immediately. The Arbiter assesses that Abbie needs to discover who she is outside of crisis management before she’s capable of choosing well. It places her near people she finds interesting. What she does with that is hers.

The thing she didn’t expect: the Arbiter’s assessment acknowledges the night she kissed her colleague. It doesn’t make a declaration about her sexuality — it simply notes that her assessed community placement includes people across a fuller spectrum than her previous social world. Abbie reads that sentence three times and doesn’t know what to do with it.

NIYA WILLIAMS, 37 | Black | Houston (Third Ward / Medical Center)

Relationship status: Two years with DeShawn, who she met through a cousin at a family cookout. He’s solid, good with her parents, works in logistics. She loves him. She’s not sure she’s in love with him in the way she imagined she’d feel by now. She hasn’t said this to anyone.

Children: None yet. Her mother asks every Sunday. Her grandmother asks more directly. Niya wants kids but she’s also holding a quiet fear — she’s worked in healthcare long enough that Black maternal health outcomes are not an abstraction for her.

Mental health: Low-grade chronic depression, undertreated. Raised in a faith tradition that treated mental health as something you prayed through. She runs to manage it. She talks to God about it. She suspects she could use a third option.

Sexuality: Niya is a deeply sensual person who grew up in an environment — church, family, Third Ward — where female desire was acknowledged obliquely at best. The message she absorbed was that good women were desired, not desirous. You were chosen; you didn’t choose. She internalized this more than she knows. Her sexual history has been entirely with men, exclusively within committed relationships, and she’s never thought to question that frame — not because she’s repressed but because the frame was seamless enough that she never saw its edges. With DeShawn, the sex is comfortable and warm and she initiates less than she used to. She sometimes finds herself more aroused by her own imagination than by what’s actually happening, and she doesn’t examine that gap too closely. There’s a version of Niya that is waiting, without knowing it, for permission she doesn’t know she needs.

Friend group: Rich and deep — TSU women, church community, family, work friends. Houston is woven through with people who love her. Sometimes the density feels like its own pressure. Everyone knows her business.

ENROLLMENT

Niya’s enrollment is the most communal and also the most private. She doesn’t arrive at it alone — she knows three people who’ve enrolled, including a colleague at Houston Methodist she respects enormously — but the reason she actually does it is something she doesn’t tell those people, or anyone.

She’s been with DeShawn for two years and she has understood for at least six months that she is not going to marry him. She loves him. He is good. And she is not going to marry him. Sitting with that knowledge — which she cannot act on yet because she doesn’t know how to — she starts noticing the texture of her life more carefully. The Sunday lunches where everyone has an opinion. The director role she keeps not taking because it would mean less time for family, and her family counts on her time in ways that were never negotiated, just assumed. The depression that runs underneath everything like a low current she’s learned to function around. The sense that her life, which looks from the outside like exactly what she wanted, has been built to everyone’s specifications but her own.

Arbitration, when she finally reads about it properly, does something unexpected: it makes her cry. Not the marketing language — the section on community assessment. The idea that a system would look at who she actually is, at the specific shape of her needs, and then build a life around that shape instead of asking her to fit into shapes that already exist. She has never been asked what she wants in a way that felt like the question had structural consequences. The Arbiter asks it first and then does something about the answer. She enrolls quietly, without telling her mother, which is how she knows she’s serious.

LIFE UNDER ARBITRATION

The Arbiter keeps her in Houston. Her family ties are not a complication to be solved — they’re assessed as a genuine source of strength. But it restructures how she exists within them. Niya has been the family’s emotional infrastructure without being assessed or compensated for that role. The Arbiter names this clearly: she has been giving at a rate that exceeds what she’s receiving, and the imbalance is part of what’s been muffling her.

Career: the director role she’s been avoiding. The Arbiter simply assesses that she should take it. The reasons she’s been declining — family time, visibility, the weight of being one of few Black women at that level — are real, and the Arbiter’s community placement is designed to provide the support infrastructure that makes those reasons less load-bearing.

DeShawn: this is the hard one. The Arbiter’s assessment doesn’t tell her to leave him. It tells her — through the shape of her community placement, through the life it’s building around her — that the relationship she’s in is not the relationship her assessed profile needs. She has to make the conclusion herself. The Arbiter just makes it impossible to avoid.

The thing the Arbiter gives her that she didn’t know she needed: a therapist, specifically matched, who is the first person to treat her depression as a clinical reality rather than a spiritual deficiency. This might be the most important thing it does for her.

TIFF LIANG, 38 | Chinese-American | Koreatown, Los Angeles

Relationship status: Single. More comfortable with it than she lets on. She dated seriously through her late 20s and early 30s, including one four-year relationship that probably should have ended at two. She has a type — high-achieving, emotionally unavailable — and she knows this about herself.

Children: None. Not a crisis for her. Her parents, particularly her mother, feel differently.

Mental health: Anxiety and perfectionism forged in a high-expectation household. Extraordinarily capable, extraordinarily hard on herself. Has never been to therapy. Drinks more than she should — two glasses of wine most nights, sometimes three — and doesn’t think about it too carefully.

Sexuality: Tiff has a robust and entirely private erotic life that would surprise the people who know her professionally. She is controlled in most domains; sex is the place she’s least interested in controlling anything. The four-year relationship was the last time she felt genuinely uninhibited with another person, and its end — he left, eventually, for someone less intimidating — left a specific kind of damage she’s still carrying. Since then she’s had a handful of encounters, mostly with men she meets through work adjacencies, all conducted with a discretion that borders on secrecy. She enjoys sex and doesn’t conflate it with intimacy, which is efficient and also a form of protection. What she hasn’t admitted to herself is that she’s hungry for the latter. She reads a lot of literary fiction that’s really about longing and tells herself she reads it for the prose. She’s also bisexual in a way she’s never acted on and doesn’t think about too hard — it’s always been there, a background frequency she’s filed under irrelevant given current circumstances.

Friend group: UCLA friends scattered across LA and beyond. She sees them enough, though “enough” has drifted. Lives in Koreatown partly as a way of being Asian in LA without being legible to her parents.

ENROLLMENT

Tiff is the most resistant and ultimately the most deliberate. She approaches Arbitration the way she approaches everything professionally — she builds a spreadsheet. She models the financial outcomes, the career trajectory implications, the statistical wellbeing data. She interviews three enrolled friends with structured questions. She reads the legal architecture documents that most prospective enrollees skim. She is, for about eight months, the most sophisticated skeptic the system has probably encountered.

What she can’t model is the loneliness. It doesn’t show up in spreadsheets. She’s in her apartment on a Saturday night — not unhappy, not sad, just in her apartment on a Saturday night, with work she could be doing and a book she’s not reading and a glass of wine she’s nursing — and she has the sudden, vertiginous sense that this is simply what her life is. That she has built, with great competence and discipline, a life in which there is no room for anything she didn’t plan for. The four-year relationship ended because she was intimidating. Her friends are scattered. Her family wants from her what she doesn’t know how to give. Her erotic life is a series of discrete encounters she enjoys in the moment and doesn’t think about afterward because thinking about them would mean wanting something.

The Arbitration section that gets her is the one about community placement — the idea that enrolled individuals are placed in communities of assessed compatibility, that the loneliness epidemic is, from the Arbiter’s perspective, a provisioning failure rather than a personal one. She has spent her whole life treating her isolation as a personal failure. Reframing it as a structural problem that a structural solution can address is — she will admit this, much later, to exactly one person — the most relieving thing she’s ever read. She submits her Expression of Intent on a Tuesday morning before her second coffee, the same way she places a trade: analysis complete, decision made, proceed.

LIFE UNDER ARBITRATION

The Arbiter takes her out of the boutique Century City firm. This is the confrontation. Her entire identity is built around that career trajectory — the grad degrees, the quantitative finance specialty, the particular prestige of where she works. The Arbiter assesses that the environment, while professionally matched, is socially corrosive for her specific profile. The competitiveness she thrives on professionally is the same mechanism that’s been keeping intimacy at arm’s length.

It places her in a larger institutional role — probably a public pension fund or a university endowment — where her skills are fully utilized but the culture is less predatory. Less status, more substance. She hates this assessment for about three months and then notices she’s sleeping better.

Housing: out of Koreatown. The Arbiter places her in a community with higher assessed social compatibility — probably still LA, maybe Silver Lake or Pasadena — where her neighbors are people the system has determined she’d actually like if she gave them time.

Relationship and sexuality: the Arbiter doesn’t out her. But her community placement is notably diverse in ways that create options she’s never had proximity to. The bisexuality she’s filed under irrelevant becomes, in this new environment, simply a fact about her that the world around her is equipped to receive.

Children: the Arbiter assesses this as genuinely unresolved rather than decided. It doesn’t force it, but it removes the structural barriers that made it feel impossible. What she does with that open door is the question.

DANI CRUZ, 39 | Salvadoran-American | Midtown Houston

Relationship status: Ended a three-year long-distance relationship with a man named Marco last year. Not over it as much as she tells herself. Seeing someone casually — a guy she met at a bar — but not investing much and suspects he can tell.

Children: None. She watches her brother’s kids and something moves in her she doesn’t examine too closely.

Mental health: Imposter syndrome and identity fracture as a lived condition. Twenty years of performing authority in rooms where it wasn’t assumed. Charming, excellent at her job, privately exhausted.

Sexuality: Dani’s relationship to sex is inseparable from her relationship to power, and her relationship to power is complicated. She grew up Brown and female in a culture that had very specific ideas about both, moved into a professional world that had different but equally specific ideas, and has spent her adult life navigating the gap. In practice this means she’s a woman who knows exactly what she wants and has a hard time wanting it without interrogating it first. She was raised Catholic — lapsed now, mostly, but Catholicism doesn’t leave you — and early messages about female desire as something to be managed, offered carefully, never too eagerly, settled into her somewhere she can’t entirely reach. She is extremely good at sex in the same way she’s good at her job: she reads the room, she delivers, she leaves people wanting more. What she’s less practiced at is being the one who needs something. Vulnerability in bed is the thing that costs her most. Marco was the last person she let see her that way, and losing that relationship took more than she’s told anyone. She’s been using the casual situation — the guy from the bar — as a kind of anesthetic, and she’s aware enough to know that’s what it is.

ENROLLMENT

Dani’s is the most unexpected, because Dani is the woman you would least expect to surrender control. She has fought for everything. She has built herself, door by door, in rooms that weren’t built for her. She is not the demographic the Arbiter’s marketing imagines.

But that’s exactly it. She is so tired of fighting. Not the career — she’s good at that, she can sustain that. It’s the everything else. The parents she loves and can’t reach. The brother who stayed and the guilt she carries for leaving even though leaving was necessary. The Marco-shaped hole in her chest that won’t close. The guy from the bar who is a placeholder and they both know it. The sense that she has optimized for professional success so completely that she forgot to build a personal life, and now she’s 39 and the blueprint is missing.

She reads about Arbitration first in a profile piece about a Black and Latina enrollment cohort in Houston — women whose stories are not the tech-bro early-adopter narrative she’d associated with it. One of the women interviewed says something that lodges in Dani like a splinter: I was so busy proving I could do everything myself that I never stopped to ask if doing everything myself was actually working. Dani reads that sentence four times. She texts the article to no one. She stares at her apartment — the nice apartment in Midtown she chose herself, the art she hung herself, the life she built herself — and she feels the specific loneliness of a person who won and found the trophy lighter than expected.

She submits her Expression of Intent two weeks later, at 11pm on a work night, and then closes the laptop and goes to bed. She sleeps better than she has in months.

LIFE UNDER ARBITRATION

The Arbiter keeps her in Houston — her roots matter, and Midtown suits her actual temperament even if Gulfton shaped her — but it restructures her relationship to her work. Energy sector sales is a good fit for her skills and her love of the room, but the travel has been a substitute for having a life. The Arbiter cuts the travel significantly and places her in a more strategic role — probably business development or client relations leadership — where she’s still in the room but the room comes to her more often.

The parents: the Arbiter does something quietly radical here. It doesn’t make her go home more. It assesses that the guilt and the distance are a structural problem, not a personal failure, and it provisions accordingly — potentially relocating her parents to an enrolled community closer to Midtown, or building support infrastructure around them that means Dani’s presence is chosen rather than obligated. For the first time in her adult life, when she goes to Sunday lunch, it’s because she wants to.

Relationship: the Arbiter assesses that Dani needs someone who doesn’t require her to be the strongest person in the room. It probably places her near someone — and the profile suggests this person could be a man or a woman, the Arbiter doesn’t seem to share Dani’s assumptions about this — who has their own authority, their own groundedness, and no interest in being managed. Someone she can’t perform for because they’d see through it.

The thing she fights hardest: the Arbiter’s assessment names the exhaustion underneath the competence. Dani has been so busy proving she could do everything herself that she never questioned whether doing everything herself was the goal. Reading that, she probably closes the document and doesn’t reopen it for a week. Then she reads it again.