Along the way, while I was fighting for those kids, I forgot to fight for myself.
The elevator opens on the seventh floor.
I walk down the hallway to apartment 708, and before I even turn the key, I already know. The lights are off. I can sense it, the way you eventually learn to feel all the things you have stopped saying out loud. Two years of that particular quiet, and I still cannot decide if it is peaceful or just the absence of something I never had enough of to notice losing.
I unlock it anyway and the apartment opens into darkness.
The city bleeds through the floor-to-ceiling windows—amber and white against the black sky, painting the living room in that cinematic way that looks beautiful in photographs and is akin to standing inside a painting someone else made of your life. All gorgeous light, no warmth. Story of this fucking apartment.
I hit the switch with my elbow, drop my bag by the door, and shrug off the blazer, hanging it on the hook before I move through the living room toward the kitchen. My leg hits the small table as I pass, and the framed photograph tips forward, face down against the surface with a soft, flat knock. I right it without looking. It’s the one Damien’s friend took of us at a rooftop party eight months ago. Damien’s arm around me. Drinks in our hands. Both of us smiling the way people smile when a camera appears—that automatic, slightly performativelift of the mouth that is not quite a lie but not quite the truth either. We look like a couple in a photograph because that is exactly what we are in that moment.
I walk into the bedroom and undress quickly.
Work trousers off. Silk blouse off. Both pool at my feet for exactly ten seconds before I pick them up and fold them over the chair. Then I pull on the soft gray sweats and the oversized sweatshirt I bought at a thrift store for four dollars that says NYU across the chest.
I never went to NYU. I never went anywhere that had a sweatshirt worth buying new. But I liked the color and the weight of it, and it was mine in the simplest, cleanest way something can be yours.
I pad out to the kitchen in my socks.
The refrigerator hums as I open it and stand in the cold blue light, scanning the shelves with the unfocused stare of someone too exhausted to want anything specific. Chicken thighs on the second shelf. Half a bag of spinach. A lemon going soft at one end. A tub of expensive olives I have never once eaten, sitting right at the front, where I have to move it every time because Damien has been buying them and has never once noticed that I do not like them.
I reach for the chicken, then think about having something simpler. Instant noodles, maybe.
My phone buzzes against the counter.
I leave the fridge open and walk over to grab it.
It’s Cassie.
Her contact photo is from four years ago, lollipop in her mouth, the expression of someone daring the camera to try her. My mouth pulls into a smile at the sight of it.
I open her message.
Cassie:Thought you should see this.
An image is attached.
I pause with my thumb over it.
Knowing Cassie, it’s probably something about Zane. She has been doing that a lot lately, sending little breadcrumbs, laying them out, then standing back and waiting, because she has always believed that if she gives me enough rope, I will eventually climb it.
My heart starts beating faster, and I hate that it does that. Hate that even now, after everything, after all this time, the possibility of him still does something to my pulse without permission.
I take a deep breath, let it out slowly, then tap the screen.
The photograph fills it.
But it’s not Zane; it’s Damien.
The image is taken through glass, a restaurant window with warm candlelight behind it. A place that keeps the lighting low and the tables small enough that two people have no choice but to lean toward each other.
It’s the kind of place Damien always says is too loud, too intimate, not really his thing. Unless, apparently, the right woman is sitting across from him. And there he is. Leaned forward with full intention, body angled in a way that has nothing casual about it, his voice probably low, his face arranged into the soft, particular expression he wears when he wants a woman to feel like the only person in the room. I know that expression. I know exactly what it costs him to produce it and exactly what he expects in return. His hand rests on the table. Almost touching hers.
For a long time, I only stare.
I know that restaurant. Damien has taken me there once or twice on the nights I said I was going to see Cassie at the deli around the corner where she works.
She would have walked straight past that window on her way home, seen him through the glass, stopped walking, taken the photo, and sent it without a second’s hesitation, because that is exactly who Cassie is and has always been. She has never once in her life decided that something was easier not to mention. If someone is fucking you over, Cassie believes with her whole chest that you deserve to know.
