Page 24 of What Happens at Nightfall

Jess leaned back hard against her desk chair, stretching it back as far as it would go. Sunlight streamed through the giant plateglass windows that had been such a selling point of this apartment when she’d first moved to New York to take that analyst job back in 2017. She’d been consulting before that, living out of hotel rooms, spending a few months in this city, a few months in that, and it had been exciting for a girl who’d never left the country before business school. She’d been to carnival in Rio and toasted the New Year on the banks of the Seine. But as the years went by, she’d watched her colleagues drop away one by one: marry, switch jobs, buy houses, settle down.

Kimmy was in New York, the closest thing Jess had to family aside from her mother in Sands Hollow, California—but there weren’t finance jobs in Sands Hollow. And Jess’s mom had a full life without Jess. It wasn’t that Cindy didn’t love her; Jess knew she did. It was just that her mother’s sense of time worked differently from other peoples’.

Cindy claimed she hadn’t done that many drugs at Berkeley in the eighties, but Jess had always wondered if that depended on how one defined many.

Prying herself out of her chair, Jess wandered over to the window. Her apartment was on the thirty-eighth floor of a building on Fifty-Seventh between Eighth and Ninth. From her aerie, she could see a vista of building upon building, roofs and water towers and walls of windows. It wasn’t as grand as the view the billionaires in their supertalls had farther down Fifty-Seventh, but it was hers. Temporarily. For as long as she could pay the rent. She used to stumble back late at night, after a sixteen-hour day at the office, and pause for a moment to look at the lights glittering in the darkness; she’d stand there and watch as lights went out in the windows across the way before turning out her own.

And sometimes she’d wonder about all those lives behind those windows and what they’d figured out that she hadn’t.

That was part of why she’d taken the plunge and taken that job at the start-up. CFO. It sounded like an accomplishment. Not a grunt at the research arm of a bank but chief financial officer. The hours were better, the pay was generous, and the start-up itself involved art, a backward way into a world she loved but had been too timid—too cautious—to enter.

And then it all went wrong. Unbelievably, unimaginably, irreparably wrong.

Jess still couldn’t quite wrap her head around that. How could someone work hard, do everything right, and still have everything go so wrong?

The world was full of horrible people, lazy people, careless people, lying people who still somehow managed to have jobs and families. What had she done that she had neither?

Were the Indigo Girls right? Was she serving time for mistakes made by another in another lifetime?

“Screw it,” Jess muttered to herself.

She had no idea how long it would be until her soul got it right, but she did know she needed to get out of the apartment. Her eye fell on the parasol by the door. The tour office was only ten blocks away. She could kill two birds with one stone and go drop off that parasol.

While she was at it, she could pick up a new container of caramel macchiato creamer on the way home and make herself coffee that didn’t scour the lining off her throat.

Jess’s phone informed her the sun outside her window wasn’t false advertising; it was 78 and sunny. Last night’s insane temperature drop and windstorm seemed like something out of a different lifetime, the leaves whipping around her head, strange creatures moving at the corners of her vision, Ben’s hand in hers as they ran.

Quick, quick.

Defiantly, Jess shrugged out of her gray yoga pants and an even grayer T-shirt and pulled on a sundress she had bought on a T.J. Maxx expedition with Kimmy, a full-skirted sleeveless shirt dress with a cheerful bow at the waist. Betty Draper wanted her dress back, but the hell with it; Jess was sick of black pants and beige shells.

Also, she hadn’t done laundry for a while and there were weird stains on last night’s black pants from where she’d knelt on the floor of the tomb, gathering up shards of glass.

Jess looked at her hand. The Peppa Band-Aid sat crookedly on her finger. Her memory presented her with a vivid recollection of the arborist holding her hand, smoothing the Band-Aid over her finger.

He was probably worried about liability if she got blood poisoning, Jess told herself, although she knew that hadn’t been the thought in his mind at all. He was just a nice guy, the sort of guy who carried Neosporin and asked strangers to text to say they got home safely.

A guy with kids and a life, who was just being kind.

Jess gave her head a little shake and headed to the door. The dress swished pleasantly around her legs, making her feel like a different person. If she’d been wearing a dress last night . . . she would have been cold.

She grabbed her sweater and stuffed it in her bag on her way out, just in case.

Jess tucked the parasol under her arm and hightailed it down Ninth, past the hardware store where she’d bought her screwdriver, past the Mexican restaurant she used to order from. The neighborhood got grottier the farther south she went, away from Millionaire’s Row. A smoke shop offered scented vapes and the convenience of an in-shop ATM. Shutters were closed beneath a very dirty sign that read “CLEANERS.”

Jess turned right on Forty-Seventh, past a florist’s shop that reeked of roses. She had to double down the block twice before she was sure she had the right building number; the address on the website was occupied by a defunct taxi company, metal grates pulled tightly shut beneath a tattered yellow awning.

Jess pulled out her phone and checked again. This was the building, all right. Suite 66, it said.

A dirty glass door led into a tiny vestibule next to the storefront. Jess regarded the row of buzzers on the wall, hunting for Domiciles of the Damned. There was clearly a great deal of turnover in the building. Labels had been pasted over labels, rendering them illegible.

Someone clattered down the stairs, a messenger bag over one shoulder. “It’s broken,” he said. “The buzzer. If you’re waiting for someone to answer, don’t.”

“Great,” Jess muttered. “Do you know where sixty-six is?”

“Sixth floor,” said the guy cheerfully, and pushed out the door.

“I don’t suppose there’s an elevator?” Jess asked hopefully, but she was speaking to the empty vestibule.