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She told me that the energy of this building must have affected him and she glared at Oliver with his bad aura. “You really need to get the smudge sticks,” she informed me.

It was clear that the search for Maël-Michael wouldn’t be a priority for the police since they had other crimes to solve. “Half of that should have been mine,” Mom tried to argue, but “finders/keepers” wasn’t a legal argument and the officer didn’t really listen. He and his partner left, but Oliver stayed.

He glanced at my mom, who had curled up in my desk chair and was weeping pretty loudly. “What about her?”

I looked at her, too. “Mom, do you want to go lie down and center?” I suggested.

She sniffled but got up and nodded. We watched her do her walking dance despondently toward the bedroom.

“I can’t tell if all this will make things better or worse,” I said.

“It’s a good thing to have that guy out of your apartment. I didn’t like the idea of him being here with you.” He bent and picked up my air mattress, which had been punctured in the commotion and had deflated. Then he sat in the desk chair that my mom had vacated, and it made a lot of terrible noises.

“Thank you for coming when I called. I know you had told Lexi that you had a lot of work to do today,” I said.

“I can work as late as I want. I live alone,” he pointed out. “No one cares what I do.” He picked up the copy of an old newspaper article from the library. “This is about gang activity in this building.”

“The Purple Gang,” I said, nodding. “They were very violent during Prohibition. Maybe the gun and the money belonged to one of those guys.”

“Maybe he planned to come back and get it all later, but things didn’t work out.”

“You never know what will happen next,” I agreed, quoting what he’d said earlier.

“Mrs. McGlothen is going to have a fit about the damage to the wall,” he mentioned. “She found a nail hole when I moved out and tried to charge me a hundred bucks. I hadn’t hung anything, which she finally did acknowledge. She said I had made the apartment look like a prison cell.”

“I wonder what she would think about the trash in the hallway.”

“Nothing good,” he said, getting up. “Let’s go get rid of it.”

It started to snow while we were doing that and I was frozen by the time we finished, but both the hallway and the apartment did look a lot better. Oliver left to return to work and I spent more time cleaning, deeply and strenuously. I even opened the windows to remove any of the air that Maël-Michael might have breathed, although that made the apartment almost as freezing as the dark afternoon outside and made the Christmas ornaments swing in the breeze. Not all of them had broken, although Maël-Michael had crashed into the tree two times that I had seen.

The drop in temperature drew my mom out of the bedroom. “What are you doing?” she asked, shivering.

“Cleaning. I’ll do that room next,” I answered. First, I put on a new pair of gloves and braced myself for more evidence of Maël-Michael. There seemed to be a lot of it on the mattress and no, I wasn’t going to keep that. No amount of cleaning would go deep enough to entice me to sleep on it, ever.

But finally, I deemed the room safe to occupy again. I had even washed the walls and the ceiling as well as I could, due to all the gymnastics that guy had been doing on them.

“Thanks, Kat,” my mom said. She hopped in behind me as I leaned on the mop, and threw herself onto the bed. “I think I should recenter now.”

“Mom, this is my room,” I told her. Unfortunately, she was already doing shavasana so I had missed my window for conversation. Well, I didn’t want to go near those mattresses anyway and now I was back to not having a bed to put them on. Too many of the pieces had been broken to try to salvage it and I had realized that once it was constructed, it was going to look as cheap and temporary as the bookshelves had and my desk also did.

I wanted furniture that was sturdy and timeless—after all, it was going to stay in this apartment forever, here in this place where I was supposed to have lived alone. I sat down at the desk that still made me nervous when I rested my coffee cup on it, and tried to get some work done. After a while, I stopped and switched to a new project, and a while after that, I heard from Oliver.

“How are things there?”

He had asked me to let him know if Maël-Michael came back, and fortunately the coast was still clear of him. “My mom has been in my room for hours but it’s totally quiet. I think that’s positive because when she used to mourn her relationship with Daisuke, it was a lot noisier. Maybe she wasn’t as attached to this new guy as I had thought.” Or maybe she had changed even more than I thought in the years since I’d seen her last.

“I’m glad she’s quiet,” he answered. “Want to get dinner?”

I said yes and leaped up so quickly that I knocked over the desk chair and the back part of it detached from the seat part. I left it where it had fallen and was in the bathroom working on my hair when I heard my bedroom door open. My mom came in to join me.

“Are you going out?” she asked.

“Yes, to get dinner,” I said. “Do you want to come?”

She looked at her reflection in the mirror for a moment, turning her head to study herself from different angles. “No,” she finally said, and I felt bad that I’d experienced a surge of happiness when I heard her answer.

“I can bring you something,” I suggested.