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It smells musty inside. There are mailboxes lining one wall, with junk mail piled in the corner. An old elevator is to my left, but I choose to take the staircase directly in front of me. The stair treads are so worn down that they’ve been tarnished to a dull brown color in the middle.
It feels wrong. Not being here—but this being where Lily lives. She should be in some gorgeous log cabin nestled in the woods, or a house made of steel and glass perched on a cliff. She should be in an ashram in India or a shack on a beach somewhere. She should be living some glamorous, beautiful life.
Not in some dull, boxy apartment on the edge of the downtown of Heart’s Cove.
She should be with me.
The thought clangs through me, and I pause on the second-floor landing, staring at the worn linoleum. Somewhere in the distance I hear a door open above me, and my feet start moving again. I make it to the fourth floor and realize I don’t know Lily’s apartment number. The buzzer outside just had black buttons beside the names. But there’s a door propped open with a shoe wedged in the opening, and I recognize Lily’s sneaker.
I knock on the door before pushing it open. “Hello?”
“In here,” Lily calls out.
I step inside and pause.
Lily’s apartment is a small one-bedroom space, with a tiny U-shaped kitchen that opens onto a medium-sized living room that only has a desk and a chair in the corner, with a laptop sitting on the desk. There’s an old sofa on the opposite wall. Through the bedroom doorway, I spy a tidy bedroom with a double bed. There are approximately seven thousand cushions and pillows on the bed. The only other pieces of furniture I can see are two barstools on the far side of the kitchen’s peninsula counter.
The whole place is beige. Beige carpet, beige walls, beige linoleum in the kitchen, beige countertops, and slightly-darker-than-beige cabinets. The desk is brown.
Lily straightens up from the kitchen sink, yellow rubber gloves pulled over her hands. She wipes her brow with her bicep, the bandana on her head nudging back over her dark hair. “Hey,” she says. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“I should have called,” I say. I smell the sharp, astringent scent of cleaning products and notice the mop and bucket propped next to the stove. The windows are open, and a vacuum is waiting to be used in the middle of the living room. Lily pulls off her gloves, drops them on the edge of the sink, and opens the old relic of a fridge (also beige), to pull out a jug of cold, filtered water.
She catches me scanning the room and grins. “I’m still working on decorating the place. Obviously.”
“It’s very…”
“Beige?” she supplies, then laughs. “I know. The owner used the words ‘blank canvas’ when I came by to sign the lease. It’s temporary.”
“Should you be cleaning so hard in your condition?” I hear myself say.
The hard iron mask that falls over Lily’s features is the first hint I get that I said something wrong.
“My condition?” she answers carefully.
I shake my head. “I just mean… I didn’t…”
Lily lets out a harsh breath that might be a laugh, and hands me a glass of cold water. “I have cancer, Rudy, but I’m not dead yet.”
“I know.” My fingers wrap around the glass, barely brushing hers. I take a gulp while Lily stares at me. “What?”
“I’m waiting for you to tell me why you’re here,” she says, cocking a brow.
The discomfort that had been churning in my gut slows, and I find my lips curling. This is what I love about Lily. The sass. The attitude. The total and complete irreverence.
“I hadn’t really thought it through,” I admit.
“Thought what through? Showing up at my house uninvited?”
“Exactly,” I say, finishing the water and setting my glass on the counter. “One minute I was at the bookstore having the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had with my cousin, next minute I’m ringing your buzzer.”
Lily pauses, her eyes sliding away from me. She takes a sip of water and backs up to lean against the edge of the sink, her head tilting. “Your cousin?”
“He was buying books from my grandmother.”
“Does he live in Heart’s Cove?”
I shake my head. “No. Lives in Edgeville.”
