Chapter one
The fight started over dishes.
That was the thing about a small apartment; everything started as something small. The dishes, the electricity bill, the single bathroom that three women were supposed to share without losing their minds. Sophie had been home for exactly forty minutes after a six-hour shift at a coffee shop that smelled like burnt milk and broken dreams, and her mother was already standing in the kitchen doorway with that look. The one that meant a conversation Sophie had not agreed to was about to happen anyway.
“I’m just saying,” her mother started.
“I know what you’re saying, Mum.”
“You haven’t touched your applications since Tuesday.”
“It’s Thursday.”
“Exactly.”
Sophie set her bag down on the chair that wobbled, the one they kept meaning to fix and never did and pressed her fingers against the bridge of her nose. The apartment was twenty-three square meters of shared tension. Every surface had something on it. Every wall was a little too close. Lily’s jacket was on the floor by the door, which meant Lily had come home, dropped everything as usual, and left again without telling anyone where she was going, which was also as usual.
“Sophie.” Her mother’s voice shifted. Softer now, which was somehow worse. “I’m not trying to pressure you.”
“I know.”
“I just worry.”
“I know that too.”
Grace Henry had the particular talent of making love feel like a deadline. She meant well. Sophie had never doubted that, not once but meaning well and the effect of a thing was not always the same. Sophie had grown up understanding that she was the responsible one, the capable one, the one who would figure it out. It was not something anyone had said out loud. It was simply the shape her family had taken, and she had grown into it the way plants grow toward whatever light is available.
She ate dinner standing up because Lily’s things were spread across the table, and she didn’t have the energy to move them. Her mother talked. Sophie answered. The television was on in the background and the neighbor upstairs was dragging something heavy across the floor and the city outside the window was doing what it always did, being enormous and indifferent and relentlessly loud.
By eight o’clock, Sophie’s chest felt like a room with no windows.
She picked up her jacket.
“Where are you going?” her mother called from the kitchen.
“Out.”
“It’s late.”
“I won’t be long.”
She closed the door before the next question arrived.
The city at night was a different creature. Sophie walked with no destination and her hands in her pockets, letting the cold air do what the apartment couldn’t give her room to breathe. She passed restaurants spilling light and noise onto the pavement, couples walking with the specific ease of people who had nowhere urgent to be, a man selling flowers from a bucket who called out to her and didn’t seem offended when she shook her head.
She wasn’t going anywhere. She was just going.
She ended up at a bar she’d passed a hundred times but never entered. It occupied the rooftop of a hotel she couldn’t afford to stay in, accessible through a lobby that made her straighten her spine automatically. She almost turned around twice. She kept walking.
The rooftop was quieter than she expected. Low lighting, small tables, the city spread below like something from a film she hadn’t seen yet. She found a seat at the bar, looked at the prices, thought about her bank balance, and ordered the cheapest thing on the menu with the calm of someone making a decision they have already made.
She was on her second sip when she noticed him.
He was sitting at the far end of the bar, and he was alone in the way that some people are alone, not waiting for anyone, not looking at his phone, not performing solitude for an audience. Just actually, genuinely alone. He had a glass in front of him, nearly untouched. His jacket was expensive. His posture was the kind you don’t think about because it is simply straight, contained, the posture of someone who takes up exactly the space he intends to take up and not a centimeter more.
He wasn’t looking at her.
She wasn’t looking at him.
They did this for approximately four minutes before he said, without turning his head:
“You’re going to finish that drink and order another one you don’t need because you don’t actually want to go home yet.”
Sophie looked at him.
He was already looking at her. His eyes were dark, and his expression gave away very little, which should have been off-putting and was instead, inexplicably, the most interesting thing that had happened to her in weeks.
“That’s a strange thing to say to someone you’ve never met,” she said.
“It’s a true thing.”
