The Width of Glass

Chapter One — Cold Tiles and Dark Windows

Mara pov

I moved to Harwick Street with two suitcases, a lamp, and the very specific kind of exhaustion that comes not from physical tiredness but from spending eight months being careful.

Careful about what I said. Careful about what I showed on my face. Careful about the tone I used when I said things like I'm fine and it's nothing and you're overreacting, because the tone mattered as much as the words and I had learned, slowly and then very quickly, that getting either wrong had consequences I would rather not revisit.

The apartment was a sublet. I had chosen it for three reasons. It was available immediately. It accepted a cash deposit. And it was in a neighborhood that had no connection to anyone I knew, no restaurant we had been to together, no street corner with a specific memory attached to it, no geography that belonged to a version of my life I was trying to put some distance between myself and.

The building super was a man named Artie who smelled of cigarettes and showed me around with the detached efficiency of someone who had done it too many times to find it interesting anymore. Good light in the mornings, he said. Heating can be temperamental in the lower floors but you're on the fourth so you should be fine. Bathroom's been redone recently.

The bathroom had hexagonal floor tiles that I decided, during the viewing, were charming.

They were not charming. They were cold in a way that went beyond temperature, and they collected grime in the grout lines with what felt like personal enthusiasm, and within a week I had spent more time on my knees with a toothbrush than I care to admit. But I had signed the lease by then and I was not, in any case, in a position to be particular.

I unpacked the first suitcase completely. The second I left half full in the corner of the bedroom, which I told myself was because I hadn't decided where things should go yet. This was not entirely true. The half-unpacked suitcase was a habit I had developed over the preceding months and had not yet managed to break. A suitcase you can close in under two minutes is not something you admit to yourself you need. You just need it.

The lamp I put in the kitchen, on the counter by the window. It was the one thing I had brought from before that I didn't have complicated feelings about. A simple thing, cream shade, warm bulb, the kind of light that made a room feel inhabited rather than just occupied. I had carried it down four flights of stairs and into a cab and up another four flights rather than leave it behind, which my friend Cass had observed was perhaps a sign that I needed to reconsider my priorities.

Cass didn't know the full story. Nobody did, except me and Daniel, and Daniel's version was considerably different from mine.

I ate dinner on my first night at the kitchen table with the lamp on and the overhead light off, which was better, and looked out the window at the street below, which was quiet, and at the building across the road, which was pale stone and seven stories and had the slightly grand, slightly faded quality of a building that had once been something more specific than residential.

I noticed the windows the way you notice any windows in a city when you live opposite them. Briefly. Abstractly. Squares of yellow light, the flickering blue of a television, the silhouette of someone moving through a room. The unremarkable visual texture of other people's evenings.

I didn't notice anything particular about the seventh floor corner unit that first night.

That came later.

What I noticed instead, or what I registered without quite noticing, was how quiet it was. Not silent. Cities are never silent. But the particular noise of Harwick Street was different from what I had been living with, the specific acoustic signature of an apartment I had shared with someone who moved through spaces loudly, whose presence announced itself in the opening of doors and the putting down of glasses and the particular quality of silence that isn't really silence but is a person being deliberately quiet in a way that means something.

This quiet was just quiet.

I sat in it for a while before I understood that what I was feeling was not loneliness. It took me longer than it should have to identify it because I hadn't felt it in some time.

It was relief.

I washed my plate. I checked the lock on the front door, and then checked it again, and then told myself firmly that twice was sufficient and went to bed.

I checked it a third time at two in the morning when I woke to the sound of the radiator knocking and lay in the dark for twenty minutes convincing myself it was the radiator.

It was the radiator.

I went back to sleep just before four and dreamed about nothing I could remember in the morning, which was the best kind of dream.

The note was on my floor when I went to make coffee.

I stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at it for a moment before I picked it up. White paper, folded once. No envelope. I turned it over before I opened it, some instinct making me check the back first, as if the back would tell me something the front wouldn't.

Blank.

I unfolded it.

Don't take the Caldwell Street exit after dark. Use Renner instead.

I read it twice. Looked at the lock on my front door, which was engaged. Looked at the chain, which was on. Looked at the thin strip of my hallway visible beneath the door, as if an explanation might come through after the note.

Nothing came through.

My first instinct was to call Artie. My second was to call the police. My third, the one I stood with long enough for the others to fade, was to fold the note back along its crease and set it on the counter next to my keys.

Someone had been in my corridor in the night. Someone who knew which exit I used, or guessed, or had watched long enough to know my patterns, which was a thought I did not let myself finish.

I made my coffee. I drank it standing at the window looking at the street below. I was going to be late for work if I didn't leave in the next fifteen minutes and I had a meeting at nine that I couldn't reschedule and a backlog of archival requests that had been waiting since Thursday.

I left at eight forty. I took Renner Street.

I told myself it was just because it was marginally shorter. I knew this was not true. Renner Street was forty seconds longer, I had already checked.

Two blocks from my building there was police tape across the Caldwell exit. A small crowd had gathered on the pavement, people on their phones, a uniform keeping them back. Blue and red light on the wet stone.

I didn't stop. I kept walking.

But I looked up, once, at the building across the street. Seventh floor. Corner unit. The light was on behind the glass.

A figure stood at the window.

Still. Watching.

I turned back to the pavement ahead of me and kept my pace even and told myself it meant nothing. Told myself I was pattern-matching, finding significance in coincidence, doing the thing that frightened people do which is locate threat in everything whether or not it belongs there.

I was good at that, I knew. It was a habit Daniel had given me and I was still in the process of returning it.

By the time I reached the office I had almost convinced myself.

Almost.