The thing about Isabelle being in New York was that it changed the air pressure.
Not dramatically. Not in any way that was visible or nameable on a given Tuesday or Thursday. But the city was smaller than it pretended to be Manhattan especially, which spread itself across an island and performed enormousness while actually being a collection of neighborhoods that overlapped and intersected in ways that made complete avoidance of any given person essentially a full-time project.
Isabelle was in Midtown.
The Calloway brownstone was on the Upper East Side.
The West Village bakery was, as the name suggested, in the West Village.
These were not, geographically, the same place.
And yet.
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It was Patricia who invited her to Sunday dinner.
I had known it was coming, Jade had warned me,
