The Man I Was Forbidden to Love

My mother used to say that New York swallowed girls whole and spat out their bones. She said it so often that I stopped hearing it. Now I stood on the curb outside Penn Station with one suitcase, a cardboard box of her things, and forty-three dollars in my wallet, and I heard every word. Three weeks. That was how long it had been since the funeral. Three weeks of casseroles from neighbors who didn't know what to say, of a landlord who did know exactly what to say and said it kindly, of a house that grew quieter every night until the silence had a shape and sat at the table across from me. Then the envelope came. It had been in the lawyer's file for years, he told me, with my name written on the front in my mother's slanted hand. Inside was a single page and a key. Elara, there is a room waiting for you at 214 West 71st Street. Go. Don't ask me why, and forgive me for not telling you myself. I was a coward about it. And one more thing, my darling, the only thing I have ever begged of you: stay away from the Sterlings. All of them. Promise me. I had read it so many times the folds had gone soft as cloth. I'd never heard the name Sterling in my life. The rain started the moment I stepped off the curb. Not a drizzle. New York rain, the kind that arrives like an argument. I hauled the suitcase through a river of taxi headlights, the box clutched against my chest, my mother's blue scarf already soaked through at the top. Somewhere between Seventh Avenue and the subway grate that nearly took my heel, I decided that crying was a luxury I could not afford until I had a roof. The building on West 71st Street was older than I expected, all pale stone and iron balconies, with a green awning that had faded to the color of sea glass. The key fit the front door. It fit the second door, too, and the third, and then I was standing in a narrow hallway that smelled of lemon polish and old books, dripping onto a black-and-white floor. A room waiting for me. On the fourth floor, according to the key tag. There was no elevator. I made it to the second landing before my arms gave out and the box slipped. The lid popped. My mother's things went skidding across the stairs: her reading glasses, a paperback with a cracked spine, the little tin music box that played a song I could never name. "Oh, no, no, no." I dropped to my knees and started gathering. "Let me." The voice came from above me, low and unhurried, the kind of voice that had never once needed to raise itself. A hand appeared in my line of sight, long fingers, a plain steel watch, and it closed around the music box before I could reach it. I looked up. He was standing three steps above me in a charcoal suit that was damp at the shoulders, as though he had walked in from the same storm. Dark hair pushed back by an impatient hand. A face that belonged on a magazine cover, if the magazine were about men who owned things. But it was his eyes that held me, gray, steady, and very much awake, the eyes of someone who noticed everything and decided afterward what to do about it. He turned the tin box over once in his palm, almost gently, and something crossed his face too quickly for me to name. "You dropped this," he said. "Thank you." My voice came out smaller than I intended. I took the box from him, and our fingers brushed, and a strange warmth ran up my arm, absurd, inconvenient, completely out of place on a staircase on the worst day of a very bad month. I pulled my hand back as if I'd touched a stove. "I'm sorry. I'm blocking the stairs. I'm new, I just moved in, I'm on the fourth floor..." "The fourth floor." A pause. "Apartment 4B?" "I think so. The key says so." Something shifted in his expression, a stillness, like a man who has just heard a footstep in an empty "Then we're going to be seeing each other." He crouched, collected my mother's reading glasses and the paperback, and set them in the box with an economy that suggested he did everything that way. "Let me carry that for you." "You don't have to..." "I know." He lifted the box as if it weighed nothing, then took the suitcase in his other hand before I could object. "Come on. You're shivering." I was. I hadn't noticed. He didn't speak as we climbed, and I was grateful. Grief had made me allergic to small talk. I watched the back of his shoulders instead, the way the wet wool pulled across them, and told myself I was only being careful. A stranger. A big city. My mother would have had plenty to say about a girl following a strange man up a dark staircase. But my mother had said very little about anything, in the end. On the fourth landing, he set my suitcase down in front of a green door with a brass *4B* and stepped back, giving me room. Giving me space. As though he'd known I needed it. "Thank you," I said again. "Really. I don't know your name." He looked at me for a long moment, rain still beaded in his dark hair, the hall light making a hard line of his jaw. Then, at last, the faintest curve at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile. "Cassian," he said. "And you?" "Elara. Elara Vale." He nodded slowly, as if testing the weight of it. "Welcome to the building, Elara." He turned to go. Halfway down the first step, he stopped, one hand on the iron rail. "I live on the top floor," he said, without looking back. "If you need anything." Then he was gone, his footsteps fading down the stairwell, and I stood alone in the hallway with my heart doing something ridiculous against my ribs. It wasn't until I was inside, the door shut, the key still warm in my fist, that I noticed the mail table by the entrance. A small brass nameplate was fixed to the wall above it, polished and discreet, listing the building's owner for the tenants who cared to look. I looked. *Sterling Enterprises.* The key slid out of my fingers and hit the floor. *Stay away from the Sterlings. All of them. Promise me.* Down the stairwell, somewhere far below, a door closed softly, and I realized I had never asked him his last name.