COLD TERMS

EPISODE FIVE CONTINUE

signed things this morning that were not this, people who were doing whatever normal was — and she thought about the way her name had sounded in that voice. Low and even and somehow precise, like he'd considered the word before he said it and decided it was the correct word to use.

She went home.

She stood in the middle of her apartment and looked at it the way you look at a place you're leaving — not with nostalgia, exactly, because it wasn't a place she'd been happy in for the past four months; more with the acknowledgment that it had been hers, however difficult. The cracked tile by the sink she'd learned to step around. The light that came through the east window at four p.m. and made the whole room look momentarily golden. The drawer where she kept things she didn't want to look at.

She opened the drawer. Took out the eviction notice. Took it to the recycling bin.

Then she went to her bedroom and pulled the six boxes out of the wardrobe where she'd stored the ones she'd already packed and started filling the rest.

She called Jade while she packed.

'So you signed it.'

'I signed it.'

'And you're moving in tonight.'

'Tonight.'

A pause. The sound of Jade's TV in the background — she was on nights this week and would be sleeping in a few hours. 'Aria.'

'What?'

'He said you're going to be fine.'

'Yes.'

'Did he sound like he meant it?'

Aria thought about the voice. The way it didn't soften the statement. The way it said it like a fact rather than a comfort, which somehow made it feel more like a comfort.

'He sounded like he doesn't say things he doesn't mean,' she said.

A longer pause. 'Okay,' said Jade. 'Okay. Call me when you get there?'

'When I get to my contractual husband's penthouse?'

'When you get to where you're sleeping tonight, yes.'

'I'll call you.'

She put the phone down. She folded the last of her clothes into the last box. She looked around the room — the empty shelves, the marks on the walls where she'd hung things, the window with its four p.m. light.

She picked up the box and walked to the door.

The car Damian had sent was already waiting outside. The driver was a man in his fifties who introduced himself as Robert, offered to take the boxes, and did not ask her any questions. She found this deeply, specifically kind.

They drove north through the city. The evening light was changing — that golden edge that happened to Manhattan in autumn, the way everything got briefly beautiful before the dark. She sat in the back seat with her hands in her lap and watched the city change character around her as they moved into the kind of neighbourhood where the buildings were older and more serious and the streets were wider and quieter.

Crest Tower's residential building was connected to the main complex but separate — its own entrance, its own lobby, marble and deep carpeting and the specific silence she was beginning to identify as the sound of money existing quietly. Robert brought her boxes. The building manager met them, handed her a key card and a regular key and an access code for the private floors, and showed her to the elevator without a word beyond what was necessary.

The penthouse door opened into a hallway that was larger than her old apartment's main room.

She stood in the hallway for a moment.

She was going to have to convince rooms full of people that she was in love with the man who lived here.

The worst part — the part she was going to put in a drawer and not look at for as long as she could manage — was that the racing in her chest, standing in that hallway with her six boxes and her key card and her brand-new beginning, was not entirely explainable by anxiety.

She picked up the first box. She found the third door on the left in the east wing. She put the box down in the center of the empty room and looked around at the space — large windows, neutral walls, a private bathroom through the door to her right.

'Okay,' she said, to no one.

Then she went back for the rest of the boxes, and she started unpacking her life.