Chapter 1
The cab smells like pine air freshener and someone else's lunch, and I don't care even a little bit. Outside the taxi’s window, New York City is assaulting every sense simultaneously. I grew up two hundred miles from here, and it might as well have been another planet.
I press my face closer to the glass. I'm twenty-seven years old, and I’m not going to pretend to be indifferent to the energy of this amazing city.
We're somewhere in midtown, gridlocked, the cab inching forward in a procession of yellow and black. Delivery trucks double-parked on both sides. Someone honks their horn three cars back.
Then the traffic stops completely.
A man steps off the curb into our lane. Shirtless despite the October chill. Lean, tattooed, guitar slung low. He plants himself in the middle of the street and starts to play. Loud. Off-key. Completely, magnificently committed to the performance.
Cars slow. Someone leans harder on that horn. The performer just keeps playing his guitar, eyes closed, head tilted toward the gray Manhattan sky like he's tuning into some alien signal from outer space.
I start laughing before I realize I'm doing it.
He opens his eyes. Finds me immediately through the cab window. Flashes a grin and strums harder, like he was playing for me all along.
I laugh again and look away, suddenly warm.
"Welcome to the big city," the driver says.
We turn a corner and the gridlock loosens, and the cab accelerates uptown. After about five minutes, we reach our destination.
The Overton rises at the end of the block, exactly where Google Earth said it would be.
I’ve seen pictures. Street View, real estate shots. A grainy image attached to the lawyer’s paperwork. None of it prepared me for the real thing.
Thirty stories of dark pre-war stone loom above the street, heavier and older than anything around it. In photographs, the spires looked decorative. From the sidewalk, they look sharp enough to cut the sky.
It feels like the kind of building designed to last forever. And to outlast everyone inside it.
The sign above the entrance reads OVERTON in letters worn smooth by decades of weather. A brass placard beside the door, once polished, now dulled to the color of an old penny.
I pay the driver and haul my suitcase and backpack out of the trunk. The sum total of my new life now sits on a Manhattan sidewalk.
The building looks down at me. I look back. Then I pick up my suitcase and go inside.
The superintendent has been waiting an hour and wants to make sure I know it.
He’s in his fifties, thick-necked. He stands in the lobby with a stillness that makes him seem like another fixture of the building. His hooded eyes judge me before I even finish saying hello.
"Mrs. Shaw." He looks me over with visible disappointment. "I've been waiting for an hour."
"I'm sorry. The train was running late."
He grunts. Points at my suitcase with his chin and turns without waiting to see if I'll follow.
I walk after him.
"Shame what happened," he says, leading me toward the elevators. "I hope they catch the bastard. City's gone to shit in the last few years. You and your grandmother close?"
"I haven't seen her in over twenty years."
He glances back at me with those careful eyes.
"My mother cut her off when I was five," I say. "She didn't feel Eleanor was the best influence."
The superintendent considers this as we reach the elevators. "And now you're about to live in her penthouse apartment." He presses the call button. "Guess she had a soft spot for you."
I shrug. There's a flicker of something in my chest I wasn't prepared for. Grief, maybe. Or the shape grief leaves behind when you're mourning someone you never really had the chance to know.
"I'm the only family left," I say.
The elevator arrives with a groan. The steel doors slam shut, and we begin the slow climb, the cables straining overhead.
"What do you do for work?" he asks.
"I teach. Kindergarten."
He absorbs this.
"Mrs. Shaw hated children."
Thanks for sharing that lovely detail.
The elevator dings.
We head for the oakwood door at the end of the hallway. The super inserts a brass key into the lock, pushes the door open, and nods for me to go first.
I step inside and… stop.
I marvel at the high ceilings and dark wood floors that glow in the afternoon light. The windows, enormous, oblong, running nearly floor to ceiling, pour the city into the room. The furniture is immaculate, expensive. Old world taste and refinement. Let’s just say Eleanor didn’t shop at Ikea.
I move slowly through the elegantly decorated rooms, taking it all in.
The walls are covered in art. Paintings. Photographs. None of it is decorative in any soft sense of the word. There's an edge to all of it, a deliberate provocation. My conservative mother would have covered half the pieces with a sheet.
I find myself smiling. It all feels like freedom to me.
"Mrs. Shaw's account covers everything," the superintendent is saying behind me. "Utilities. Maintenance. Me. Lawyer set it all up years ago."
I'm barely listening. I'm drawn across the room toward the windows. I step up to the glass, and the city opens beneath me. Thirty stories down, Manhattan is a grid of rooftops stretching to the horizon. It feels unreal. Like a painting of a city rather than a city.
"Best view in the building," the superintendent says. "Maybe the city."
"The lawyer said it was worth?—"
"Whatever number they gave you, it's higher."
I nod. I already figured that.
He asks if I have questions. I tell him no. He tells me he's on the ground floor if there are problems. He moves toward the door.
“Did you know her well?” I ask.
The super pauses with his hand on the door handle. Considers the question.
“Thirty years in the same building. Mrs. Shaw was friendly enough. Generous around Christmas. But she mostly kept to herself.”
The super heads for the door. Pauses.
"People like Mrs. Shaw don't have to be alone," he says. "They prefer it that way.”
The heavy oak door slams shut behind him.
I stand alone now.
The city hums thirty floors below. The art watches from the walls. I walk slowly through the rooms, running my hand along the edge of a bookshelf, across the back of a leather chair. It’s almost like I’m trying to get a better sense of the woman who used to live here. And then I see her.
A large framed photograph on the wall near the hallway.
Eleanor Shaw, perhaps fifteen years ago though I suspect she looked more or less this way at any age, the kind of woman who didn't so much resist time as simply refused to acknowledge its jurisdiction.
She is tall, slender, dressed in something dark and expensive, and she is looking directly into the camera with an expression that is not quite a smile.
More like haughty appraisal, like she is critically measuring you.
Around her neck, she wears a pendant. Silver, shaped like an eye, with a polished black stone at its center that seems to absorb the light around it rather than reflect it.
I remember that pendant.
The memory arrives the way early childhood memories do — not as a sequence of events but as vivid fragments.
Eleanor's apartment, though a different one I think, somewhere with red walls.
The smell of expensive perfume. A jewelry box open on a vanity table, its contents spread across the surface like treasure.
Pick one, she'd said. Any one you like.
I was five. I had been raised in a house where you asked before you touched anything. I stood there frozen, overwhelmed by the permission of it.
“Go on,” Eleanor said. She crouched down to my level, unhurried, unpatronizing. She didn’t talk to me like a child but addressed me like a little adult.
You have good taste. I can already tell.
I picked a ring too large for any of my fingers. She took it from me without comment, slipped it onto her own hand, turned it in the light.
Good choice, she said. That's called instinct. Don't let anyone talk you out of it.
Later, my mother found us sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by jewelry and laughing at something I can't remember now, and the disapproving look on her face is the last thing I remember about that day.
Three weeks later we stopped visiting. I was five years old and I didn't understand why, and by the time I was old enough to ask, asking felt like choosing a side.
I look at Eleanor in the photograph. At the cool assessment in her gaze, her stern expression. She doesn't look like a woman who would lose sleep over being cut off by her daughter.
I turn away from the portrait, suddenly uneasy in a way I can't quite name, and face those enormous windows.
Beyond the glass, the city spreads out below me like an inheritance I don’t yet know how to embrace.