Chapter 30
Elena
I’ve been talking for forty minutes.
Nadia hasn’t interrupted once, which is how I know the situation is bad.
She interrupted when I told her about the first kiss.
She interrupted when I told her about his mother at the door.
She interrupted when I told her about the weekend, about the hotel, about the zoo.
Nadia interrupts because she cares, because she’s Nadia, because holding her opinion for longer than three sentences goes against her biology.
She has not said a word since I started talking about the NDA.
She’s sitting cross-legged on her bed with a pair of scissors in one hand, ribbon samples fanned out around her like a textile explosion. The scissors haven’t moved in twenty minutes. I have told her everything. What I said to Patrick. What he said back. The lie.
That’s where I am now. The lie.
“There is no job in Boston,” I say.
She looks at me. “What?”
“There’s no theater company. There’s no eight-week run. There’s no paying role.” I am standing in the doorway of her bedroom, still in the clothes I’ve been wearing since yesterday, my bag on the floor behind me where I dropped it when I walked in. “I made it up.”
She sets down the scissors. “You lied to him.”
“I needed him to let me go. If I told him I was just leaving, just quitting, no plan, no job, nothing lined up, he would have tried to fix it. He would have said stay. He would have found a reason, a solution, some version of this where I don’t leave, because that’s what he does, he solves things.
” My voice is steady. Practiced. I have been practicing this conversation in my head since the cab ride home from the fortieth floor.
“I needed it to be clean. I needed him to think I was going toward something, not just running from him.”
“Were you?”
“Was I what.”
“Running from him.”
I look at the ribbon samples on her bed. Pink. Cream. Dusty rose. Nadia’s world is always so specific. Every shade chosen on purpose, every cut measured, every arrangement built to hold.
“I was running from the version of me that would have stayed,” I say.
Nadia picks up her tea. Drinks. Puts it down. She is doing the thing she does when she’s processing something large, which is move slowly through the small things around it.
“The NDA,” she says.
“Yes.”
“His mother.”
“Yes.”
“You read a legal document that told you you’d never be family, decided it confirmed everything you’ve always believed about yourself, lied to the man you’re in love with about a job that doesn’t exist, quit the real job you actually had then packed your desk after hours so you wouldn’t have to see him. ”
“That’s a very thorough summary.”
“Elena.”
“I know.”
“You lied.”
“I know.”
She looks at me for a long time. Not with judgment.
With the particular exhaustion of a woman who has been watching her younger sister do this exact thing in different shapes for nineteen years.
Not the running—the opposite of that. The getting involved.
The caring too much, too fast, too completely, until it ends and I am the one left holding it.
Every time. Different people, different rooms, different versions of the same heartbreak.
Nadia has watched me do this since I was old enough to attach to people who were never going to stay.
This time I left first. That’s new. That’s the thing Nadia is sitting with.
“Okay,” she says finally. “So what’s the actual plan?”
“I have enough saved to cover first month’s rent on something small. Something mine. I’ll find a job. Waitressing, temp work, whatever. Mornings I audition.”
“You’ve been saying that since you got to New York.”
“This time I don’t have a boss I’m sleeping with.”
She almost smiles. Doesn’t. “That’s progress, I suppose.”
“It’s something.”
She picks up the scissors again. Cuts a length of cream ribbon with the precision of a woman who does not waste material. “I’m proud of you,” she says, without looking up.
“For lying?”
“For leaving. Even badly. Even for the wrong reasons mixed in with the right ones.” She looks at me. “You left. You chose yourself. That matters, even if you did it like a disaster.”
I sit on the edge of her bed. Something in my chest releases, just slightly, the held breath I’ve been carrying since Tuesday.
She’s not going to tell me I ruined it. She’s not going to tell me to go back.
She’s going to sit here cutting ribbon, being Nadia, being the person who has never once told me what to do but has always, without fail, told me what’s true.
“I miss him,” I say.
“I know.”
“I miss Erick.”
She puts down the scissors. “I know that too.”
I want to cry, loud and ugly cry. I can feel it right behind everything, the specific pressure of it, patient and waiting.
But there is a code between us that goes back further than either of us has ever named, which is that I don’t fall apart in front of Nadia.
I never have. She worries in a way that stays with her for days, the quiet kind, the kind she carries alone and doesn’t show, and I figured out a long time ago that the kindest thing I can do for her is hold it together while she’s watching.
So I do. I hold it together. I turn the ribbon over in my fingers and breathe and don’t cry.
The first apartment is on the Lower East Side, a basement unit the listing described as “cozy garden-level studio with natural light.”
It is a cave.
The ceiling is low enough that I could touch it if I raised my arm.
The single window sits at street level, showing a thin rectangle of sidewalk.
From the inside, all I can see is shoes.
Sneakers. Heels. The bottom of a stroller wheel.
People walking past the top of my head, living their above-ground lives.
The walls are damp. Not damp in the sense of recently cleaned.
Damp in the structural sense, the deep kind, the kind that comes from being below the waterline of a city that was never meant to be lived in underground.
There is a faint smell of something I can’t identify. Old carpet. Old pipes. Old hope.
The broker smiles at me. “It has character,” she says.
It has mold. I can see it along the baseboard near the bathroom, a thin green line making its case.
“The rent includes water,” she adds.
I picture myself here. Waking up in this room. Seeing feet through the window. Getting dressed for auditions in a room that smells like damp concrete. Coming home to this after a day of being told no.
“I’ll think about it,” I say.
The second apartment is in Washington Heights.
It’s above ground, which is an improvement.
Fourth floor, walk-up, a one-bedroom with a window that faces a brick wall approximately three feet away.
The walls are thin. I know this because I can hear the couple next door having a conversation about groceries at normal volume, every word, including a disagreement about whether they need more eggs.
They don’t need more eggs. They have eleven.
The hallway smells like weed. Not faintly.
Aggressively. The kind of smell that has soaked into the paint, the walls, the philosophy of the building itself.
It starts at the front door of the building, intensifies on the stairs, reaches its peak on the third-floor landing where someone has left an ashtray on the windowsill like a monument to commitment.
The apartment itself is fine. Small. Clean enough. The kitchen has two burners that work. The bathroom door closes. These are facts, not selling points, but I list them anyway because I am trying very hard to see the positive.
The broker says the landlord is flexible on move-in.
I stand in the empty living room. Look at the brick wall through the window. Listen to the egg conversation reach its conclusion, which is that they will buy more eggs because you can never have too many eggs, which is actually a reasonable position.
I could live here. I could make this work. People make worse work. I have made worse work. I have slept on couches, shared rooms in foster homes, lived in spaces that belonged to other people my entire life. This would be mine. Small, loud, smelling faintly of someone else’s choices, but mine.
The word sits in my chest like something heavy.
Mine.
This is what I left Colorado for. This is what the whole thing was about. Choosing myself. Building something.
So why does it feel like losing?
“I’ll let you know,” I tell the broker.
Back at Nadia’s I sit on the couch that has been my bed for months, open my laptop, pull up three audition listings I bookmarked last week.
A staged reading downtown. An off-Broadway workshop. A commercial callback that pays enough to cover a month of the egg apartment if I get it.
This is the upside. The thing I couldn’t do when I was working nine to six on the fortieth floor.
Mornings are mine now. I can audition at ten, at eleven, at two.
I can take workshops. I can do the open calls that happen during business hours, the ones I used to read about on my phone at my desk while Patrick was in meetings, the ones I’d close the tab on because I couldn’t go.
I can go now.
I pull up the first listing. Read the breakdown.
It’s a new play, small theater in the Village, ensemble cast, the kind of thing where everyone does everything and the budget is held together with goodwill.
The character description reads: Late 20s, sharp, funny, carrying something she won’t name. They don’t say anything else about it.
I read that three times.
I click the second listing. Off-Broadway, Chekhov adaptation, different company than Okonkwo but the same energy, the same small-budget ambition. They want a Masha. My Masha. The role I lost, offered again in a different room by different people.
My hands hover over the keyboard.
I think about what Patrick said at dinner, the dinner with the wine I faked my way through, the dinner where he looked at me across white tablecloths and said you’ll get one. I close the laptop. Open it again.
I sign up for both.
Then I sit on Nadia’s couch, in the life I am trying to build with my own hands, staring at confirmation emails that represent the reason I left, the reason I told myself I left, the reason that is true but not the whole truth, because the whole truth is that I am sitting here wanting to call him.
I don’t call him.
I open the laptop again. Pull up the apartment listings. The cave. The egg building. Two more I haven’t seen yet, further out, smaller, cheaper.
I will find a place. I will audition. I will build something.
I tell myself that if I keep moving, if I keep looking at listings and auditions and the practical shape of the life I said I wanted, the urge to call him will pass.
It doesn’t.
But I get up the next morning anyway.