Chapter 32
Elena
The apartment is very quiet in the morning.
I have what is supposed to be good for me.
That’s what I tell myself every time I put the key in the lock.
My own place. My name on the lease. The specific, adult independence that is supposed to feel like arrival and instead feels like a room that doesn’t know I live in it yet, which is strange, because I’ve been here three weeks.
I make cereal most mornings. I bought real groceries the first week, things that required cooking and a reason to sit at a table.
Most of it went bad. The cereal doesn’t go bad.
I eat it standing at the counter because sitting at the table alone feels like a performance no one bought tickets to, and I have done enough of those.
The apartment is in Alphabet City, third-floor walkup, one bedroom, a window that faces a courtyard where someone keeps a bicycle chained to a fire escape.
I put flowers on the counter every Monday, a small bunch from the bodega, because Nadia taught me that flowers change a room.
They do. They change it from empty to empty with flowers.
I have a rug, secondhand, blue and cream.
Two matching mugs because owning matching mugs felt like something a person with a real life does.
A Hopper print on the wall, the woman sitting alone in a room full of light, which I chose because I thought it was beautiful and now understand is the most depressing thing I could have hung in a room where I sleep alone.
The apartment has everything it needs. I just don’t need what it has.
Here is the thing about me that I have always known and have spent considerable energy ignoring: I am not built for this.
I am not the woman who dreamed about her own space, her quiet mornings, her walls.
I am the woman who, at eight years old, lying in a strange bed in the Hendersons’ house, constructed elaborate fantasies about a family dinner table so full of people that you had to raise your voice to be heard.
I have always wanted a house full of my people.
Someone who loved me. Noise and warmth and the specific comfort of not being the only person in the room.
That is what I want. That is what I have always wanted.
And instead I have a Hopper print and matching mugs and the correct prescription for a woman who got too attached, and I am taking it every morning like medicine that hasn’t started working yet.
Or maybe it doesn’t work on me. Maybe I am the person for whom independence is the wrong cure.
That thought comes every time I open the door and the silence comes back, not as a presence but as an absence, a shape where something should be.
I push it away. I tell myself it’s new, that new things feel thin, that it fills in.
I try, every morning, to remember the reason I left.
There was a reason. It had something to do with not orbiting someone else so closely that I disappeared.
I believed in it when I said it out loud.
I still believe in it, technically, in the way you believe in things that are true and useless at six in the morning when the apartment is cold and Patrick Aldera has appeared in my head again before I’ve finished the cereal.
He just shows up. I’m not doing it on purpose.
The silence has a particular texture in that apartment, and he fills it the way he filled rooms, completely, without effort, the specific gravity of a person who never needed to try.
I go over things I have no business going over, the weight of his attention, the way he moved through his own kitchen enjoying every moment of his cooking, the exact quality of what it felt like to be seen by someone who didn’t need anything.
I probe it the way you probe a bruise to see if it still hurts. It does. I do it anyway.
I keep Erick's leaf pressed inside my notebook. On the bad mornings I open it to that page, take the leaf out, and count to ten. It's a ridiculous thing to do. It also works, just enough, just the way he said it would, like a small borrowed courage that isn't mine but I'm using anyway.
It’ll pass. You think about someone until you don’t, and between those two points is just time and the daily work of choosing not to. I’m somewhere in the middle of that. It doesn’t feel like movement. It mostly feels like cereal.
So I work.
The waitressing job came through Mara, who heard from a woman in the Village cast that Luca’s on Prince Street needed Saturday coverage.
Good money. The kitchen runs tight, the regulars tip well, the manager leaves you alone as long as your tables don’t wait.
I’ve been there two weeks and I’m good at it in a way that either means I’ve found a hidden talent or found what I do when the other thing doesn’t work out, and I try very hard not to sit with which one it is.
The Village play rehearses three nights a week.
My part is the woman who holds everything together while quietly falling apart.
I did not have to work hard for that. There’s a callback Tuesday for an off-Broadway workshop.
Between that and Luca’s and the Village show, I’ll cover rent, the flowers, the cereal, the general project of staying in New York.
Most evenings I end up at Nadia’s.
I finish a shift or a rehearsal, stand on the street with my key in my hand, think about the apartment, the silence, the Hopper woman, the matched mugs sitting on the shelf like artifacts from an optimistic afternoon, and then I think about Nadia’s—the new couch that is maybe not as comfortable as my bed but the conversation that comes with it makes up for it entirely.
Four nights out of seven. Sometimes five.
Nadia doesn’t say anything. She holds the door open and leaves a blanket on the armrest.
I know what it means. I know every night on that couch is a night I’m not learning to tolerate the room I chose.
But the apartment is very quiet, and Patrick shows up in the quiet whether I want him to or not, and Nadia’s smells like the candle she keeps on the coffee table, and sometimes the best you can do is get through the day and end it somewhere that doesn’t feel like evidence.
Saturday dinner service runs hot from seven.
Six tables, a full bar section, a sous chef with a grudge against anyone who puts in a wrong order.
The dining room fills the way SoHo restaurants fill on a Saturday night, beautiful people performing a good weekend, the candlelight doing its job, the wine list doing its job, all of it moving with the smooth precision of a room that has no idea I exist.
I’m at the service station pulling bread when the door opens.
I don’t look up right away. I finish the bread, tuck the napkin, turn to deliver it, and my body stops before my mind does.
Because I know that shape.
Before I can think, before I can talk myself out of what I’m seeing.
Patrick Aldera in a dark jacket, shoulders back, jaw set, walking in like the room should be grateful.
Behind him, Alister, who introduced himself as Patrick’s conscience at the speakeasy.
Two women. One with Alister, dark-haired, already laughing at something he said. The other with Patrick.
Blonde. Tall. A dress that is trying very hard to be interesting on a body that is trying very hard to be memorable. She touches his arm at the host stand. Light, casual, proprietary, the touch of a woman who believes she has the right.
My stomach drops so fast I’m surprised it doesn’t hit the floor and roll under the bar.
The hostess walks them straight to my section with the serene efficiency of someone who doesn’t know she is dismantling my entire evening.
I find Mara at the coffee station before they’ve even sat down.
“I need you to take table six.”
She looks up from the espresso. “That’s your table.”
“I know. I need it to be yours.”
“Elena, I’ve got the bar section and two four-tops—”
“Please.” It comes out thin, tight, and Mara, thank God, is the kind of person who hears what’s underneath a word. She looks at me. Glances toward table six. Looks back.
“Fine. But you owe me.”
“I owe you my life.”
“I was going to say Saturday tips, but sure.”
I go through the kitchen door, find the wall beside the prep line, press my hands flat against the cold tile and breathe.
In through the nose, out through the mouth.
The way you breathe when everything in you wants to do something loud and irreversible and you are holding a bread basket instead.
I told him I would be in Boston and I have been in Alphabet City eating cereal and pretending the distance was real.
If he sees me in this apron, in this restaurant, I will have to stand there and explain something that has no version of itself that doesn’t sound exactly like what it is.
I go back out the long way, into the far section near the bar.
I serve a four-top their entrees. I refill water at the two-top by the window.
I smile. I ask about the risotto. I do the job.
The whole time I am aware of table six the way you’re aware of a fire in a building you’re trying not to evacuate, heat at my back, a pull I refuse to follow.
The blonde’s laugh cuts across the room every few minutes, flat and bright, the sound of a woman performing, I hate her already.
I look anyway. Quick glances between refills, small deliberate acts of self-destruction.
She’s leaning toward him, her hand on his arm again, talking with the confident ease of a woman who thinks the evening is going exactly as planned.
He nods. Moves something around his plate.
I know that particular stillness. I have watched him do it in boardrooms when the meeting bored him, that immaculate, courteous attention that isn’t attention at all, just good manners arranged into the shape of engagement.
He isn’t with her, not really. And then I crush that thought because it doesn’t matter.
He is here. With her. Doing the thing people do when they are moving forward.
He is moving forward. I am the one hiding in the service section eating feelings with a notepad.
I keep my back to his table. I don’t look again. He is facing the other direction, and the dinner will end, and they will leave, and I will clock out and go to Nadia’s and never think about any of this again.
I’m setting plates at the bar table when I feel it.
Not in the room’s noise or the rhythm of the floor.
A shift in pressure, a current that moves up the back of my neck and stills my hands before I understand why.
The plates are down, the couple at the bar is saying thank you, and my body has already stopped listening because it knows something my brain hasn’t caught up to yet.
I look up.
Across the restaurant, Patrick Aldera is staring directly at me.
The specific quality of stillness he gets when something has locked in completely, that absolute, unmoving focus I have felt on me before across a desk on the fortieth floor. It crosses thirty feet of candlelit dining room and lands on me like a hand on my shoulder.
Two seconds. Three. Our eyes lock and the world stops. I look away first because it’s the only power I have and I use it badly, turning toward the bar with my heart slamming against my ribs.
When I glance back, he’s already moving.
He says something to the table, brief, decisive, the tone of a man who has stopped pretending this evening is going to continue.
The blonde looks confused. The loud friend starts to say something.
Patrick doesn’t wait for either of them.
He pushes back his chair and stands and walks toward the back of the restaurant, past the bar, past the service station, with the focused intensity of a man who has made a decision and has no interest in discussing it.
I’m in the hallway near the kitchen. I came here to breathe, to press my back against the wall and close my eyes and convince my heartbeat to behave. But I hear his footsteps, steady and deliberate. I open my eyes and he’s there, three feet away.
“What are you doing here?” he says.
My chin lifts. The armor goes up. “I work here.”
“Elena.”
“What are you doing here, Patrick?”
He steps closer. The hallway is narrow; he takes up most of it. I can smell him, the clean, warm scent that lived in my memory all month, and my body responds before my brain can intervene: a full-system reaction that starts in my chest and spreads outward.
“Come with me,” he says. His voice is low, rough. There’s something on his face I can’t quite read, anger maybe, or confusion, or both, layered together like paint that hasn’t dried.
“I can’t.”
“Elena.”
“I don’t do threesomes, Patrick. Your date is waiting.”
His jaw tightens. The confusion shifts, sharpens. “She’s not my…”
“I have work to do.” I take a step back. The wall is behind me and there’s nowhere to go but I stand straighter, hold the notepad like a shield. “Please leave. Please just go.”
He stands there. Looking at me. The anger and the confusion and the something else moving across his face like weather.
I watch him swallow. I watch him almost say something, then stop.
Then he turns and walks back through the restaurant, past the bar, past the service station, past the table where the blonde is standing with her jacket on, and he doesn’t stop.
He walks out the front door without looking back.
I lean against the wall. Close my eyes. Press the notepad against my chest.
The sous chef sticks his head out the kitchen door. “You okay?”
“Fine,” I say. “I’m fine.”
I am so far from fine that the word doesn’t even apply to my species anymore.