Chapter 1

The bag of takeout was still warm against my chest when I pressed the buzzer for Evan’s apartment and got nothing back.

I tried again. Held it longer this time.

Nothing.

“Come on,” I muttered, shifting the bag to my other arm. “Pick up your phone, you idiot.”

He hadn’t answered my last three calls. Or the texts. I’d told myself he was in a meeting, that his battery died, that he was driving. I’d told myself a lot of things on the cab ride over.

The thing about telling yourself things is that some small, ugly part of you always knows you’re lying.

I pushed the lobby door and it gave way under my hand. Not locked. It was never locked, the super kept promising to fix it, and I used to hate that. Tonight I was grateful. Tonight I didn’t have to wait downstairs like a delivery girl.

I took the stairs because the elevator in that building moved like it was thinking it over.

Third floor. His door. My key already in my fingers because I’d had a key for eight months and that meant something, didn’t it, a key meant something.

Then I heard the music.

Soft. Some playlist he made when he wanted to seem like the kind of guy who knew about jazz. He didn’t. He’d told me that once, laughing, his head in my lap. “I just pretend, Maya. Nobody actually likes this stuff.”

I stood there with my hand against the door and I didn’t put the key in.

There was a sound underneath the music.

A laugh. Not his.

A woman’s laugh, low and easy, the kind you only do when you’re comfortable, when you’ve been somewhere a while, when you’ve got nowhere to be.

My fingers went cold around the key.

I should have knocked. A normal person knocks. A normal person calls out, hey, it’s me, are you home, and gives the other person a second to be decent.

I didn’t knock.

I pushed the door open, and it swung wide and quiet because of course it did, because nothing in my life was going to make noise tonight to warn me.

The takeout bag slipped. I caught it against my hip without thinking.

The living room was empty. His shoes by the couch. A second pair of heels by the couch, red, strappy, expensive, the kind I’d never wear because I’d break my neck.

The bedroom door was open.

I want to say I looked away. I want to say I had that much dignity left.

But I looked.

Evan. The sheets. A woman with dark hair fanned across his pillow, the pillow I slept on, and his hand was on her hip, and they were laughing about something, and the world just kept on existing like it had any right to.

For a second nobody moved. The music kept playing.

Then he saw me.

I watched it hit him. The way his whole face dropped, the way his mouth opened and closed, the way his hand came off her hip like the sheets had caught fire.

“Maya.” He scrambled up, sheet twisting around him. “Maya, no, wait, this isn’t, just let me, “

“Don’t.” My voice came out flat. Not even angry. I didn’t recognize it.

“Babe, please, “

“Don’t call me that.”

The woman pulled the sheet up to her chin. She wouldn’t look at me. Smart of her. She had nothing to do with this and she knew it, she was just the body in my spot, and somehow that made it worse, that she was nobody, that he’d done this for nobody.

Evan was off the bed now, reaching for his boxers, talking the whole time. “It’s not what, okay it is what it looks like, but it didn’t mean, Maya, you have to listen, “

“I brought you dinner.”

That stopped him.

He blinked at the bag in my arms like he didn’t understand what it was. “What?”

“Thai. The place on Mercer. You said it was your favorite.” I heard myself say it and I wanted to laugh, except laughing felt like it would crack something open that I needed to keep closed for about ten more minutes. “I waited in line.”

“Maya, “ He took a step toward me. Bare feet on the hardwood. “Put the food down, okay, let’s just, let’s talk, “

“There’s a chili sauce on the side. You like extra.”

“Stop. Stop talking about the food.” His voice cracked. Like he was the one with something to be upset about. “Look at me. Just look at me.”

I was looking at him. That was the problem.

I set the bag down on the little table by the door. Carefully. I straightened it so it sat square against the edge, because if I didn’t have something to do with my hands I didn’t know what they’d do.

“You don’t have to go,” I said, to the bag. “I’ll go.”

“Maya, for God’s sake, “ He grabbed my arm.

I looked at his hand. Then I looked at him.

He let go.

“You’re not even gonna yell at me?” he said. Quieter now. Almost confused. Like he’d prepared for a fight and I’d robbed him of it. “You’re just gonna, what, you’re just gonna leave?”

I turned around.

“Maya.” His voice followed me into the hall. “Maya, come on, don’t do this, we can, MAYA, “

I took the stairs again. Slower this time, because my legs had stopped feeling like mine.

Behind me a door opened. His voice, smaller with distance. My name, again, but he didn’t come down after me. Of course he didn’t. He was in his boxers and there was a woman in his bed and even Evan knew you didn’t chase a girl down three flights for that.

The lobby door was still unlocked.

I walked out into the night and the cold hit my face and I just kept walking.

I didn’t cry. I kept waiting for it. I walked four blocks waiting for it, the way you wait for a sneeze, and it never came. There was just this static behind my eyes and a ringing in my ears that wouldn’t quit.

My phone buzzed. Sophia.

I let it ring out.

It buzzed again. I turned it face down in my hand and kept walking, past a bodega, past a man arguing with a parking meter, past a couple holding hands who looked at me and then looked away fast, and I realized I must have looked like something. A woman walking too fast in heels with no coat and no destination.

I didn’t want to go home. Home had the candle I’d bought because he liked it. Home had the second toothbrush. Home was full of him, and I wasn’t ready to walk into a place that still believed in us.

So when I saw the light, I stopped.

It spilled out onto the sidewalk, warm and gold, from a place with no real sign, just brass letters above a door and a man in a dark coat holding it like he’d been waiting for someone. Not me. But the door was open and the light looked like the opposite of a man’s bedroom, and that was enough.

Inside, it was all low amber and quiet and the clink of good glass. The kind of place I’d never walk into on my own. The kind of place Evan would have walked into like he owned it.

I sat at the bar before I could talk myself out of it.

The bartender slid a coaster in front of me without a word. He had the good manners not to look at my face too long.

“What’s the most expensive thing you’ve got,” I said.

He raised an eyebrow. “Glass or bottle?”

“Glass. I’m not a maniac.” My voice almost worked. Almost.

He named something French and a price that should have made me flinch.

“That one,” I said.

I didn’t have the money for it. I had the money for it the way you have money for things when you’ve stopped caring, which is to say not really, but tonight my card could deal with the consequences of my choices for once.

The wine came. Deep red, almost black in the low light. I wrapped my hand around the stem and didn’t drink yet.

In the mirror behind the bottles I could see myself, and I looked fine. That was the strange part. Mascara holding. Hair holding. A woman who looked completely normal, sitting alone, having a drink, and you’d never know that an hour ago she’d had a whole life and now she was holding the pieces of it in her lap and pretending they were a clutch.

“Long night?”

The voice came from my right. Low. Unhurried.

I didn’t turn. I watched him in the mirror instead, a man settling onto the stool one over, not crowding me, his eyes on the bottles in front of us and not on me, which was somehow the only reason I didn’t tell him to leave.

“You could say that,” I said.

“You don’t have to say anything.” He lifted two fingers and the bartender drifted over. “Whatever she’s having. And put hers on mine.”

“I can pay for my own drink.”

“I’m sure you can.” A pause. A small one. “I’m not trying to buy you anything. You just look like someone who decided something tonight, and I’ve got a soft spot for people who decide things.”

I finally turned and looked at him.

And the thing was, he was right.

I had decided something. Standing in that doorway, watching the man I’d brought dinner to put his hand on a stranger’s hip, some quiet switch inside me had flipped, and I wasn’t sure yet what it had turned off.