Chapter Text
Their father dropped them off at the curb on Saturday afternoon like he was returning something he'd rented and hadn't much liked, two days earlier than predicted, in a distracted hurry that meant he had somewhere better to be and wanted everybody to agree that what he was doing was the most logical line of action. He'd promised the whole weekend, in his promise voice, warm and superficially sweet; it was the voice that made Roark go stupid with hope every single time, and now it was barely past two on the second day and he was leaning across the passenger seat to push the door open because reaching all the way over was apparently the most he could manage. Bronwyn got out, having learned a while ago that getting out first and fast was better than watching him invent reasons, because the reasons were always the same and always long and he clearly thought his children were stupid enough to believe them when the real reason was that he simply did not wish to spend time with them.
"Something came up at work," he said. "Big fire only I can put out, can't be helped. I'll make it up to you guys, okay? Next weekend, if your mother isn’t difficult about it; whatever you want: movie, skating, everything."
"You said we could see the new Toy Story," Roark said, still half in the car, still believing there was a negotiation happening.
"I said next weekend, bud. Grab your stuff."
Roark grabbed his stuff as Bronwyn watched him do it, as she watched him take too long about it hoping their dad would change his mind, and she wanted to tell him to hurry up before it got worse, before their father started to get irritated and mean about it, but you couldn't say that to Roark. He had to find it out himself every time, fresh, like it was the first time it had ever happened to them and not like it was routine by this point. The car pulled off before Roark had fully shut the door and he had to jump back onto the sidewalk; inside it, their father lifted two fingers off the wheel in a wave without looking in the mirror, and then he was gone into traffic on Fifth and it was just the two of them on the curb with a duffel bag, a backpack and Roark's hockey stick that he'd insisted on bringing in the hopes their father would take them to the rink.
Layton, the doorman, held the door for them and said, "Back already?" as if he hadn’t seen this exact scenario play out tens of times before, and Bronwyn answered, "Change of plans," in the voice she'd copied off her mother, the one that closed the subject, and Layton, who understood, let it close.
The elevator was mirrored on three sides so there was nowhere to look that wasn't her own face or Roark's. Her brother had gone quiet, which was a bad sign. Loud Roark she could handle, quiet Roark meant he was thinking and adding things up, all of them, the last time and the time before that, and that he was getting to the answer, and the answer made his chin wobble. She reached over and took the hockey stick off him so he'd have his hands free, the only weight she could take off of him and onto herself.
"He forgot Toy Story was tonight," Roark said. "That's why, he didn’t do it on purpose."
"Probably," Bronwyn said.
It was on the twelfth floor, standing in front of their own door with their key in her hand, that Brownyn had realized that the key was in fact not in her hand. The key was in the little zip pocket of the bag she'd left in the back of their father's car when he'd rushed them, because she'd taken it out to check if her kindle charger was in there and never put it back, and it was now somewhere on the FDR heading north. She stood there patting the same three pockets over and over as if the key might have quietly changed its mind about where it lived.
"Call Dad," Roark said.
She called Dad. It rang the number of times it always rang and then it went to voicemail, and she got to hear his voice come on sounding delighted to hear from her and instructing her to leave a message. She called again. Then again, a third and fourth time, and then made herself stop, because there was no point. He never picked up.
"He'll see the missed calls," she said. "He'll turn around."
He would not turn around. They both knew he would not turn around, but sometimes you had to lie to yourself to make yourself feel better. Roark accepted the lie because he wanted to, not because he believed it, and they sat down on the floor with their backs against the door because there was nothing else to do.
They both came to the silent agreement that they were not going to call their mother. Their mother was at the autumn Dior event, the really important one, the one she'd been stressed about for three weeks and had ironed a speech for and told them a hundred times she'd be reachable if there was an emergency but please, please, God, let there not be an emergency. This was not an emergency, nobody was bleeding, nobody was physically hurt or loudly sobbing. If Bronwyn called her, she would leave. She would walk out of the important event, in the beautiful dress Brownyn and Roark had helped her lace up, in the middle of her important speech and get in a car and come home, and she would say it was fine, she would say it a hundred times. But it would not be fine, and it would be their dad's fault but somehow it would land on their mum, the way everything he did hurt her instead of him.
So they would wait. Their mother was home by nine, usually, on the semi-late ones. It was two-forty. Bronwyn did the sum and did not announce it out loud.
"We're going to wait," she told Roark. "It's going to be an adventure."
"It's not an adventure Wyn, we're sitting on the floor."
"That's the adventure part, we've never done it before."
He laughed a little, which was reassuring, and then about twenty minutes in he stopped laughing and telling jokes, and about forty minutes in he stopped talking, and around the one hour mark, with his knees up under his chin and his back against the door of the home he couldn't get into, he started to cry – not loudly, which was the normal Roark cry, but the quiet shaky kind he usually did around their father when he was trying not to and couldn't get on top of it. Bronwyn put her arm around him and stared very hard at the wallpaper across the hall, and thought about her favourite book, because if she thought about her afternoon she was going to cry too, and one of them had to be strong.
That was when the door at the end of the hall opened.
They'd never seen anyone come out of it. It was the other apartment on their floor, the big one, empty for as long as they'd lived here – their mother said the last tenant had died and there'd been a whole dispute with the estate, and Bronwyn had taken that and spun it into six months' worth of theories with her best friend Celia, most of them involving the apartment being haunted, all of them abandoned now because a woman had just walked out of it holding a mug, and the woman was not a ghost. She just looked like Auntie Serena on a sunday morning, which was extremely hungover, but alive.
She was maybe her mum's age, long brown hair everywhere, in sleep shorts and a huge grey shirt that said something faded across the front in big orange letters, and dark sunglasses even though the hallway was not bright, and socks. Just socks, with little cartoon ducks on them, no slippers, standing in the hallway with her mug held against her chest like it was keeping her upright. She squinted toward them over the top of her sunglasses, took in the two kids on the floor and the one of them crying, and said, in a low scratched-up voice, "Oh, no."
Bronwyn tightened up on instinct, ready to say we're fine, thanks, ready to deploy a dismissal, but the woman didn't come over. She stayed where she was and looked at them for a second longer and then said, "Okay, I'm going to guess. Locked out?"
"Our key's in our dad's car," Roark said, immediately, because the only thing bigger than his laugh was his mouth, and he had never met a stranger he wouldn't tell everything to. Bronwyn wanted to kill him. "He was supposed to have us this weekend but something came up at his job so he dropped us early. Only Bronwyn forgot the key because he was making us hurry and now he won't pick up and Mum's at a work event so we're waiting."
"Roark," Bronwyn hissed..
"What, she asked."
The woman took a slow sip from her mug and seemed to think about the whole business with a seriousness that Bronwyn hadn't expected, no oh you poor things, no fake cheerfulness, or worse, pity; just a woman working out a problem while her head clearly hurt.
"Right," she said. "Couple of things. One, I'm not going to say come inside, because you don't know me from a hole in the ground and neither of us wants your mother coming home to the kids went into a stranger's appartment, that's a bad afternoon for everybody. Two, I’m not going to let you sit on the floor for hours, I'm not built to watch that. So." She set her mug down on the hallway carpet and pushed the sunglasses up into her hair and rubbed both hands down her face, and her eyes when they came out were brown and enormous and not remotely as put-together as the rest of her was pretending to be. "Give me a minute, I'm going to bring the party to you."
She turned around and went back in, and Roark looked at Bronwyn with his face still blotchy and said, "What party?". Bronwyn answered that she had no idea, and then there was a noise from inside the apartment like furniture being moved, a long scraping drag, and the woman reappeared backwards through her own front door hauling one end of a couch with one hand.
It was a nice big couch— deep burgundy, the kind of thing you saw in the lobby of a fancy hotel — and she was walking it out into the hall by herself, across the threshold and then across the carpet toward them. She was not even slightly big, she was a normal-sized hungover woman in socks, and she moved that couch like it weighed nothing at all. Bronwyn scrambled up to help and got a hand under one arm of it and it was heavy, it was a lot, she could barely budge her side, and the woman had been carrying the whole thing.
"You're strong," Bronwyn said.
"Adrenaline," the woman replied, "And spite, sit."
They sat. The couch faced their own front door, which was ridiculous, an expensive couch parked in the middle of a hallway aimed at their door, and Roark started laughing again, the real loud laugh this time, and once he'd started he couldn't stop, the whole thing tipping over from awful into funny. Bronwyn felt her chest come unclenched about a notch.
The woman made two more trips. She came out with a folded blanket that she dropped on Roark without ceremony, and a stack of books she set on the arm of the couch — old ones, cloth covers, a couple with no writing left on the spine — and then she disappeared for longer and came back with a tin under one arm and both hands full of things she'd clearly just grabbed out of her fridge with no plan whatsoever. She laid it all out on the couch between them like it was normal: a wedge of some cheese that smelled strong and looked expensive, a box of crackers, a bar of dark chocolate the size of a paperback, half a pizza still in the box, a jar of shortbread cookies, and three bottles of fancy sparkling water with Italian writing on them.
"Eat," she said. "I mean it. I don't want your mother thinking I let you starve in a hallway, I've got a reputation." She dropped onto the far end of the couch with her mug and closed her eyes for a second like sitting down was the best thing that had happened to her all day. "Not a good reputation, but a reputation nonetheless."
"What is this cheese?" Roark said, already unwrapping it.
"Pule cheese, got it for my friend. Start with the crackers, and then work up to it, it'll change your life."
Roark ate the cheese by itself in one bite and made a face like he'd been zapped, and the woman laughed, more an exhale than a proper laugh, and then winced and pressed two fingers to her temple. Bronwyn caught the wince and understood she was in genuine pain and doing all of this anyway, dragging couches and laying out food, with a head that clearly felt like it was splitting.
"You had a party," Bronwyn said; it wasn't a question.
"I did not have a party. I went to a party last night that had a great deal of poor decision-making in it, and I am now paying what one pays." She cracked one eye at Bronwyn. "You don't miss much, do you?"
"No, I don’t." Bronwyn said.
"Good, don't ever start. Terrible habit, missing things." She reached over and knocked the lid off the tin, and it was filled with shortbread, homemade-looking. She nudged it toward Bronwyn. "The eldest always gets to be the one who notices everything. I know how that goes, it's a rotten job and nobody thanks you for it." She said it lightly, but she was looking at her when she said it, and Bronwyn, who did in fact do the rotten job and had never once been properly thanked for it, felt weirdly and completely seen by a stranger in duck patterned socks, and didn't know what to do except take a piece of shortbread.
The woman taught them a card game after that, from a soft old deck she'd fished out of her apartment. It was a strange one, not Uno, not anything Bronwyn knew, with rules she explained as they went and clearly bent whenever it suited her. She kept saying things that were a little off — she called the jack "the knave" once and didn't seem to notice, and when Roark won a hand she’d said something which made no sense in a language Bronwyn did not recognize, and when they asked her what it meant she waved it off and said she'd read too much. She was easy to be around in a way most grown-ups were not, no performance to her, no leaning down to their level and speaking to them as if they were less on the sole basis of being children. She just talked to them like people, and if you asked her a real question she gave you a real answer, and if you asked her something she didn't want to answer she said "next question" and grinned and there was no getting past it.
Her hands were cold. Bronwyn noticed it when the woman passed her the deck to shuffle, their fingers touching for a second — cold, properly cold, like she'd had them out a window, even though the hallway was warm and she'd been holding a mug of what looked like hot coffee. Bronwyn thought poor circulation, which was a thing her nan had, and let it go.
It got to be past four. The light coming through the window at the end of the hall had gone long and gold, and Roark had eaten most of a pizza and fallen into the blanket sideways. Bronwyn was three books deep into the stack, having finally found one she liked, and the woman looked at the two of them settled in on her couch and said, gently, no push in it, "You're going to call your mom now."
"She's at work," Bronwyn said. "It's important."
"I believe you. Call her anyway."
"She'll leave."
"She'll want to," the woman agreed. "My guess is she'd rather leave and not have needed to than find out later you were out here since two and she didn't get the chance." She said it plainly, no drama, and it landed exactly where Bronwyn didn't want it to land, because it was true. "Your mother gets to decide what's important to her. That's not your job, and your mother wouldn’t want it to be."
So Bronwyn called her.
Her mother answered on the second ring, "Bronwyn? Darling, is everything all right?"
Bronwyn told her the short version, no key, Dad, waiting, and there was a silence on the line that had a lot in it, and then her mother's voice came back changed: she was sending Auntie Serena, Auntie Serena was ten minutes out, she had a spare key and Bronwyn was to stay exactly where she was and not go anywhere with anyone. Bronwyn looked at the woman on the couch and the woman was already shaking her head, mouthing don't, and Bronwyn understood she meant don't mention me, don't make it a thing your mum has to worry about from across town, and so Bronwyn said, "We're fine, we're just in the hall, Roark ate so much pizza," and her mother made a wet laughing sound that meant she was more upset than she was letting on, and said she'd be home as soon as she could, and love you, tell your brother, and hung up.
Serena buzzed up in eight minutes, not ten. The woman was already on her feet by then, gathering the sunglasses off the arm of the couch, and she said she'd leave them to it. She did not make a big deal of it, no hug, no it was so lovely, she just told Roark the cheese would be there next time he was locked out of anywhere near her, which made him laugh, and she told Bronwyn to keep the book she was was getting started on, the third one, said it like it was nothing, said she had two copies.
The kids took the elevator down to meet Serena in the lobby. Bronwyn hit the button and the doors started to close, and in the last second before they did she looked back down the hall, and the woman was still standing there by the couch that neither of them had moved back inside, one hand resting on its arm, watching them go with her sunglasses back down over her eyes. She lifted her hand in a small wave. She wasn't going back in, she was just standing there in her duck patterned socks in the empty hall with all her party still spread out on a couch for nobody, and something about it caught at Bronwyn and wouldn't quite let go, and then the doors closed over it and they went down.
"I like her," Roark announced to the mirrored box. "What's her name?"
Bronwyn realized they had never asked. And she'd never said.
Emily came home at nine to find a couch in the hallway, which was not among the many things she had prepared herself for in the car. She had prepared herself for the kids being upset, for having to be diplomatic about their father without saying anything she'd regret in front of them, for Serena's face doing its I-told-you-about-that-man expression, for the guilt that had ridden home with her from the Plaza and was now going to move in for a few days as it always did. She had not prepared for a large burgundy sofa parked in the corridor outside her own front door, angled toward it, as though her flat were about to be interviewed. She stood in front of it with her heels in one hand and simply looked at it for a moment, too tired to have a theory.
Inside, Serena was in her favourite spot on the sofa with a glass of the Montbazillac and her feet up on the coffee table she had been told a hundred times not to put her feet on, and she said, without turning around, "They're asleep. Everyone's fed, nobody's traumatized, and you can breathe."
"There's a couch in the hall."
"I know. It's a whole story, the kids will want to tell you themselves in the morning, they've been rehearsing." Serena finally looked round, and whatever was on Emily's face made her put the glass down and soften, a little. "They're fine, Em. They had a nicer afternoon than either of us, courtesy of your new neighbor, who apparently kept them entertained in the hallway for two hours because your daughter, God love her, will die before she inflicts one negative emotion upon anyone else. She gets that from precisely one of the two people who made her."
Emily hung up her coat and did not rise to it, because it was true and because there was no version of arguing it that didn't end with her crying in front of Serena. She got the story in pieces over the next twenty minutes, the ones Serena had, which were secondhand and full of holes – Frank, the key, the wait, the woman from the empty flat who'd dragged furniture and food into the corridor and taught the children some card game and then, crucially, been the one to tell Bronwyn to call her mother. A stranger had done the thing Emily's own child wouldn't do, which was decide that Emily deserved to be told.
"Roark says she's the strongest person he's ever met and he now wants her to be his hockey coach and guide him to glory," Serena said. "He says she carried the couch by herself."
"So my children spent the afternoon with a woman I've never met, in a hallway, eating her food."
"Yes, that's the ungenerous read, well done, you've found it." Serena stood and collected her things. "The generous read is a person you've never spoken to spent her Saturday making sure your kids weren't miserable and asked for nothing, and left before either of us could even thank her properly. I'd go with that one, personally, but you do you." She kissed Emily's cheek at the door. "Go to bed. And tell your neighbor to move her couch, it's a fire hazard sitting out there."
Emily did not go to bed. She stood in her kitchen for a while thinking about the fact that she owed a debt to a person whose name she didn't know, and the thought sat wrong on her, itched, because Emily did not do owing. Owing was proof of lacking. So at ten, in the interest of settling the account and getting to sleep, she went to the wine rack and pulled out a bottle without looking at the label, on the principle that if she looked she might start caring which one, and she recognized the shape of it a second too late as one of the Romanées Frank had bought by the case in the year he'd decided he was a wine person, before he'd decided he was several other kinds of person instead. Even better, she'd rather like giving away Frank's wine to a stranger. She'd rather like it a great deal.
She knocked on the door at the end of the hall still in her laced up dress, an Annie Ibiza champagne colored piece she'd worn to be formidable in front of Dior, holding a good bottle of somebody else's regret, fully expecting the hungover creature in horrifying socks serena had described.
The door opened on someone else entirely.
The woman standing there was dressed to go out — properly out, a black mini dress that was doing a lot with very little, hair down and styled, one earring in and the other apparently still in progress somewhere, barefoot on her own parquet with the unbothered ease of a person who inhabited her own skin with ease. She'd clearly recovered from whatever the children had witnessed. She looked, in fact, extremely well, and Emily, who assessed appearances for a living and did it faster than most people breathed, took her in and found her jarring — not just beautiful, though she was that, but arresting in a manner Emily couldn't quite identify, an over-thereness to her, a quality of being more present in the doorway than a regular person should be. Emily's eye stuck and dragged. She hated when her eye stuck. She was not a person who did that; she'd stood in rooms with the most beautiful faces on the planet and rolled her eyes through it. She stuck for the length of a breath on a barefoot stranger in a tiny dress, and then she was furious, immediately, mostly at herself, and she funneled all of it into the raising of her chin.
"You're the neighbour," she said, which came out as an accusation rather than a greeting.
"I'm a neighbor," the woman agreed, and she was smiling, warm and without a scrap of armor, as if being accused on her own doorstep at ten at night were the nicest thing that had happened to her all week. "And you must be the mother. Your daughter’s got your face, you know. The unimpressed one, this one." She raised an eyebrow and sneered, "She used it on me about five times this afternoon. Good inheritance, my compliments."
"I've come to thank you." Emily disregard everything being said and held out the bottle like she was serving a subpoena. "For today. It was kind, more than kind, and I don't enjoy being in anyone's debt, so." She let the so land flat and final.
The woman took the bottle and turned it to read the label, and made a low sound of real appreciation. "You opened the good cabinet for me. First meeting. I'm touched."
"It's my ex-husband's."
"Then it's perfect, I'll think coldly of him with every glass." She looked up from the label, and there was that over-there quality again, brown eyes that didn't quite go with the smiling mouth, and she took Emily in — properly, unhurried, from her slippers, over her dress, to her collarbones and back up to her face — and made no attempt at all to pretend she wasn't doing it. "You wore an impressive dress to bring me wine. It's the one you put on to be the most eyecatching and intimidating woman in the room. You didn't have to armor up, I was always going to be nice to you."
"I dressed for an event, not for you."
"No, obviously." Perfectly agreeable, not believing one word of it. "You simply still had it on, an hour later, when you walked the whole length of the hall to hand-deliver a bottle you could've left at my door with a note. Just manners."
"Yes," Emily said. "Manners. You may have heard of them, they're popular in some countries, clearly not yours." She had meant that to sting but it did not; the woman just laughed, low and pleased, and leaned a shoulder into the doorframe and settled in, one earring in and the other still off somewhere, entirely at her leisure though she was plainly dressed to be somewhere else. Emily found herself being looked at with an interest she was going to categorize as rudeness because the alternative was absurd. This was a stranger. This was a beautiful stranger in a beautiful dress who had had her children in a hallway that afternoon, and she was looking at Emily as though Emily were the most interesting thing she'd laid eyes on in recent history, and it was forward, it was American, it was nothing.
"Do you always come to the door dressed like that?" Emily heard herself ask, and immediately hated it, because it had come out wrong, it had come out as though she'd noticed, when the entire point was that she had not.
"Only when someone knocks." The corner of the woman's mouth went up. "Should I have changed? You'd have waited. I'd have liked knowing you were out here waiting for me." She said it easily, warmly, and Emily felt something she hoped to God wasn't visible on her face from the outside. "You've gone very still, did I say something?"
"You said several somethings and none of them worked." This was a lie. "Is this how you operate? You do a favor and then flirt with the woman on your doorstep and call it neighbourly?"
"Is that what I'm doing?" All innocence, delighted innocence, the trap already sprung. "I thought I was making conversation. But if you'd rather call it flirting, I won't stop you, you're the one who reached for the word." She tilted her head, unhurried, reading Emily as if Emily were large print. "For what it's worth, you'd know if I were flirting with you. You wouldn't have to guess, and you certainly wouldn't be standing there pretending you hadn't noticed."
"I'm not – " Emily started, and stopped, because there was no honest end to the sentence and she did not do dishonest ends where she'd get caught. She went, instead, for the meanest thing in the drawer. "It must be a wonderful life. Nothing to do on a Saturday but babysit other people's children and then go put on three centimeters of fabric and drink until you can't remember the day. Off somewhere important, are we?"
The woman didn't flinch. If anything she smiled wider, genuinely thrilled. "God, no. I’m off somewhere absolutely shallow. I'm going to stand in a dark room and let strangers buy me drinks, then buy them drinks, and be of no use to anyone." The dig went straight through the honesty and hit the floor, spent, and Emily's contempt was left holding nothing. "You're very good at that, by the way – the look, the once-over, the little downward flick at the dress before the remark. Professional, very good. I've been appraised by the best in the business and you're in the conversation." She was enjoying this so plainly, so completely, that Emily wanted to shake her. "Your daughter's going to be lethal when she grows into it, you should be frightened."
"Don't talk about my daughter."
"Off limits, noted, apologies." No offense taken, none available for the taking, and Emily stood there having emptied the whole drawer while the woman leaned in her doorway un-dented and warm and holding Frank's wine, and the horror of it was that Emily was the one whose pulse had come up, Emily was the one rattled, in a hallway, at ten, by a person she had every intention of never thinking about again. "I liked them, for the record. Good kids. Bronwyn watches everything and Roark is not shy about speaing it, so between them there are no secrets. You've done a good job with two humans a lousy man keeps disappointing." She said it gently, no barb in it, and it was worse than any barb, because it was nice and Emily had no defenses built for nice because she rarely got nice. "Would love to keep doing this with you, truly, but you should get some sleep. You look like a woman who's been holding a face together since this morning, and you've earned putting it down."
"I don't need – "
"I know. Nobody needs anything, it's a very fashionable way to live nowadays." She smiled again, and this one was quieter, aimed properly at Emily and not at the sport of it, and it did something inconvenient at the bottom of Emily’s stomach that she elected to chalk up to fatigue. "Go to bed, neighbor. Thank you for the wine. I'll move the couch back before I leave. It's genuinely nice to meet you finally – you're exactly as I imagined, and I mean that as a compliment."
Emily opened her mouth, found nothing in it that would win, and closed it. She was not going to stand in a hallway losing to a barefoot woman in a slip. She'd delivered the wine. The account was settled, or it wasn't, and either way she was done. "Enjoy your evening," she said, in the voice she used to end meetings, and turned on her heel and walked the length of the corridor back to her own door with her shoulders square and the certain knowledge that she was being watched the entire way and would not, under any circumstances, look back.
She didn't look back; she got inside and shut the door. She stood against it in the dark of her own hall and discovered she'd forgotten to ask the woman's name again, third person in her family to manage it in one day, and she was too proud to go back now. Somewhere down the corridor she heard the long low scrape of a couch being moved by one person as though it weighed nothing at all.
Emily went to bed angry, at Frank, at the couch, at her daughter's loyalty, at the itch of an unpaid debt, and at one thing she did not name and put firmly at the bottom of the pile where the things she wasn't going to look at lived, and she lay in the dark listening to her building settle and did not sleep for quite some time.
She left the flat at seven the next morning to walk to Ladurée on Madison, because it was hers, the one indulgence she'd kept from the marriage that had nothing of Frank in it, and because she wanted to be home with the pale green box on the counter before either child woke up. Bronwyn and Roark were going to wake up to a bad taste in their mouths about a father who'd dumped them and vanished, and you could not fix that, there was no fixing that, but you could put chocolate custard between them and the memory of it for one morning, and Emily believed in the small managing of things you could not solve. She dressed quickly: white wool sweater, black leggings, trainers she walked in and would not be caught dead in, hair scraped back with a clip, glasses instead of contacts because it was seven o'clock on a Sunday. No face on. It was, she reflected, letting herself out into the hush of the corridor, the single least seen version of herself in existence, and there was precisely nobody awake in Manhattan to see it.
The lift was still four floors down and climbing when the door at the end of the corridor opened.
The woman from last night came out of it backwards, talking, in a shirt that was plainly not the dress she'd left in and nothing else worth mentioning, herding two people ahead of her toward the lift with her phone in one hand. "— it's a black Toyota and it's downstairs now; if you make the driver wait he'll go and then you'll have to make your own arrangements, and I've seen the pair of you attempt a decision this morning, so –"
They were both younger than her, or younger than she looked, a girl and a boy who'd clearly been somewhere excellent all night and were now blinking at the corridor lighting. And they were, Emily saw before she could decide not to, absolutely covered in whatever happened during the night — bruised at the throat, both of them, high on the neck and down toward the collar, the marks dark against the boy's pale skin and darker still on the girl's, a whole night's work worn openly at seven o'clock on a Sunday morning in a floor with her children in it.
The woman herself had lipstick that wasn't her own smeared in a rough diagonal down one side of her throat, and the pleased, unbothered wreckage of somebody who'd had an excellent time and had no regrets pending. She was mid-sentence when she looked up and saw Emily.
She stopped. Whatever she had been saying about the Toyota simply ceased, and her whole face opened, and she said, "Oh – hello."
"Good morning," Emily said, with as much dignity as a woman who had been embarassingly out of her depth the night prior could be.
"Cute glasses." The lift arrived and the doors slid open. The woman put a hand flat between her two guests' shoulder blades and posted them into it without looking at them. "In. Back corner, both of you." And then she stepped in after them and turned her back on the pair of them entirely, and gave Emily her whole attention. Emily found herself the sole object of a regard that was, at seven in the morning, frankly excessive.
Emily got in, because the alternative was standing in a corridor waiting pointedly for a second lift that wouldn't come for ten minutes, and because pride would not permit her to be seen fleeing. She put herself in the front corner and pressed the already-lit L as though it might go faster for the insistence.
The doors closed on the four of them.
"They've been mauled," Emily said, without really meaning to.
"Sorry?"
"Your guests." Emily gestured at the two figures in the back corner. "It looks like a wildlife documentary."
The boy in the back said something indistinct and pleased about this. The woman did not turn round.
"They had a nice time," she said.
"They look like they've been in an accident."
"They had a very nice time."
The two strangers were draped and murmuring and clearly still somewhere else in their heads, the girl with her nose more or less in the collar of the boy's jacket — and the woman ignored the pair of them completely. She had stopped attending to them at the moment the corridor door opened on Emily and had not gone back, and she was now looking at Emily with the frank untroubled attention of somebody with all the time in the world and nothing better to point it at.
It was seven o'clock in the morning. Emily was in her Sunday worst and her glasses, with her hair in a clip, buying pastry for her children out of guilt, and she was being looked at as though she were the most interesting thing to exist, again. She resented it keenly and could not entirely locate the reason for the resentment.
"You're up early," the woman said. "You have the demeanor of a woman on a mission."
"I'm buying éclairs."
"At seven?"
"They go fast."
"Do they." She sounded like this was the most entertainig thing she'd heard in a decade, which was patently ridiculous, and the boy in the back lifted his head and said, blearily, "Are we getting éclairs?"
"No, doll. She's getting éclairs, you're getting an Uber." The dismissal was so gentle and so total that Emily nearly laughed and caught it in time.
"Long night?" Emily asked, and let her glance go, once, deliberately, to the lipstick down the woman's neck, and back up. She'd meant it as a dig. She was fairly sure she'd meant it as a dig.
The woman put two fingers to her throat, found the smear, examined it on her fingertips without embarrassment, and shrugged. "Productive one. You should see the — no, you shouldn't, forget I said that, there are children in this building." Her eyebrows knitted together, smile persistent. "You look scandalized, but you're not, though, not really . You've decided to look scandalized because it's tidier than whatever you actually feel, and I respect that."
"I think," Emily said, with precision, "that it's seven in the morning and you're leaving home with two people you'll have forgotten by lunch, smelling like a distillery, and I think whatever you do with your evenings is entirely your business and I'd thank you not to do it in the lift I share with my children."
"Fair. Completely fair. I'll be more discreet, I'll make them leave my place through the wall next time." She said it with such easy good humor that it robbed Emily of the satisfaction of having aimed anything, and then the girl on the left surfaced and said something into the woman's ear. The woman turned her head and murmured back, low, something Emily didn't catch and didn't want to, and the girl laughed and subsided, and the woman came straight back to Emily as if the interruption didn’t happen. "Sorry. Where were we? Right, you were disapproving of me."
"I was leaving," Emily said, because they were nearly at the lobby.
"You keep doing that," the woman observed. "Planning exits. You did it last night too, didn't look back once. You wanted to but you didn't." Emily opened her mouth to deny it and the woman went right on, delighted with herself. "It's my favorite thing about you so far. You'll stand in a lift and fight with me at seven in the morning, you'll come to my door in a pretty dress; you'll do the whole song and dance, but God forbid you let me see you look back. It's very consistent. I've known you for one day and I can already predict it."
"You don't know me at all," Emily said, which came out with more feeling than she'd intended, and the woman's face changed a fraction, the delight going quieter, more careful.
"No," she agreed. "Not yet. But I'm going to enjoy trying to, if you let me. And you might. Stranger things have happened." The lift settled and the doors opened on the lobby, Layton at the desk pretending very hard not to look at the tableau emerging. The two strangers peeled themselves off and drifted out ahead toward the daylight and their forgotten uber. The woman let them go without a backward glance, still standing there in the lift, holding the door with one hand, entirely unhurried.
"You should catch up with your — night," Emily said, and gestured after them, and it came out less cutting than she wanted.
"They'll manage. They're very resourceful, that's how they ended up on my arms." The woman didn’t step out into the lobby light, and it occurred to Emily that in two days and two conversations they had somehow still not done the one ordinary thing that people did in the first thirty seconds. "This is idiotic," the woman said, apparently arriving at the same place. "We've talked twice and shared a lift, and I watched your kids, but I still don't know your name and you don't know mine. I'm Andy. Andy Sachs."
"Emily," Emily said, before she'd decided to. "Charlton."
"Emily Charlton." Andy said it back slowly, tried the whole of it out, and something in the saying of it seemed to please her enormously, an old-fashioned kind of pleasure. "There. Now when you’re rude to me in a lift it'll feel personal, much better. Go and get your éclairs, Emily. Buy an extra one." She was already turning, clicking on the elevator button to go up the the 12th, done with the lobby and the strangers and the whole night behind her. "You've had a rotten weekend and nobody's bought you anything, buy the extra one and eat it before the kids wake up. Don't share it, it should be yours."
The elevator doors closed before Emily could answer.
She bought the extra éclair. She told herself it was because they came in boxes of four and there were odd numbers of people in her flat, which did not make sense. She ate it standing at her own kitchen counter in the gold seven-thirty light before either child stirred. She did not share it, and she thought, once, briefly, of the name – Andy – and then put the thought where it belonged, at the bottom, under everything else she was not going to look at, and went to wake her children with pastries and a face she'd already fixed.