Page 83 of Suite 7

Except for her coffee mug on my counter. Her scent on my sheets. The memory of her in my shirt, drowning in gray fabric, arguing about not being able to have a Sinclair-Beckett Smackdown before nine AM like it was the most natural thing she’d ever done.

I pick up her mug. Rinse it. Dry it, and open the cabinet.

Sloane’s mug is on the shelf below, the one she uses when she comes for dinner. I set her mug next to mine on the upper shelf, and close the cabinet.

Then I stand there, staring at the closed cabinet. The mugs are where I put them — hers next to mine, upper shelf, the natural place for something that belongs. I know what I’ve done. I did it without deciding to, which is the part I can’t work out, because I decide everything. Every object in this apartment is where it is because I put it there on purpose.

The mug is where it is because I wasn’t paying attention.

I step back. Move to the window, which is what I do when I need the city to be indifferent at me for a while.

A week since Suite 7. One morning. The arrangement exactly what we said it would be.

Except I just gave her mug a shelf.

I wait for the impulse to move it. To restore the order I prefer. The apartment that has always been precisely mine.

The impulse doesn’t come.

I get the glass of water I don’t want and stand at the counter with it. My gaze drifts back to the cabinet.

Hers. Mine. One shelf.

It’s harder to stay present. When I’m not indifferent to the outcome.

I should not have said that. I said it anyway. And the thing I notice — the variable I can’t isolate — is that I don’t want to take it back.

I look at Gerald.

Six years on that shelf. Never once demanded I be more than I’m in a given moment. Never looked at me across a room full of people and made me forget what I was doing. In every respect, the ideal roommate.

“You’re useless,” I tell him.

Gerald says nothing. He is, as always, a cactus.

I shower. Change. Spend the evening doing the work I told myself I’d do.

This is not true.

My phone buzzes at eleven forty-seven.

Vera: Still up?

She never texts late at night.

Me: Still up.

Vera: I’ve been thinking.

Me: About?

Three dots. A long pause. Longer than usual for her — she types fast, doesn’t second-guess.

Vera: This morning. The argument. The part where you said you can’t give me up.

I set the phone down. Pick it up.

There are things I could type. True things. The mug. The shelf. The fact that the question has never been whether I want this — it’s that I can’t yet see the bottom of it, and that quality of not-knowing is not something I have a measurement for.