From the other side of the apartment, I heard Ryan say, “Okay, Ines. We need to make some decisions. What are we packing right now?”
I pressed a fist to my mouth to smother a manic laugh. Not twenty minutes ago I was busy wringing the oxygen out of every molecule in reach in the daft hope of suffocating that interaction on the plane from memory. All I’d wanted was to climb into bed and hide under the covers for a minimum of sixteen hours.Alone.
And here we were, waiting on Jakobi’s truck and figuring out if there was anything, even one tiny thing from this place, that I could take with me to Ryan’s condo.
Where I wouldn’t be able to hide at all.
“Did you buy or lease?”
Ryan set eight reusable grocery bags on the marble island, all of which he’d insisted on carrying into the high-rise condo himself, and cut a glance toward Ines. “Buy.”
“How much did you pay?”
“Ines,” I whisper-yelled.
She held up her hands. “What?”
“It’s rude to ask those things,” I said.
Ryan shook his head. “It’s fine. Reporters write about it all the time. My grandmother gives me a ton of shit about it too.” To Ines, he said, “About fifteen million.”
“Dollars?”
He shrugged as he unpacked a bag. We’d cleared out the fridge and cupboards before leaving. “The seller wasn’t willing to take jelly beans.”
She pushed her glasses up. “What’s the square footage?”
“A little over four thousand inside, another thousand on the deck.”
I glanced past the comfortable living room and dining room with a table to seat eight, toward the deck. The clouds pressed in close, heavy and dense. The city all but disappeared.
If it wasn’t still raining like the end of days and my uterus wasn’t clawing its wallpaper off, I’d disappear too. I just needed to figure a few things out and I couldn’t do that during Ines’s interrogation of Ryan or his wildly precise approach to shelving peanut butter and black beans.
I had a tote bag loaded with vitamins, hair stuff, and any random thing that wasn’t wet. My heating pad, which came as a huge relief seeing as my period decided to visit five whole days early. A few bras, some t-shirts, jeans that fit only sometimes. But that was it. I needed to wash my clothes from the weekend so I had something to wear to work tomorrow and—god help me—my lesson plans were still a mystery. And the laptop I needed to access my instructional materials was chilling in twenty pounds of rice.
“When are you and Emme getting married?”
“Ines, my sunshine,” I whispered, pressing fingertips to my eyelids. “It’s a good question, one I’ve asked several times myself, but can we put a pin in this chat until after I have a cute little panic attack because I have no computer, no underwear, and no idea how I’m supposed to function tomorrow?”
“That’s cool,” she said as she turned a curious eye to the barista-quality espresso machine on the countertop.
“You’re not having a panic attack,” Ryan said, moving on to the cheeses. I noted a bit of judgment in his eyes when he had them all laid out on the counter. “We’re going to get everything fixed, and replace anything you lost.”
“Yeah, but how?Howdoes that happen? My landlord is a guy in a bodega. We’re not talking about responsive property management here.”
“You’re not saying anything I don’t already know,” he said, eyeing the wedges of gouda and brie. “That kind of damage takes time to fix. It’s not going to be resolved this week. Probably not this month.” He shrugged like this was fine. “So, stay here.”
I glanced down the long line of the kitchen island to Ines. She was entertaining herself with the espresso machine. “But this isyourplace.”
“Legally, it’ll be yours soon enough.”
I searched and searched but found no adequate response to that. I just…I hadn’t even thought of it that way.
“Listen. You have two options,” Ryan said to me, taking real care to organize the cheddars. “One, we leave now to pick up a new laptop for you and then swing by some shops for your—for whatever you need.”
“And the second option?” I asked.
He closed the fridge and turned, meeting my gaze. “Or I call Marcie and Wren right now and tell them to have everything you need delivered tonight. It might take Wren a few days to replace your entire wardrobe but she can get you taken care of for tomorrow.”
