“Different police. From the suburbs, about her.”
I’d seen that visit on the footage I wasn’t sure I was supposed to have watched. “Oh. Right. They find her car?”
“Yeah. Towed from here. I guess that’s why you were with her, uh, your sister,” he said. “You could have told me Marisa was missing.”
“You could have told me about Oona.”
But I hadn’t seen Alex to tell him about Marisa or even mention the damage to the floors I’d discovered next door. And now I knew why he’d been so twitchy. And so elusive. He’d been with Oona. Two blocks in distance, but so far away from me.
I didn’t want to talk about hardwood floors. I put the gift down to deal with later. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll be okay with it. You and Oona. I’m… happy. That you’re happy.”
He nodded but he still had a little tuck in the spot between his eyebrows.
“Youarehappy, right?” I said. “You seem… I don’t know. Anything you need to tell me?”
“I need to tell you something,” Alex said, as though I hadn’t prompted him.
I braced myself.
“I have an offer to buy the building,” he said. “A good one.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh. I didn’t realize… I didn’t know it was for sale.”
“It wasn’t.”
Edith Maxwell, that bitch. I couldn’t wait to black out the teeth in her stupid face the next time I saw one of those bus benches. I should havesnatchedthat peacock feather. “And you’re going to accept it? The offer?”
“Well,” he said. “Well, I wanted to talk with you. Before I made any decisions.”
“Okay.”
We both waited. A long empty minute passed. It was hard to tell with Alex, sometimes, if a silence was a pause in the conversation he had designed, in order to process and arrange his thoughts, or a silence he expected someone else to fill.
“You wanted to talk to me,” I said. “Do you mean, you want to know what I think?”
“What do you think?”
I had a lump in my throat. I’d been a kid here, once, building a fort under the corner booth, crawling all over the place, up and down and between the two apartments through the scuttle space. I couldn’t even look in the direction of my stage. Mystage.
All my joy had come from this place, every good memory. Everything that I’d come through, this was the place that called me home. I swallowed my grief and said, “I think it’s your decision. The building’s yours.”
“It’s yours, too.”
All those ideas I’d had to share the stage—poof, gone. “Maybe it’s time I tried to get on someone else’s stage,” I said.
He reached for the back of his neck and pulled. A nervous tic.
“Oh, you mean theapartment,” I said. “Right. But I never meant to stay upstairs long term, anyway. I guess I could move back into my— Oh. Oona. Oona will need to move…” Revelations tumbled like dominoes. “Oh. Oona will move into the house, with you. Is that…? Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.”
“I didn’t mean the apartment,” he said, trying to look me in the eye, and failing. My shoulder was getting the brunt of his attention.
“What then?”
“The pub,” he said. “The pub could be yours. Someday.”
My stomach suddenly hurt. Or some organ in the middle? Just under my ribs.
“I don’t know if running McPhee’s is my, uh, career path,” I said. “Not like it was yours.”
