“Hi. Lily, right?”
I realized I knew her by sight as one of Jesse’s and Sue’s friends. I’d also seen her at the wedding on Saturday.
She nodded. “Yep. I’m your new neighbor.”
“Really? You rented Sue’s apartment?”
“I did. It’s closer to work.” She locked her door and slipped the keys in her oversized bag.
“Welcome to the neighborhood, Lily. I’m Sebastian.”
“I know.” She gave me a long smile I didn’t know how to read. Then she pointed to the stairs. “Shall we?”
“After you.”
It wasn’t easy to make conversation while descending narrow stairs, but I tried anyway.
“So, what do you do, Lily?”
“I’m a psychologist.”
“Oh.”
I must have sounded put off, because she laughed lightly. At the foot of the stairs, she turned to me.
“Do you have anything against psychotherapy?” she asked.
I returned her smile. “Nothing in particular.”
My instincts turned alert. I wasn’t too fond of psychologists. After our parents passed away, Janine had made me see acounselor, but I could never connect with the guy. He was only a few years older than me, and had clearly never experienced a major loss in his life. He struck me as a privileged, spoiled brat who knew shit about human suffering. The things he said to me were ridiculously banal, and after a couple sessions I’d refused to go back.
“Well, we’re not all bad,” Lily joked.
“I’m sure of that.”
I welcomed her to the neighborhood again, then we parted ways in front of the building.
The subway wasn’t crowded yet, which was rare. I sat in my usual corner seat, headphones on but no music playing—just enough to keep people from starting conversations I didn’t want.
The early city buzz had bloomed into full-on weekday chaos. Taxis honked, cyclists weaved like maniacs, and some poor college kid dropped his iced latte right at the crosswalk. I cut across Broadway, heading for Columbia’s main gates, then walked past the red-brick sprawl of campus buildings toward the low, unassuming structure that housed the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. It was the same building as Tom’s Restaurant from Seinfeld, which somehow never stopped being ironic.
I swiped my badge. The elevator took its sweet time, as usual.
Upstairs, I nodded at the security guy, stepped into the glassy open workspace, and dumped my bag beside my terminal. My dual monitors blinked to life, humming a low welcome.
Someone had left a stale cinnamon roll on the kitchenette counter. Or at least, what I assumed had once aspired to be a cinnamon roll. I winced at the sad, calcified pastry spiral, picturing the real thing—dough layered with butter and cinnamon, baked until golden, then glazed while still warm so the icing melted into every crevice. My cinnamon rolls could get women out of their underwear faster than it took the glaze to set.
This wasn’t a cinnamon roll. This was a crime against pastry.
I sat at my desk and put on my eyeglasses. I was too vain to wear them all the time, but I couldn’t work without them.
“Morning, team,” I said into the Slack huddle.
A few sleepy faces blinked back at me, floating against virtual Mars backgrounds and coffee-stained screens.
“Hey, Sebastian,” one of the interns said—Miles, maybe. “We lost one of the ET feeds from the Colorado satellite overnight. Looks like a bad handshake with the cloud API.”
I sighed. “I did say the word of the year was ‘challenging.’”
