“Horses do it quieter.” He stops on the landing but keeps hold of my hand, forcing me to stop, too. “Take a minute.”
I want to argue, but truthfully, my lungs really are screaming bloody murder and I haven’t made acquaintances with a Stairmaster in an embarrassingly long time, so I lean against the wall and try to catch my breath. Bastian stands close by.
“Better?” he asks after a moment.
“Peachy. Let’s keep going.”
We resume our upward trek. Fortunately, the stairs peter out at the fourteenth floor and we spill out onto a long hallway lined with dark wood paneling. Side by side, we keep walking to the door at the end. Bastian pushes it open and guides me inside.
“Come,” he says. “Sit. Look.”
He lowers me to a seat. Then, with two fingers on my chin, he directs my gaze out.
I look—and my breath freezes in my chest.
All the world is visible from here. I see Chicago laid out beneath me like a wedding cake left to melt. Dark chocolate skyscrapers pooling into caramelized streets, burnt sugar traffic lights glistening, the fondant of distant clouds nestling on top of the buildings.
It’s neon. It’s black. It’s bright. It’s beautiful. Everything is soft and uncertain at the edges, the way things look when you’re crying or going blind or both.
Somewhere out there is my apartment building, that squat brick thing with the broken buzzer and the radiator that clangs all night. Bastian’s penthouse is easier to locate: a gleaming tower of glass and steel absorbing the moonlight. Even from here, even with my shit eyes, I can see it.
And my mother’s place. Way out in Humboldt Park, where the streetlights are dimmer and farther apart, where the buildings hunker low against the sky. She’s probably asleep by now, dreaming about the future, or maybe lying awake thinking about the meeting, about Rick, about all the Dereks who came before Rick, about all the good things that might come after.
It’s a gorgeous world. I want to cup it in my hands and take a bite of it.
“It’s beautiful,” I whisper.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “It is.”
I lean my head against his shoulder. “Thank you for bringing me here.”
“Seemed like the right night for it.” He kisses the top of my head. “Big view for a big day.”
I close my eyes and justfeel—his warmth, his steadiness, the flavor and texture of the city below us. So many things are changing.
But not him. Not this.
We sit there for a long time. Eventually, Bastian breaks the silence in a hushed murmur. “Can I tell you a story?”
“Of course,” I say.
He clears his throat. “I was barely a teen when I first knew cooking was the thing for me. I was working the dish pit at this shithole diner on the North Side. Used to watch the owner hand an envelope of cash to the health inspector every quarter to make him ignore a whole bunch of shit.”
I keep my head on his shoulder, saying nothing.
“We had this regular who came in every Sunday morning. Old guy, maybe seventy, always ordered the same thing: two eggs over easy, hash browns, wheat toast. One day, the cook called in sick, so the owner asked if I could handle it. I’d never worked a real line before, but I was the only person around who even knew how to turn on the stove.”
His hand finds mine in the darkness.
“I made those eggs, and when I plated them, something just clicked. It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t Michelin-star shit. But it wasright.”
He pauses. Breathes.
“The old guy looked up at me when I brought it out and said, ‘Now,that’show you cook an egg, son.’ And even though it was kinda dumb—it was just a fucking egg, after all—I knew, right then, that this was it. This was what I was supposed to do with my life.”
Another pause. Another breath. He turns to look at me.
“I feel the same way about you,” he says. “You’rewhat I’m supposed to do with my life, Eliana.”
