Marcus: Are you free tonight? I want to show you something.
I stared at the message. Something about the phrasing felt different. Significant.
Me: Always. What is it?
A pause. Three dots appearing and disappearing. Then:
Marcus: My apartment. If you’re ready.
His apartment. Not the shop. Not the back room where we’d been carefully, safely getting to know each other. His actual home, where he’d lived with Sarah, where her things still were, where he hadn’t invited anyone in two years.
“What is it?” Cassie asked, reading my expression.
“He wants me to see his apartment.”
Her eyebrows rose. “That’s big.”
“I know.”
“Are you ready?”
I thought about it. Really thought. About what it meant to enter the space he’d shared with his wife. To see her books on the shelves and her photos on the walls and navigate the geography of a grief I could never fully understand.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I’m going to do it anyway.”
Marcus’s apartmentwas above the shop.
I’d known that, technically. I’d seen the narrow staircase in the back, the door at the top that he disappeared through at the end of each day. But I’d never been up there. It had felt like a boundary—his space, his sanctuary, the place where he went to be alone with his memories.
Now I was standing at the bottom of those stairs, a bottle of wine in my hand, trying to remember how to breathe.
“You can still leave,” Marcus said from the top. He was leaning against the doorframe, watching me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. “I won’t be offended.”
“I’m not leaving. I’m just… gathering courage.”
“It’s twelve stairs.”
“It’s not about the stairs.”
His expression softened. “I know.”
I climbed the stairs. Twelve of them, creaky and narrow, each one feeling like a choice. When I reached the top, Marcus stepped aside to let me in.
The apartment was smaller than I’d expected. A living room that flowed into a kitchen, a hallway that probably led to a bedroom and bathroom. Warm light from lamps he’d clearlychosen with care. Books everywhere—on shelves, on tables, stacked on the floor in precarious towers.
And Sarah.
She was everywhere too. Not in a shrine-like way, not obsessive—just present. A photo on the bookshelf of them young, probably just married, laughing at something off-camera. Another on the wall of her alone, standing on a beach, hair wild in the wind. Her books mixed with his on the shelves. A sweater draped over the back of a chair, like she’d just taken it off.
“I haven’t changed much,” Marcus said quietly. “I kept meaning to. Pack some things away. Make it less…”
“Less her?”
“Less frozen.” He moved past me into the kitchen, started opening the wine. “For a long time, keeping everything the same felt like keeping her. Like if I moved her sweater, I’d be letting go of something I wasn’t ready to release.”
“And now?”
He was quiet for a moment, focused on the corkscrew. “Now I think I was just scared. Changing things meant admitting she was really gone. That this was my life now, not ours.”
