I should leave. The assessment is complete: the lock is adequate, the windows are secure, the fire escape is accessible. I have what I came for.
I don't leave.
I move further into the room. Slowly. Not touching anything—not yet. Just looking. Reading her apartment the way I'd read a dossier, except this dossier is written in objects instead of words.
The kitchen. A hot plate, a kettle, a row of mugs on a shelf—four of them, each different, none matching. A box of chamomile tea beside the kettle, nearly empty. The fridge is small and old, the kind that hums loudly. I open it. Inside: half a carton of milk, a block of cheese, two apples, a container ofleftover pad see ew. The door shelf holds a bottle of sriracha and a jar of peanut butter.
I close the fridge gently. The inventory is thin, careful, the refrigerator of a person who plans meals around a budget that doesn't allow waste. She's not starving—there's enough here. But there's no abundance. No indulgence. No evidence that food is anything other than fuel.
Except the pad see ew. Takeout. A small luxury. Someone treated her, or she treated herself.
I move to the main space. The mattress is pushed against the wall beneath the window. The quilt is pulled up neatly—she makes her bed, which tells me something about discipline, or about the habit of keeping a space orderly when the space is all you have. The pillow holds the indent of her head. I look at it for too long.
The table beside the bed. The lamp. The book—a novel, dog-eared halfway through, the cover worn soft. I pick it up and read the title. It's not what I expected—not art theory or sculpture technique. It's fiction. A story about a woman travelling alone through a country she doesn't know, finding herself in the strangeness of displacement.
I set the book down exactly as it was, matching the angle, the position of the dog-ear. Precision. Even here, in this act of violation, precision.
On the windowsill: a jar of dried lavender and a postcard. I pick up the postcard. New Mexico—a desert sunset, garish and beautiful. The back reads, in handwriting that's large and looping:Wish you were here. Actually I wish I was there. It's too hot and the food is weird. Love you forever—T
Tess. The friend. I set the postcard back.
The clothes rail is against the far wall. A few hangers holding work clothes—canvas jackets, jeans, tank tops. Practical things. Worn things. At the end of the rail, separated slightly from the rest, something different: a dark green dress on a hanger that doesn't sag.
I stop.
The dress. It doesn't match anything else on the rail. The other clothes are work-worn, faded, practical. This is something else. This was chosen.
She must have bought this for the show. She bought a dress—this woman who owns almost nothing, who eats ramen and pad see ew and checks her bank balance with the resignation of someone who already knows what she'll find—she spent money on a green dress to wear to her opening.
I reach out and touch the fabric. It's soft. Heavier than it looks. The kind of thing that would move well, that would catch the light.
I close my eyes and imagine her wearing it. The green against her skin. Her bare arms—the burns, the scars, the working muscle. The neckline open, the collarbone visible, the hollow at the base of her throat.
My hand tightens on the fabric. I force myself to let go.
The bathroom is small. A shower stall, no tub. A sink with a cracked mirror above it. On the shelf: soap, shampoo, a toothbrush in a cup, a bottle of lotion. I pick up the lotion. The label says shea butter and vanilla. I open it and the scent hits me—soft, warm, sweet. This is what she puts on her hands at night. The hands that weld steel and bend iron and made the sculpture that's going to fill a gallery in four days.
I put the lotion back. My hands are no longer steady. I notice this with the clinical detachment of a man observing his own unravelling. The tremor is slight—invisible to anyone watching. But I feel it. The first sign that control is slipping.
I go back to the main room. I should leave. I've been here nine minutes and every second increases the risk. She could come home early. A neighbour could hear movement. The hallway light on the fourth floor could be fixed tonight by some miracle of civic maintenance, and my face would be visible on a landing I have no reason to be on.
I should leave.
Instead, I sit on her bed.
The mattress is firm. Cheap, probably, but well-kept. The quilt is soft under my hands—washed many times, the fabric thinning in places. I sit with my palms flat on it and breathe.
This is where she sleeps. Every night, she lies here in the dark, in this small room, in this cold apartment, and closes her eyes and lets the world go. This is where she's most unguarded. Most vulnerable. The place where the foster-care vigilance finally relaxes and she becomes just a woman, sleeping, dreaming, the lines of worry smoothing out of her face.
I've seen her sleep. Through the camera, on nights when she's worked late at the studio and fallen asleep on the crate with her jacket over her like a blanket. Her face changes when she sleeps—softens, loses the watchful quality that defines her waking expression. She looks younger. More open. Like the girl she might have been if the world had been kinder.
I'm sitting on her bed. In her apartment. Surrounded by her things. And the feeling that moves through me is so large and so complex that I can't reduce it to a single word.
Shame. That's the first layer. Deep, visceral shame—the knowledge that what I'm doing is indefensible by any moral framework. This woman has built her life around the principle of self-sovereignty. Her space, her choices, her boundaries. She locks her door every night—deadbolt and chain. She keeps her world small and controlled because control is the only safety she's ever known. And I've walked through her locks like they don't exist, because to me, they don't.
Beneath the shame: tenderness. Devastating, unwanted tenderness. For the single pillow. For the empty tea mug. For the green dress on the good hanger. For the jar of lavender and the postcard from Tess and the half-empty fridge and the lotion that smells like vanilla. For the entire fragile ecosystem of a life built from nothing by a woman who was given nothing and made something anyway.
And beneath the tenderness, in the basement of whatever is happening inside me: hunger. The old, vast, limitless hunger that started on a rainy street in Brooklyn and has been growing ever since. The hunger to know her. To be near her. To occupy the spaces she occupies, breathe the air she breathes, understand every detail of the life she's built so that I can—what? Protect it? Possess it? Worship it?
