8 PM.
I'm going.
Chapter 14 - Damien
I take her art off the walls at 6 PM.
The mirror piece comes down first. I lift it carefully—it's heavier than it looks, the welded steel frame biting into my palms—and carry it to the bedroom closet. The iron fist that might be a flower follows. I wrap them both in cloth and slide them behind the suits and close the door.
The walls look worse without them. The apartment, which was already empty in every way that matters, is now aggressively so—white walls, designer furniture, the careful absence of personality that I've maintained for years as a matter of operational habit. No photographs. No mementos. Nothing that tells a visitor who lives here, because the man who lives here has spent his adult life ensuring that no space he occupies contains evidence of an interior life.
The art was the only honest thing in this apartment. And I've hidden it because it would raise a question I can't answer—why does a man she's met a handful of times own two pieces by an unknown sculptor from Brooklyn?
I check the closet again. The cloth covers the pieces completely. The door closes flush. Fine.
I stand in the living room and look at the space the way she'll see it. The floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the park. The furniture—Italian, minimal, chosen by a decorator I spoke to once. The kitchen, all marble and stainless steel, which I use to make coffee and nothing else. The bookshelves, lined with volumes I bought by the meter to fill the emptiness, most of them unread.
She's going to hate it. Or worse—she's going to understand it. She's going to walk in and see exactly what thisapartment is: a container for a man who doesn't know how to live, only how to occupy space. And her artist's eye, which misses nothing, is going to read the emptiness the way she reads metal—as a material that's been shaped by force, and the shape tells you everything about the force that made it.
I shower. I dress—dark trousers, a black shirt, no jacket. Casual, or my version of it, which is probably still too precise, too considered. I tried on two other shirts before settling on this one, which is a behavior so unlike me that I stood in front of the mirror afterward and examined my own face for signs of illness.
I'm not ill. I'm nervous. I'm not sure I've been nervous since I was twelve years old. The sensation is almost anthropological—a relic from a body I thought I'd outgrown.
7:45 PM. I pour scotch and don't drink it. I check my phone—no reply to the text I sent yesterday. No reply necessary. She'll either come or she won't, and if she doesn't, I'll sit in this apartment with my scotch and my empty walls and my operational discipline and I'll survive it the way I've survived everything, which is to say poorly, but invisibly.
7:58 PM. The intercom buzzes.
I close my eyes. My hand is on the counter and I press it flat against the marble and feel the cold stone under my palm and I breathe once, slowly, and then I cross the apartment and press the button.
"Yes?"
"It's Jess." Her voice through the intercom is tinny, compressed, stripped of all the texture that makes it hers. But the two syllables are enough to make my pulse do something my cardiologist would find concerning.
I buzz her in. I open the apartment door. I stand in the doorway and wait for the elevator, and the thirty seconds it takes for the doors to open are the longest thirty seconds of my life, including the two days I spent in my father's wine cellar when I was nine.
The doors open. She steps out.
The green dress. She's wearing the green dress, and seeing her in it is different from the gallery—more intimate, more deliberate. She chose it. Not for a crowd, not for an opening night. For me. For this.
My jacket is folded over her arm. Her hair is pushed back from her face and her jaw is set and her eyes are sharp and she's looking at me with an expression that contains at least four things I can identify: anger, desire, suspicion, and a determination so fierce it's almost physical.
She's come to fight. Whatever this is, she hasn't come to surrender. She's come to challenge, to interrogate, to push until something gives.
Good. I don't want her surrender. I want her fight. I want every ounce of resistance she has, because the resistance is what makes her real, and I've spent my entire life surrounded by people who don't resist anything.
"Come in," I say.
She walks past me into the apartment, and the scent of her—soap, the faintest trace of metal, the vanilla lotion from the bottle by her bathroom sink—moves through my nervous system like a lit fuse.
She stops in the living room. I watch her take it in. The windows. The view. The furniture. The empty walls where her art used to hang. I watch her eyes move across the space,cataloging, assessing, and I see the exact moment she reaches her conclusion.
"It's beautiful," she says. Her voice is flat. "And nobody lives here."
"I live here."
"No. You stay here. There's a difference." She turns to face me. "Where are your things? Your photographs. Your books—the ones you've actually read. Where's the evidence that a human being occupies this space?"
I don't answer, because the answer is: there is no evidence. The human being who occupies this space has spent twenty years ensuring his own invisibility, and the apartment is the physical manifestation of that project—a monument to absence.
