I stayed on the phone with Olivia for another twenty minutes.
We didn’t say much. She told me about a restaurant in London she’d been meaning to try
for six months and still hadn’t. I told her about a meeting I had Thursday. Normal things.
The kind of conversation you have not because either of you needs information but because
you need to stay in the same space a little while longer before the night closes.
When we hung up, I stood at my window for a moment. The city was doing what New
York always did, moving, lit, enormous and indifferent. Somewhere across it, in a penthouse
on the upper east side, a plant named Elena was sitting in a window getting the light it
deserved. I thought about that longer than was probably reasonable. Then I went to bed.
Margaret called three days lat
