“I’m sorry too,” I said, and then I missed my loft with a homesickness so acute that it seemed my bones might break from the pain of it. I missed the sounds, and the drafts, and the way that every nail revealed a dozen layers of paint, all in terrible colors, and the way you used to always have to stop on the seventh floor for a quick pause to catch your breath before the final two flights; everybody did it, that seventh-inning stretch. Nine flights is a lot, and the freight elevator that worked, it seemed, for one week a year, its cage doors held together with special brass tabs that I’d never seen anywhere else. I missed the pigeons that collected in the eaves each evening, turning the windowsills white and cooing me to sleep, and the hot plate and the minifridge and the plastic bathtub with its mystery stains. I would have given anything, in that moment, to go back in time and live the last six months all over again, to have put my paintings in climate-controlled storage like I was supposed to—to have a home of my own, to curl up anywhere the way that Max curled up in here.

Exhausted, and possibly on the verge of tears, I stubbed out my cigarette and stood up.

“I gotta go home, Max,” I told her. “This is wild, though.”

“No!” she cried, the ketamine melting her face into agony. “Please don’t.”

“I have to, Max,” I said. “I’m overwhelmed.”

She hugged me for the second time in the past two weeks and I realized we’d exchanged more words tonight than we had in years. “Make one of the staff drive you, okay?” she said. I nodded.

I let a freckle-faced teenager drive me home with the windows open, and told him to leave my truck at the end of Max’s driveway, unlocked and with the keys tucked in the visor, then gave him a twenty. After locking the front door behind me, I shimmied out of my dress, poured myself another drink, and curled up in my new bed. Loneliness ran through me like poison, a jet-black stream of unhappiness that threatened to rip me open, to take the bones of my rib cage and break them in half. The room spun. I felt awful. Why did I go to that party? All it did was highlight everything I didn’t and couldn’t and wouldn’t ever have.

I pulled the covers up over my head and shut my eyes until the world went dark.

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight