“Was it a woman?” I inquire. “Did she break your heart?”

He laughs a little with that question. “If only my issues were as trivial as matters of the heart.” He leans into the wall so that he can face me. “What floor do you live on?” He licks his fingers and pinches the end of his joint, then puts it back in his pocket. “I’ve never noticed you before.”

“That’s because I don’t live here.” I point in the direction of my apartment. “See that insurance building?”

He squints as he looks in the direction I’m pointing. “Yeah.”

“I live in the building next to it. It’s too short to see from here. It’s only three stories tall.”

He’s facing me again, resting his elbow on the ledge. “If you live over there, why are you here? Your boyfriend live here or something?”

His comment somehow makes me feel cheap. It was too easy—an amateurish pickup line. From the looks of this guy, I know he has better skills than that. It makes me think he saves the more difficult pickup lines for the women he deems worthy.

“You have a nice roof,” I tell him.

He lifts an eyebrow, waiting for more of an explanation.

“I wanted fresh air. Somewhere to think. I pulled up Google Earth and found the closest apartment complex with a decent rooftop patio.”

He regards me with a smile. “At least you’re economical,” he says. “That’s a good quality to have.”

At least?

I nod, because I am economical. And it is a good quality to have.

“Why did you need fresh air?” he asks.

Because I buried my father today and gave an epically disastrous eulogy and now I feel like I can’t breathe.

I face forward again and slowly exhale. “Can we just not talk for a little while?”

He seems a bit relieved that I asked for silence. He leans over the ledge and lets an arm dangle as he stares down at the street. He stays like this for a while, and I stare at him the entire time. He probably knows I’m staring, but he doesn’t seem to care.

“A guy fell off this roof last month,” he says.

I would be annoyed at his lack of respect for my request for silence, but I’m kind of intrigued.

“Was it an accident?”

He shrugs. “No one knows. It happened late in the evening. His wife said she was cooking dinner and he told her he was coming up here to take some pictures of the sunset. He was a photographer. They think he was leaning over the ledge to get a shot of the skyline, and he slipped.”

I look over the ledge, wondering how someone could possibly put themselves in a situation where they could fall by accident. But then I remember I was just straddling the ledge on the other side of the roof a few minutes ago.

“When my sister told me what happened, the only thing I could think about was whether or not he got the shot. I was hoping his camera didn’t fall with him, because that would have been a real waste, you know? To die because of your love of photography, but you didn’t even get the final shot that cost you your life?”