“The loft is for Stella,” he said. “Until she finds a place of her own. And there’s a whole basement for you. More privacy.”

He showed me downstairs: a bathroom, laundry room, and bedroom. There was more furniture down here than anywhere else in the apartment—a matching bed and dresser, a braided red carpet, a small writing desk with one lonely glass paperweight. I didn’t have any work to do at a desk like that. I had only tiny cats to arrange across the wood.

Abe set down my box. He touched his lower back briefly as he stood straight again—a moment of ache. It had been a couple years since I’d seen him—his last business trip to Reno, something to do with a tire recall—but he looked older than I’d expected.

He kissed me on the cheek and said he needed to run. Literally run. He was late and wearing sneakers. He’d bring up the rest of the boxes but then he had to take off. He was supposed to be at a meeting that had started an hour ago.

“You coming back for dinner?”

He checked his watch. “I’m not sure,” he said. “You shouldn’t wait.” He grabbed an apple from the kitchen counter and headed for the door. He turned around before he left: “I’m happy you’re here,” he said. “I really am.” Then he was gone.

He’d said, “Don’t wait,” but of course we did. I drank too much water, needed something in my mouth, anything. Taking pee breaks broke the waiting into smaller pieces. If there’d been a clock, we would have listened to it ticking away the moments, but there wasn’t a clock, or maybe it was packed away too deep to hear. Abe’s boxes lurked around us like strangers.

“God,” Stella said. “It’s good to be out of New York.”

She started talking about why and kept going for nearly an hour—why she was so glad to be done with it, why it felt good to be alone out here. Alone was her word. She didn’t apologize for it. Her old friends, she said, were smart about everyone but themselves. The streets of the city were full of trash and strange fluids, green milk, dark oil. People bumped into you, hard, and didn’t even notice that they’d touched another human body. The bottom line was, the whole city made her tired. It made me tired to hear about it. She was scared about leaving everything, and I got that, but I also knew you couldn’t start living in the new place until you said fuck-all to the old. I was never good at this, either.

I switched on the TV, but the screen stayed black. It wasn’t plugged in.

“You could call him,” Stella said.

“I don’t want to bother him.”

“Well,” she said, “I’m fucking starving.”