Even her neighborhood, never the bustling, glittering, taxi-crowded place of her childhood imagination, was not what it had been when she moved there. She watched its best features disappear: the brutal but effective Russian aestheticians, the Italian bakeries where everything tasted of amaretto, the bocce courts with shuffling men in guayaberas and straw hats. Now androgynous twentysomethings walked their dogs across the bocce courts, whimsical boutiques lined even the dingiest blocks, and you were lucky to get a tepid facial for less than a hundred bucks. And yet the harshness of New York—heavy winter snows, hot summers, human feces on the subway—felt unabated to Marianne. But as long as she had her apartment, she told herself, she could stay.

Then one afternoon, in early August, she got the letter from her landlord that she’d long feared was coming. Her building was being turned into condos, which the current tenants could buy instead of rent. The landlord referred to the condo sales as an exciting opportunity, except in his haste or lack of English fluency, he’d written exiting opportunity. Which, given the anticipated cost of the condos (not mentioned in the letter), Marianne supposed it was.

On this very same day—at the very same moment, in fact, that she was learning of her impending homelessness—Eric called Marianne with his news. She’d come in from a walk in one hundred–degree heat, ripped open and read the letter, and heard the strident, old-fashioned ring of her telephone, four floors above. She ran to get it in case it was her landlord, calling to say that she could stay. She was breathing hard, holding the torn envelope and badly spelled letter in her hands, as she told Eric what it said.

“That’s terrible,” he agreed. “But you had to have known it was coming.” He’d moved away from the city years ago, back to Charlotte, where he’d planned to make the advance on his two-book deal last as long as possible. But he’d gotten married instead—not to Marianne—and bought a ring and a house and had then gotten divorced and found himself teaching English at a high school hard up enough to hire someone without a license. The things that happened to him there—insults hurled like chairs, followed sometimes by actual chairs—eventually led him to sign on to the job in Dubai. He had yet to write the second book.

“I thought I had another year, at least,” she said, scanning the letter again. She turned on the box fan in her kitchen window and took in a great, vibrating lungful of air. Would she ever find another apartment with a window that so perfectly fit a box fan? “It says I have to move out by September 15. That’s fifteen days into my new lease. I already signed it. I was about to send it back. Doesn’t that count—that I signed it?”