Part Seven: The New Apartment
The apartment overlooked the river.
This had not been a requirement when she was looking — she had not arrived with a list of things the apartment must have, because she had understood that arriving with requirements is its own form of attachment to a particular version of the future, and she had learned, across the previous years, to hold the future loosely. But when she had seen the apartment and had stood at the window and had looked at the river moving below in the morning light, she had understood that this was the right place.
She moved in on a Thursday.
She had very little to move — she had taken specific things from the house and left the rest. The things she had taken were the things that were hers in the sense that mattered: the documents, the books, certain objects that had been with her before the marriage and that had remained with her through it, a few photographs.
She had not taken the silver serving pieces or the crystal or the chandelier.
She had not taken any of the things that had been chosen to create an impression.
She kept what was real.
The first morning in the new apartment, she woke before light.
This was habitual — she had always woken early, and the habit had intensified across three years of needing to be awake before others in order to have the morning’s only unobserved hours. The habit was hers now in a different sense: not the habit of self-protection but the habit of preference, the preference of someone who finds the early hours the best hours for thinking.
She went to the kitchen.
It was a small kitchen. It had a window above the sink that looked out on the river’s far bank, and in the pre-dawn dark she could see the lights of the opposite side reflected in the water. The kitchen had the quality of a space that was entirely hers — not decorated to impress, not furnished with someone else’s choices, not arranged to produce any impression whatsoever. It was a kitchen in which she could make coffee.
She opened the cabinet.
She had stocked it the previous day with things she had chosen without consulting anyone’s preferences. She had bought, deliberately, the wrong brand of coffee — the brand she had bought the morning of the slap, the brand that had been a reasonable substitute and that had cost her the inside of her cheek. She had bought it and put it in the cabinet and she was going to drink it every morning for as long as she chose to, which was likely a long time, because it was, in fact, a perfectly good coffee.
She brewed it.
She took the cup to the window.
She stood barefoot on the kitchen floor — the floors were wood, the specific slightly uneven wood of a building that was not new, that had been here for decades and had absorbed decades of the lives of people who had lived in it — and she looked at the river in the early morning.
There were no bruises on her face.
She had been bruise-free for seven months, which was the length of time since she had last been in the marble kitchen, and she understood that she would be bruise-free tomorrow and the day after. Not because she was safe now in a passive sense — because she had arranged to be safe, had built the safety through three years of patient work, had understood that safety was not given to her but was something she had to construct.
She had constructed it.
She drank the coffee slowly, with both hands around the cup, looking at the river.
The coffee was, as she had always known, entirely fine.
