CHAPTER 7

WALLS MADE OF GLASS

Jade found out about the penthouse before Nora told her, which was a feat of intelligence-gathering that Nora had not budgeted for.

It happened because Nora mentioned the broken lamp. Casually. In a completely different conversation about something else entirely, she'd said *he has this lamp with a broken shade he fixed with electrical tape and never replaced,* and Jade had gone very still in the particular way she went still when she was storing information for later deployment, and Nora had realized her mistake but too late to correct it without making it worse.

"The penthouse," Jade said.

"I was waiting out the rain."

"In his penthouse."

"In his living room. We talked. I borrowed a blanket."

The pause Jade gave this was architectural. Long and load-bearing.

"You borrowed his blanket," Jade said.

"He has a blanket on his couch because he actually lives in his apartment, which I found surprising because"

"Nora." Jade leaned forward. Her voice was the voice of someone who loved her friend with great sincerity and was not going to pretend the obvious wasn't obvious. "You borrowed his blanket. You told me about his lamp. You are telling me about his lamp in a conversation that is allegedly about my landlord's parking dispute."

"I'm getting to the parking dispute."

"You're not getting to the parking dispute. You're thinking about him. You've been thinking about him since the auction and you know it and I know it and the only person in this conversation pretending otherwise is you."

Nora looked at her coffee.

"He's" she started.

"He's what?"

"Different from what I thought." She said it slowly, the way you say things you've been thinking for a while but haven't put into words yet. "He's different from the version of him I'd constructed. He's complicated. And lonely in a way that's structural. Built in. And he has all these books and he reads them with coffee and he has a lamp that he fixed because he didn't see the reason to do it twice"

She stopped.

Jade was looking at her with a very particular expression.

"What?" Nora said.

"You're gone," Jade said simply. "You're just not saying it yet."

"I'm not gone. I'm curious. It's intellectual interest."

"You borrowed his blanket."

"Jade"

"You told me about his lamp three times now."

"I mentioned it once"

"Twice in this conversation and once last week when you thought you were talking about something else." Jade picked up her coffee with the serenity of someone who had been right about a thing for a long time and was enjoying the arrival of confirmation. "It's okay, you know. It's allowed. You're allowed to"

"Don't."

"fall for someone."

"I'm not falling for anyone. I have rules."

"Your rules," Jade said kindly, "have been losing ground since the auction."

Nora opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at her coffee again, which was not offering useful guidance.

"It's too fast," she said finally.

"It's been five weeks."

"That's fast."

"For some people," Jade said. "For people like you people who don't let anything in unless it's already been through three rounds of security  five weeks of someone making it past every checkpoint might actually be the right speed."

Nora sat with that.

Outside, the city was doing its midmorning thing buses and voices and the particular ambient hum of ten million people living their lives in close proximity.

"He told me he doesn't do personal," Nora said. "First dinner. Laid it out very clearly. Like a disclosure statement."

"And?"

"And I said I wasn't particularly safe either."

"What did he do with that?"

She thought about it. The exact expression on his face. The small release of something that had been held. "He said: *even.*"

Jade was quiet for a moment. "He said *even.*"

"Yes."

"When you told him you were also"

"Also unavailable. Yes."

"And he said *even.*"

"He said *even.*"

Jade set down her coffee cup very slowly. "Nora."

"I know."

"That man is"

"I know, Jade."

"trying to meet you where you are."

"I know." Her voice came out quieter than she'd intended. The specific quiet of something admitted for the first time. "I know he is. That's the part that" she stopped.

"That's the part that what?"

She looked at her best friend. Eleven years. Every bad decision and good choice and the long complicated territory in between.

"That's the part that scares me," she said.

Jade reached across the table and covered her hand.

"I know," she said. "Keep going anyway."

That evening Nora sat at her kitchen table with the window open and the city noise coming in and she thought about walls.

She had very good ones. She'd built them after the thing she didn't talk about the year she'd spent in a kind of internal demolition, examining every structure she'd built her life on and deciding which were worth keeping. The walls had been kept. They were efficient and they were tested and they had done exactly what she'd asked them to do for three years.

The problem with very good walls, she thought, was that they didn't distinguish.

They kept out the things that wanted to hurt you. They also kept out the things that might not.

She opened her laptop. She had three unread emails. The first two were from work. The third was from Dominic, sent at six-fifteen, which meant he'd sent it before leaving his office.

*Nora,*

*I've been thinking about what you said about the story you'd built at twenty-two and the version that arrived instead. I think I did the same thing. Built a story at twenty-two and have been living adjacent to it ever since rather than admitting it wasn't the one I actually wanted.*

*I don't share that kind of thing. I wanted to tell you before the impulse passed.*

*Dominic*

She read it twice.

Then she typed back:

*Dominic,*

*I'm glad you sent it before the impulse passed.*

*Nora*

She pressed send and closed the laptop and sat in her kitchen with the city noise and the open window, and she thought: *walls made of glass are still walls.*

*But you can see through them.*

*That's the first step.*