Bad Coffee and Worse Timing

Six weeks later, Mara had a system.

It wasn't a good system, but it was hers. Wake up at 6:14 — never 6:15, never 6:00, the specificity felt important. Coffee from the deli on the corner because the espresso machine in her new apartment made a sound like a dying animal, and she hadn't had the energy to get it fixed. Subway at 7:03. Window seat if possible, standing if not. Podcast in her ears so she didn't have to think.

She'd moved forty-three blocks south and a whole universe away from the life she'd had on 74th Street.

The new apartment was smaller. Third floor, no elevator, a radiator that clanged every night at exactly 2 a.m. like it had something urgent to say. The walls were a shade of white that couldn't decide if it was yellow. The previous tenant had left a rubber plant by the window that Mara had fully intended to throw out and then somehow kept watering instead.

She'd named it Gerald.

Gerald was, at this point, her most stable relationship.

She worked at Voss & Laine Editorial, a mid-size literary agency on the 9th floor of a building on West 23rd that smelled permanently of old paper and someone's microwaved soup. She'd been there four years — long enough to have her own office, a roster of twelve authors, and a reputation for being the person you sent your difficult manuscripts to.

She was good at fixing broken things on paper.

The irony wasn't lost on her.

That Tuesday morning, she arrived seven minutes early, which was new. She'd been arriving early a lot lately because the apartment was quiet in a way that pressed against her chest if she stayed in it too long. At least at the office, there was noise. Phones, keyboards, Donna from accounting, laughing at something on her computer.

Normal sounds. Evidence that the world was still running.

She was on her second coffee — deli cup, slightly bitter, perfect — when her office door opened without a knock.

"We have a problem," said her assistant, Priya, in the tone she reserved for actual problems as opposed to the minor inconveniences she also described as problems.

Mara looked up from the manuscript on her desk. "Define problem."

"Nathan Cole problem."

Mara closed her eyes for exactly one second. Nathan Cole was her most talented author and her most catastrophic one — a former journalist who wrote like a surgeon and behaved like a weather event. His third novel was due to his publisher in eleven days. Three weeks ago he'd informed her, via a voice memo sent at 1 a.m., that he was scrapping the last four chapters.

"What did he do?"

"He's not answering emails. Or calls." Priya paused. "Or his door, apparently. His neighbor called us."

"His neighbor called us?"

"She has our number because this has happened before." Another pause. "Also, he may have adopted a dog since we last spoke to him, and the dog needs walking, and he's not—"

"Text me the address," Mara said, already standing.

Nathan Cole lived in Brooklyn, which Mara held against him professionally if not personally.

She took the F train, standing, podcast abandoned in favor of staring at the subway map like it had answers. The car smelled like rain and someone's takeout and the particular exhaustion of a Tuesday morning. Across from her, a kid had fallen asleep against his backpack. A woman in scrubs was reading something on her phone with an expression of quiet fury.

Everyone has something, Mara thought. Everyone is carrying something on the F train at 8:45 a.m.

She found this oddly comforting.

Nathan's building was a narrow brownstone on a tree-lined street in Park Slope that looked exactly like the kind of place a brooding novelist would live. She buzzed his apartment twice. Nothing. She was preparing to buzz a third time when the front door swung open from the inside, and she stepped back to avoid being hit by it.

The man who came through it was not Nathan Cole.

He was tall — not absurdly so, but enough that she registered it. Dark jacket, slightly damp at the shoulders from the rain. He was holding a very small, very chaotic terrier mix on a leash, and the dog immediately launched itself toward Mara with the unhinged enthusiasm of an animal that had never once in its life experienced disappointment.

"Hey — Biscuit, no —" The man pulled back on the leash, barely. "Sorry, she does this. She thinks everyone is here specifically for her."

"It's fine," Mara said, and crouched down without thinking to let the dog sniff her hand. The dog — Biscuit — chose instead to lick her entire wrist in one efficient motion.

"She's not mine," the man said, almost defensively. "I'm walking her for — it's a long story involving my neighbor and a deadline and a whole situation."

Mara looked up.

"Nathan Cole is your neighbor."

He blinked. "Yeah. How did you—"

"He's my author." She straightened up. "I'm his literary agent. I'm here because he's not answering his door, and apparently, you're the emergency contact for his dog."

The man stared at her for a moment. He had the look of someone recalibrating — taking in new information and rearranging his morning around it. Then, unexpectedly, he almost smiled. Not quite. Just the beginning of one, as he thought better of it.

"He told me his agent was relentless," he said.

"He meant it as a compliment," Mara said. "Mostly."

"Caleb," he said, and extended his free hand — the one not managing twelve pounds of frenetic terrier. "Caleb Shaw. I live in 3B."

She shook it. Firm, brief, professional. The way she shook every hand.

"Mara Voss."

Biscuit sneezed on her shoe.

Nathan was fine — as fine as Nathan ever was, which was a relative term. He'd been awake for thirty-one hours, had rewritten the same chapter opening seventeen times, and had completely lost track of what day it was. Mara spent forty minutes in his apartment talking him off the ledge of his own perfectionism, drank the terrible coffee he made without complaint, and left with a revised deadline and the beginnings of a plan.

Caleb was still outside when she came back down.

He was sitting on the front steps with Biscuit in his lap, reading something on his phone. He looked up when the door opened.

"He okay?"

"He will be." She stopped on the step above him, pulling her coat tighter. The rain had softened to something almost polite. "Thank you for walking the dog."

"He asked me through the door," Caleb said. "Just his voice, no visual. Like a hostage situation."

Mara laughed. A real one — short and surprised, like it escaped before she could think about it. She couldn't remember the last time she'd done that. It felt strange in her mouth. Good strange.

She covered it quickly.

"Well." She adjusted the strap of her bag. Professional. Composed. Back to the system. "I should get back."

"Sure." He nodded, looking back at his phone. Then, just as she reached the sidewalk, "The coffee on this block is terrible, for what it's worth. But there's a place two streets over that's actually good. If you ever find yourself in Brooklyn at 9 a.m. against your will again."

She turned.

He wasn't looking at her, just scrolling, casual, like he hadn't said anything worth looking up for. Biscuit had fallen asleep across his knees.

It wasn't an invitation, she told herself. It was a local recommendation. People do that.

"I'll keep that in mind," she said.

And walked away before she could think about the fact that she already was.

Some things, she was learning, you noticed before you were ready to.