The Gallery on Bleecker
The apartment holds its breath the way it always does on Friday nights now—too clean, too quiet, the kind of silence that seems to hum faintly under the surface, like a refrigerator left running in an empty house. Ethan sits on the edge of his gray sectional, elbows on his knees, phone glowing in his hands like some small, patient furnace. Outside, seven floors down, the city rumbles along without him: taxis growling at intersections, someone's laughter skittering up from the sidewalk, the distant thump of a bass line escaping a passing car. He barely registers any of it. He is somewhere else, thumbing through a photo album he swore, three weeks ago, that he would never open again.
Vanessa at twenty-six, laughing on a beach in Tulum, her sunglasses pushed up into dark hair, sand clinging to her calves. Vanessa in his kitchen, wearing his old university sweatshirt, pretending to hate the coffee he'd made her before pouring herself a second cup anyway. Vanessa asleep on his shoulder on a red-eye flight to Chicago, her mouth slightly open, unglamorous and completely unguarded in a way that had made him feel, at the time, unbearably lucky.
He scrolls slower than he means to. His…
