The Gallery on Bleecker Street
The apartment holds its breath the way it always does after nine o'clock, when the city outside keeps living and Ethan's four walls settle into something closer to a held silence. Everything here is exactly where it should be. The gray sectional sits at its precise angle to the television. The single potted fig tree, which he waters with religious punctuality, stretches its leaves toward the window like it's trying to escape. Even the exposed brick, the kind real estate agents love to call "character," looks staged under the recessed lighting, as if the whole apartment is a showroom for a life he isn't quite living.
He is thirty-four, and on paper, everything about his existence reads as enviable. A design studio that keeps growing more successful with each contract. A loft in a neighborhood that used to be someone else's before it became fashionable. A body that still cooperates when he runs in the mornings, a mind sharp enough to close deals other designers would kill for. On paper, Ethan Cole is a man who has it together.
The laptop glows on his knee, throwing pale light across his face, across the coffee table littered with nothing—no wine glass, no takeout containers,…
