I rent the unit across the hall.
It comes up on the building's internal listing two days after I move into a hotel. An elderly couple on the fourth floor are moving to be near their daughter in Asheville and they want a quiet tenant who will take it furnished. I sign a one-year lease the same afternoon. I pay six months up front in cash from the wire transfer I have not yet decided whether to keep.
I move my clothes in on a Sunday morning while I know he is at the gym. I can hear his treadmill through the floor of my new bedroom for forty minutes a day. I get used to it.
I do not move in to corner him. I move in to be available when he is ready to know me again, in whatever shape that takes.
I learn his schedule the way you learn an opponent's. I do not stalk him. I make sure I am, accidentally, where he is.
The elevator at eight twelve in the morning, when he goes down to the lobby with his coffee. The Tatte on Marlborough at noon on Tuesdays. The Esplanade path at six fifteen on weeknights when he runs.
"Mr. Hayes. Hi."
"Mr. Hayes — that's a coincidence. I'm in 4B now. I think we share a wall."
"Mr. Hayes — sorry. The lightbulb in the kitchen ceiling. I cannot reach it. Could I bother you."
He lets me bother him.
He is a man who, deep down, has never been able to refuse a small ask from a woman in trouble. I know this because I am the woman who has been receiving the benefit of this trait for ten years.
He fixes the lightbulb. He fixes the running toilet. He shows me how to close the trash chute door so it doesn't bang at midnight. He never crosses the threshold for longer than ten minutes. He never sits down. He stands in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and answers my questions as briefly as the question allows.
The night I lock myself out — on purpose, with a glass of cabernet in me to make it credible — he lets me sleep in his guest room. He does not look at me when I walk past him into the hallway. He puts a folded set of towels on the dresser and he closes the door.
In the morning, when I come out, he has made me coffee and put it on the kitchen island and gone to the office.
He has written good morning on a Post-it next to the mug.
He has not signed it.
This goes on for six weeks.
Slowly, what I am to him solidifies into a shape. I am the polite tenant across the hall. The slightly sad woman in 4B. The neighbor he is being kind to.
I am not Nor.
For me to be Nor, I have to be in the dress.
The chance comes in the form of a save-the-date in his mailbox. Pinned to the fridge by his cleaning lady, a habit she has never broken. I read it the next time I am in his kitchen helping him shift a couch.
Mass General Frontotemporal Disorders Unit Annual Benefit. The Boston Public Library. Black tie.
Hosted by Dr. Chen's department.
He will go alone. I know this because last year I went with him.
The day of the benefit I take the dress out of the back of my new closet. I do my hair. I do the lipstick. I stand in front of the mirror and the mirror gives me back a woman I have not seen in five years. I look at her until she stops feeling like a costume.
I take a Lyft to the BPL.
The Bates Hall is full. Long tables. Ridiculously high ceilings. Quartet near the windows. I see Dr. Chen first — across the room, in green silk, talking to a man with a white beard. She sees me. She does the smallest possible thing with her chin. Go ahead.
I see him a moment later. He is standing alone near the second pillar, glass of champagne untouched in his hand, watching the band set up. His tux is cut close. He looks tired. He looks beautiful and tired and alone in a way he should not have had to be alone.
I take a flute off a tray. I walk across Bates Hall with the slip dress moving against the back of my legs.
I stop two feet away from him.
"Hayes. Alone tonight."
He turns toward my voice automatically and his face — his face does the thing it did in the hallway of our apartment when he thought I had come back. He goes white. The champagne glass tilts in his hand. A drop falls on his shoe.
"Nor."
It is the smallest word. He has barely got the breath out for it.
I lift my flute to him. I let my mouth do the smile that goes with the dress.
"Long time, Jules."
Jules.
It is what I called him at twenty-one. Only at twenty-one. After we got married he was Julian or J in texts. Jules belongs to a dorm room and a record player and a pizza box on the floor.
He pulls me into him so hard the champagne goes everywhere. He buries his face in my neck. He is shaking.
"Where did you go. Nor. Where did you go."
"I didn't go anywhere," I say into his collar. "I've been waiting for you to find me."
His coworkers are watching. The man with the white beard has his eyebrows somewhere near his hairline. Dr. Chen has put her glass down very carefully on a tray.
I do not care.
"Jules. Dance with me."
He pulls me onto the floor, onto the inlaid medallion in the middle of Bates Hall. The quartet has started something in three-quarter time. He has his hand at the small of my back. His other hand is locked around mine like he is afraid of letting go.
"Don't leave me again," he says, into the top of my head. "Nor. Promise me. Please."
"I'm not going anywhere."
I lift up onto my toes and I kiss him in front of his entire company.
This time, I am the one who finds you.
Julian. Wherever your memory has stopped. I am going to walk back to you, year by year, and I am going to make you fall in love with me again every time.
He does not take me back to the brownstone.
He drives us up Route 1A in the rented Volvo with the heat too high and his right hand on my thigh the entire way, like he is checking, every few minutes, that I have not vanished out the passenger door.
We pull up to a small shingled saltbox on a side street in Rockport at one in the morning. I have not been to this house in seven years. I had forgotten he kept it.
He bought it the year he graduated from MIT, a year before he could really afford it. He used to drive me up here on summer Sundays. We would walk out to the end of Bearskin Neck and he would buy me sea-salt caramels at Tuck's and put one in his coat pocket for later.
After we got engaged, we stopped coming. We were going to sell it. He told me, once, that he had sold it. I had never thought about it again.
He has not sold it.
The inside of the house is exactly the way it was at twenty-six.
The framed Eternal Sunshine poster from the ICA screening is on the living-room wall. His PS4 is hooked up to the small TV in the corner with the controllers plugged in. There is a record player on a milk crate. There is a paperback copy of The Road on the coffee table, open face-down, the way I used to leave books, which he hated.
There is a dead jade plant on the kitchen windowsill. I gave him that jade plant for his twenty-second birthday. It has been dead for years.
He has not thrown any of it out.
"You kept this place."
"I was afraid you'd come back," he says. "And I wouldn't be where you knew to find me."
He says it from behind me, his arms around my ribs, his chin on my shoulder.
I turn around inside his arms and put my hands on his face.
"Jules. The last five years. Where have you been. Why didn't you find me."
I have to lie to him. I cannot tell him that I am the stranger who walked into his kitchen wearing nothing of mine. I cannot do that to him tonight.
"I went away for a while," I say. "I had to. I don't want to tell you about it tonight. Is that okay."
"Are you back."
"I'm back."
"For how long."
"For all of it."
He kisses me.
We end up on the couch in the living room. He is careful in the way he was careful at twenty-six, hands stopping to ask, mouth coming back to my jaw between everything else. When he stops, just before, and looks down at me — the lamp is behind him so I cannot see his face well — he says: Nor. I love you.
"I love you too, Jules."
A tear goes sideways into my hair. I do not know which of us it came from.
I wake up in his bed in the morning with the light from the harbor coming in pale through the window. His arm is heavy across my hip. His face in sleep has gone twenty-six years old. His mouth is half-open. There is a small new line at the corner of his eye that wasn't there at twenty-six. He has lost weight at the temples and the jaw.
I run a finger along the bone over his eye. His brow tightens. He says something into the pillow that I cannot catch.
I lean closer.
"Don't go."
He says it again.
"Don't go. Nor. Don't go."
I put my mouth against his forehead.
"I'm not going anywhere," I say. "I'm right here."
His face smooths.
I get up. I find his shirt on the floor. I go down to the kitchen to make him breakfast.
The fridge has a stick of butter and three bottles of beer in it. He doesn't live here. He keeps it as a museum of when we were happy. I take down one of his old wool coats from the hook by the back door to walk to the corner store for eggs.
I open the back door.
There is a woman standing on the back step with a Pyrex casserole in a wicker carrier.
Maggie.
My mother-in-law.
"Nora. What are you doing here."
She is in a camel coat and the silk scarf she has worn since 2011. Her face has gone first surprised, then careful, then cold.
"Maggie. Hi."
"Where is Julian."
"He's still asleep."
"Asleep."
She looks at me. The shirt I'm wearing is his. The hair I haven't brushed. The lipstick smudged off my mouth.
"You spent the night."
"Maggie. It's not — "
"You and Julian separated, Nora. Six months ago. He told me that himself. He told me you had — that you had agreed it was best. That you took the house. That you were not in contact."
He told her we were divorced.
He told his mother we were divorced six months ago.
I cannot make my face do anything for a second.
"Maggie. He didn't — that isn't — "
"You couldn't let him have six months of peace?"
Her voice has gone low and very level. The voice she used at her late husband's funeral when a cousin asked an ill-mannered question.
"After what you did. Predator."
The word goes through me like a thin cold wire.
"Maggie — "
The bedroom door opens upstairs. There are bare feet on the stairs.
Julian comes down in his boxers and the gray shirt, eyes still half-closed, hair on end.
"Mom. What are you doing here."
He sees her in the doorway. His face wakes up two beats slower than the rest of him. Then his eyes find me at the kitchen island, and the smile is the smile from last night, the wide foolish one I have not seen in five years.
He crosses the kitchen and slides his arm around my waist.
"You're up. Hi."
He kisses the top of my head.
Maggie's mouth goes open.
"Julian. What did you call her."
He frowns at his mother.
"Mom. This is Nor. My girlfriend."
"Your girlfriend."
"Yes."
"Julian. That is Nora. That is your ex-wife."
He laughs. It is a small confused laugh.
"Mom. What."
"You were married to her. For five years. You divorced six months ago. You told me that."
He shakes his head, slow.
"Mom — Nor and I aren't married. We've never been married. We've been together two years. Are you — are you feeling okay. Did you think she was someone else."
Maggie is staring at him.
"Are you mixing her up with someone."