Page 85 of The Seven Year Slip

That surprised me. “They didn’t?”

“No, they never lived there, but the renters knew. The man I took the lease over from warned me. He’d figured out the hard way. He thought someone else had a key to the apartment and was coming in and rearranging his things! It was only after he got hername that he realized the woman who kept breaking in had passed almost five years prior.” She shook her head, but she was grinning at the memory. “I almost didn’t believe him until it happened to me, and I met your aunt!”

She didn’t seem much like the Vera in my aunt’s stories. This Vera was more put-together, wearing a string of pearls, looking as pristine as her simply decorated apartment. And if little things were different, maybe some of my aunt’s story was, too. “Why didn’t things work out?” I asked, and she gave a one-shouldered shrug.

“I can’t tell you. I think she was always a little afraid of a good thing coming to an end, and oh, we were a good thing,” she said with a secret smile, her thumbs rubbing against the wax seal on the back of her letter. “I never loved anyone quite like I loved Annie. We kept in touch through letters, sometimes every other month, sometimes every other year, and we talked about our lives. I’m not sure she ever regretted letting me go, but I wish I would’ve fought a little more for us.”

“I know she thought about it,” I replied, remembering the night my aunt told me the whole story, the way she’d cried at the kitchen table. “She always wished it had ended differently, but I think she was afraid because... the apartment, you know. How you two met.”

Her mouth screwed into a coy smile. “She was so afraid of change. She was afraid we would grow apart. She didn’t want to ruin it, so she did what she did best—she preserved it for herself. Those feelings, that moment. I was so mad at her,” she admitted, “foryears. For years I was angry. And then I stopped being so angry. That was just who she was, and it was a part of her I loved with the rest of her. It was how she knew how to live, and it wasn’t all bad. It was good, too. The memories are good.”

I hesitated, because how could they be good when she left us? When the last taste in our mouths was lemon drops? “Even after...”

Vera took my hand and squeezed it tightly. “The memories are good,” she repeated.

I bit my bottom lip so it wouldn’t wobble, and nodded, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. The coffee she’d brought was cold by now, and neither of us had touched it.

My phone buzzed, and I was sure it was Drew and Fiona asking if I was all right. I probably needed to get back to them, so I hugged Vera and thanked her for talking with me about my aunt.

“You can come back anytime you want. I have stories for days,” she said, and escorted me back toward the door. Now that my head wasn’t spinning, I took note of the pictures that lined the hallway.

Vera was in almost all of them, standing beside two children of varying ages—a boy and a girl both with a headful of auburn hair. Sometimes they were toddlers. Sometimes they were teenagers. Fishing at the lake, elementary school graduation, the two kids sitting on a smiling old man’s knees. They both looked very much like Vera, and I realized they must be her children. There was not another person in the photos, only ever the three of them. And I couldn’t stop looking at the boy, with his dimples and pale eyes.

“My youngest called us the Three Musketeers when she was little,” she said when she caught me staring at the collage of pictures, and it felt like I heard her through a tunnel, and she pointed at a photo of a beautiful young woman in a wedding dress beside a smiling dark-haired man. “That’s Lily,” she said, and then motioned to the picture of a face I knew too well.

A young man with a crooked smile and bright pale eyes and curly auburn hair, in a floral chef’s apron as he cooked somethingover a well-loved stove. He stood beside a shorter old man with his back curled over, wearing a similar chef’s apron that readI Ain’t Old, I’m Well-Seasoned, his eyes the same bright pale gray. I stared at the photo in bittersweet awe.

“And this is Iwan,” she went on, “with my late father. Iwan really loved him.”

“Oh.” My voice was tiny.

She smiled. “He’s opening up a restaurant in the city. I’msoproud, but he’s been so stressed lately—I sometimes wonder if he’s doing all this because he loves it, or because of his grandpa.”

I stared at the photo of the man I knew—Iwan with his crooked and infectious smile. It must have been taken just before he moved to NYC. And suddenly, something clicked, looking at that photo. Of all the things that had changed in those seven years, the most prominent was the look in his eyes. There was unabashedjoythere.

And I wondered when that left.

“Maybe you’ll meet him someday. He’s very handsome,” Vera added with an eyebrow wiggle.

“He is,” I agreed, and thanked her again for letting me cry on her shoulder, and with one last hug, I left and met my friends out front on the sidewalk, who both declared—rather immediately—that I looked like I needed a drink.

They had no idea.

34

All Too Well

For the rest ofthe week, I wondered how I could’ve missed the signs.

Not that it was apparent. Thinking back on it, Iwanhadsaid that Analea was a friend of his mom’s, but I’d never asked for her name. It made sense, when I thought about it, that my aunt would offer her empty apartment to someone’s child sheknew. Not only knew, but knew intimately well. I doubted that Iwan knew his mom’s history with my aunt, just like I hadn’t—he would have brought it up.

Had the apartment known who Iwan was? Was that why it brought us together at these crossroads?

My fingers felt restless—so restless that I brought a tin of watercolors to work and sat over in Bryant Park at lunch and painted the crowds I saw. When I returned to work, I went to quickly wash the paint dried on my fingertips.

“I like that you’re painting again,” Fiona commented on Wednesday, as we lounged on the green grass in Bryant Park, onone of Drew’s blankets from her office, and I washed the Schwarzman Building in golds and creams in my travel guide’s Best Free Tourist Stops. “The yellows are pretty.”

“Almost lemony,” Drew agreed, lounging on the ground beside Fiona, her hands behind her head. “I’ve been meaning to ask for a while, but—what made you start painting again?”

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