I turned on the TV, turned it off again.
I tolerated my own company for another ten minutes. Then I left my apartment and climbed the stairs. Knocked quietly on the door. I waited a minute and knocked a little louder, and the dog, Jasmine, came clicking across the floor toward the door followed by human footsteps. Harley opened the door.
“Natalie!” she said, stepping backward.
“I know. My hair’s awful.”
“No! It’s cute. It’s just a big change. But ring in the new year, right?” She was wearing sweatpants and a yellow T-shirt. She yawned. “I’m a little drunk.”
In the year she’d lived upstairs I’d never seen the inside of Harley’s place. “So could I come in for a minute?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said. “Come in. Grab a seat.”
It was hard to believe her apartment had the same bones as mine. Her living room looked like somewhere you’d willingly spend time. Soft lighting and a sofa that looked comfortable and modern, and throw pillows, and so much artwork on the walls, all that color.
Harley went over to the sofa. Jasmine jumped up and pressed her body against Harley’s. There was a small patch on the dog’s back where the fur was missing. “She’s a little freaked out. I think because of the fireworks,” Harley said. “Do you want a glass of wine? None for me—whoa!—I’ve had enough. Don’t ever party with veterinarians. That’s all I’m saying.”
I faked a smile and sat on one of the cushioned chairs opposite the sofa. “No,” I said. “Nothing, thanks.” The wall to my left was covered in photographs—posed shots, candids, Harley and others on the beach, in the mountains, people in medical scrubs, people in dresses and suits … the scenes of her life, the people in her orbit, now and in the past.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
We had each other’s phone numbers. The week she moved in, she gave me a spare key for emergencies. I gave her mine. Then she asked me for my number and entered it into her contacts as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I’d done it, too, as if we would become fast pals, the gal upstairs and the gal downstairs, like in a sitcom from my childhood. Now a whole year had passed. I wondered why I’d done nothing to become her friend. Why I’d done nothing to become anyone’s.
“I’m supposed to do something tomorrow,” I said. “But I can’t do it. I’m not ready.”
“Do you mean a magic show?”
I didn’t know if I was choosing her because I thought she was trustworthy, or because she had patched up my hurt leg with gentle hands, or because she was my neighbor and there was no one else. A lifelong allegiance to keeping secrets can take its toll. Do it long enough, and there’s no one left to tell.
“Kind of,” I said. She watched me, confused. “So I don’t know you very well. That’s my fault. But can you keep a secret?”
“Sure. Okay, Natalie. What is it?”
“That’s a nice dog, isn’t it?”
“Jasmine? She’s the best.”
“Do you think they’re all the best?”
She smiled. “Yeah. Pretty much.”
“This thing I have to do tomorrow. I want to do it, you know? But it’s not an honest thing.”
“And that’s bothering you.”
“No. Actually, it isn’t. Maybe it should. But I want it. I want to do it. But I’m not good enough.”
“Oh,” she said, furrowing her brow.
I didn’t mean the Greek deal, which was getting better all the time and might fool anyone even if it didn’t always fool me. I meant the entirety of it: facing Victor Flowers and those other men, playing the role assigned to me, keeping my performance going all night long until the money was ours and we were safe. Ellen refused to admit that anything could go wrong. I lacked her confidence. Everything could go wrong. And if it did, what would I do? I’d assured Ellen I was all in, but was I? Would I crumble? Would I cry? Would I spill everything to save my own skin? I hoped not, but I didn’t know. It was easy to keep a secret when the stakes of keeping it were nil. That was the thing: twenty-seven, and I still didn’t know myself well enough to answer the most basic questions about honesty and loyalty and survival. If everything went right, I would walk out of Victor Flowers’s house in less than twenty-four hours with two hundred thousand dollars and the knowledge that I had bested him. But if everything went wrong? I was afraid of what I might learn about myself.
“Is there anything I can do?” Harley asked, which seemed like a polite and perfunctory question, until I realized that, actually, yes, there was something she could do—that maybe this thing she could do for me was what had been itching the corners of my brain and driven me upstairs.
“My birds,” I said. “If for some reason something … happens to me, would you take them?”
“What do you mean? What could happen to you?”
“Nothing. I’m just being—” I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. But I’d feel better knowing you’d take them. They’re really easy. They’re good birds.”
Harley tilted her head, as if trying to see me from a different angle, and the motion reminded me of what the doves themselves often did. “Of course I will,” she said, straightening her head again. “Listen, Natalie, I know it’s not my business, but do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
I almost did. The late hour, the intimacy of someone else’s apartment, the fact that earlier I had sat and watched the ball drop over Times Square on TV, one more year of observing
