Will makes the mistake of parking on Echo Park Avenue, figuring the walk up to Vestal Street would be insignificant. In fact, the small, Spanish-style bungalow Abby shares with Nic is nearly at the top of the hill and the longer-than-expected climb is unforgivingly steep.
Vestal Street is pretty. Leafy trees rise from sidewalk planters and Will can hear crickets in the quiet dark. There’s little hint that ten years ago the neighborhood was torn apart by shootings from rival Latino gangs. Gentrification has made its way steadily east to Echo Park, pushing out the working-class families who had lived there for generations with rising rents. Replacing them are people like Abby: young, overwhelmingly white professionals with low six-figure incomes willing to bargain for spectacular views, ready access to upmarket restaurants, and convenience to downtown jobs by tolerating occasional outbreaks of the old violence and more common low-level street crime—graffiti, vandalism, littering.
Not Will. When apartment-hunting last summer with Meredith, he had immediately written off Echo Park as grimy and unsafe. Now—as it seems with so many aspects of his life—he finds himself taking a closer look and having second thoughts. Up here, high in the hills, any danger seems remote and the view is indeed spectacular. Pausing to catch his breath, Will looks out at the ugly city, transformed at nightfall into a galaxy of lights twinkling along the serpentine freeways that coil and cross as they make their separate paths to the horizon. He thinks about his and Meredith’s bland apartment in the outskirts of the Mid-Wilshire district and its single notable attraction: proximity to The Grove, a Disney-fied outdoor shopping mall that teems with tourists buying tee shirts emblazoned with the Hollywood sign and lining up to see the latest superhero movie. There is no need to join a gym in Echo Park, either; just a few sharply graded streets away there is Elysian Park with its miles of rocky trails. Abby has mentioned in passing that Nic often goes mountain biking there, and that they have walked to games at Dodger Stadium.
The idea of Abby and Nic doing something as normal as going to a baseball game together is hard for Will to imagine. Nic himself is hard to imagine. The domestic situation Will has pieced together from Abby’s occasional references and the office rumor mill seems like something only a spineless sap would tolerate.
And so it is with some surprise when the door opens and Will confronts the Nic who looks every bit his biography: federal cop and ex-marine—a type well-known to Will from his years in the military. He’s wearing a gray tee shirt tucked into faded camouflage pants, his brown hair cut close. Nic is well over six feet, and while not big, not skinny, either. When he reaches out to shake Will’s hand, his grip is firm, the arm sinewy with muscle. His blue eyes bore a hole into Will’s skull, either because they are so blue or because the gaze is so direct, Will isn’t sure.
They are standing in a living room, decently sized, with smooth hardwood floors and a wall of windows that open out onto a back garden. But baby things have been allowed to accumulate, shrinking and crowding the space. The chairs and coffee table have been pushed aside to make way for a playpen and a bouncy chair, there are piles of blankets on the sofa, and toys are strewn everywhere. Boxes of infant diapers are stacked on top of the bookshelves.
Abby appears from what Will assumes is the bedroom. A blue pouch is fastened to her body by straps that wind around her waist and shoulders. The pouch has a bulge in the center, and Will can just make out a few wisps of blond hair over the top. Even with the mommy apparatus, Abby still manages to look distinctly unmaternal: she’s wearing jeans and a hoodie. Her professional look, he realizes, is a kind of costume. Bare of makeup with her peaked, unlined face and dark shadowed eyes, she could almost pass for a teenager; defiant and hard-edged.
“Cal just went to sleep,” she says, nodding toward the pouch, “so we should keep our voices down.”
“You should put him down in his crib,” Nic says. “He’ll sleep better lying flat somewhere quiet.”
“He’s fine here. Anyway, he might wake up if we try to move him and I don’t want to deal with that again today.”
Will watches, increasingly uncomfortable, as Abby and Nic stare each other down. Finally, Abby says, “Just go, Nicky. It’s your night out and Jared’s waiting for you at the Short Stop. If Cal starts screaming, it’s my problem.”
Nic rubs his jaw for a moment. “It’s your problem,” he says finally. There is no inflection in his tone, but his eyes are hard. “Alrighty then.” He opens the door, turning back once to look at Will. “Good to meet you.”
“Likewise,” Will manages. The door shuts.
The ensuing silence is noisy with unsaid words. Will looks back to Abby. Her eyelids, he now notices, are swollen, from crying or lack of sleep he can’t tell, and her hair looks like it could use a good brushing. Will, who has spent the past month racked with guilt and shame, feels something akin to happiness that Abby’s personal life has also taken a hit as the result of desires she has indulged in at the expense of her family. But then his brain freezes on the word desires and its wildly different application to his own situation, and the schadenfreude evaporates.
Abby stands there for a moment, staring at the closed door and worrying at her locket, sliding it back and forth on its gold chain. Then she looks at Will and says, “Let’s talk in the kitchen. I have the case file there.”
Will follows her obediently through an open doorway into a small L-shaped room. Appliances line up along the longer wall, and at the shorter end, there is a table with a massive accordion file on it and
