The cab smelled of pine air freshener and old leather.
Sophia sat in the back with one bag on her lap and one at her feet.
Her coat was buttoned to the throat.
Her sunglasses were on even though the sun had gone down forty minutes ago and the city outside was operating entirely on artificial light.
The driver glanced at her in the rearview mirror.
“JFK or LaGuardia?”
“JFK.”
He nodded and pulled into traffic, he said nothing else for two blocks.
Then, with the unhurried conversational.
“You live here or you leaving?”
“Leaving,” Olivia said.
“For good?”
She looked out the window at the city doing what it always did at this hour — blooming, filling, the office buildings lighting up floor by floor as the evening shift settled in and the restaurants began to fill and the sidewalks thickened with people moving at the particular velocity of New York evenings.
“I don’t know yet,” she said.
The driver considered this.
“My wife left for good twelve years ago. Went back to Santo Domingo. Said New York took more than it gave.” He paused.
“She came back after eight months. Said she missed the noise.”
“Did you take her back?”
He smiled at the mirror.
“She’s the one who left.
She came back.
What was I going to do, argue?” He shrugged with his whole upper body, “Some cities get in your blood.
You can leave but the city doesn’t leave you.”
Sophia looked out the window.
“No,” she said quietly.
“I suppose it doesn’t.”
Her phone rang.
She looked at the screen.
Elena.
She picked up.
“I’m in the cab.”
“I know, I can see your cab from mine. Your driver is considerably more aggressive than mine, which I respect.”
Traffic sounds on Elena’s end, a horn, the muffled voice of her own driver saying something.
“How are you holding up.”
“I’m fine.”
“Sophia.”
“I’m managing.”
“Marginally more honest. Okay.” Then pause.
“I want you to know that I have handled everything. The storage unit is locked, Melissa has the forwarding address, I called your bank and updated the contact details and I cancelled the joint subscriptions — all of them, including the wine club which I took the liberty of redirecting to my own address because that felt like the least the universe owed me today.” The source of this chapter is g.com.
Despite everything Sophia almost smiled.
“That’s stealing.”
“That’s reparations. There’s a difference.” Another pause, softer this time.
“Margaux confirmed the apartment. Two bedrooms, month to month, available from the fifteenth. It’s small.”
“Small is fine.”
“It’s very small. The kitchen is — I’ve seen the photos, Sophia, I want to prepare you.”
“Elena. I don’t care about the kitchen.”
“You say that now. Wait until you’re nine months pregnant trying to navigate a kitchen the size of a—” She stopped herself.
A brief silence.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to — I just—”
“It’s alright.”
“I’m going to say the wrong things sometimes. I want you to know that’s not — I’m still learning the shape of this.”
“So am I,” Sophia said.
“We’ll figure it out together.”
A longer pause.
When Elena spoke again her voice had changed register entirely — the logistics stripped away, just the two of them, eighteen years of friendship and this moment in it.
“You are the strongest person I have ever known,” Elena said.
“And I know you don’t want to hear that right now because it doesn’t feel true from the inside. But I am telling you anyway because somebody should.”
Sophia pressed her fingers briefly against her eyes beneath the sunglasses.
“I’ll see you at the gate,” she said.
“Gate B. I’ll be the one aggressively eating an airport sandwich and judging everyone’s carry-on choices.”
Sophia ended the call.
The driver was quiet.
They moved through the park — his own route, his own logic — and for a few minutes Sophia watched Central Park pass in the darkness, the trees bare, the paths lit at intervals, a jogger briefly visible and then gone.
She and Andrew had walked in this park on their first anniversary.
She closed her eyes and filed that away and opened them again.
Fifth Avenue now, heading downtown, the city at its most itself — lit and vertical and completely indifferent.
New York did not require you to be okay.
It simply required you to keep moving, which was the one instruction she was currently capable of following.
The cab stopped at a light.
She looked up without intention and saw, across the street and two floors up, the rooftop of the Meridian Hotel.
String lights.
An event tent, white and glowing.
Silhouettes moving inside.
A waiter crossing with a tray.
Someone raising a glass .
Seraphina beside him, her hand at his arm.
He was talking to another man — dark suit, receptive posture — and smiling the smile she knew, the one that reached his eyes only when something had genuinely pleased him.
Seraphina was turned slightly toward him, her expression composed and content and utterly practiced.
Forty-three floors below the penthouse they had shared.
Two weeks and two days since the anniversary dinner no one had eaten.
Sophia watched for exactly as long as the light held.
“You okay back there?” the driver asked.
She looked at his eyes in the mirror.
“Does it get easier?” she said.
“Leaving.”
He was quiet for a moment.
Considered it seriously, the way she had asked it seriously.
“First time is the hardest,” he said.
“After that you know you survived it once. Makes the next time less like dying and more like — just going somewhere.”
The light changed.
The cab moved forward.
“Take me to the airport,” she said.
“That’s where we’re going,” he said gently.
“I know.” She turned away from the window.
“I just needed to say it out loud.”
He nodded once and faced forward and said nothing else.
she was grateful for that — for being taken somewhere without commentary or consolation, without being asked to perform being fine.
The city rearranged itself behind her.
The rooftop lights grew smaller.
Then disappeared.
She did not look back.
She had promised herself that in the courthouse and she kept it now, her hands folded in her lap, the sunglasses still on.
Her coat still buttoned to the throat, moving south through a city that was already forgetting her.
The airport signs appeared overhead, green and white.
“You know what I think?” the driver said, after a long while.
“What?”
“I think you’re not leaving.” He glanced at the mirror.
“I think you’re just going to go get ready. There’s a difference.”
Sophia looked at him.
Then she looked at the signs overhead, the distance counting down in mi les, the city thinning around them as they moved toward its edges.
“Yes,” she said.
For the first time since the penthouse, she meant it completely.