I push through the doors and step out into the July heat and it hits me the same way it always does when I’m not with Alyssa lately. A slow, colorless drain, like someone’s been quietly turning a dial down since the moment I woke up this morning and she was already gone.
I walk toward the train station with my hands in my pockets and I try to understand what’s going on with me. I’m in love, but when I’m not with her this depression I’ve been carrying for a decade somehow feels worse.
I thought love was supposed to fix the wiring. I thought the whole mechanism of it would make me smile all day long.
Instead what I’ve got is this. The absence of her is somehow louder than the absence of how everything else used to be.
Before Alyssa, the numbness was just the baseline. It sat there like weather, flat and gray and consistent, and I’d learned to navigate it the way you navigate a familiar room in the dark.
Now I know what the lights look like when they’re on, and the darkness is a completely different animal. It has edges. It has a shape. It presses in from specific directions because I know exactly what’s missing and exactly where it should be standing.
Bill gave me another fifteen minutes of his thoughts on team culture today and I sat across from him with my hands flat on the conference table and felt absolutely nothing, which is normal, except now it feels like a loss rather than just a condition.
I get to a crosswalk and stand there waiting for the light with six other people, all of us staring at our phones, collectively agreeing not to acknowledge each other’s existence.
“Hello, Caleb.”
I look up.
There’s a woman standing slightly apart from the rest of the crosswalk crowd, facing me instead of the street. Tall. Red hair that goes all the way down, vivid enough that I’d have noticed her sooner if I’d been paying any attention to anything at all. Sharp features and a blue suit.
I look back at the light.
I must have misheard.
“Caleb Lawson.”
Or perhaps I did not mishear.
I look back at her. Her blue eyes dance like Alyssa’s.
“Yeah?”
“I need to speak with you.” Her voice is precise in a way that sounds practiced.
“No thanks.”
I look back at the light. It’s still red.
“It’s about your wife.”
The light turns green. I don’t move.
The other six people flow around me onto the crosswalk and I just stand there on the curb for a second, processing.
“Oh,” I say. “Alright.”
She’s already moving, which tells me she expected exactly that response. She cuts sideways off the sidewalk into the gap between a dry cleaner and a sandwich shop.
She stops about halfway in the alley and turns to face me, hands loose at her sides, completely unbothered by the setting.
I lean back against the brick and I realize, standing here, that this is the third alley I’ve been down since I’ve met Alyssa.
Am I developing an addiction?
I exhale slowly through my nose.
“Is this a Boston thing,” I say, more to myself than to her. “Do people here just conduct business between buildings?”
She doesn’t answer the alley question. She just pulls a cigarette out of her jacket pocket and puts it between her lips.
“What?” she says, the cigarette bouncing with the word.
“Never mind.”
She shakes her head slightly, like I’ve already disappointed her and we’ve barely started. “I’m Lara.”
“Okay.”
She bites the cigarette. There’s a small crunch. She pulls it out of her mouth and I realize its candy. The kind of hard sugar stick shaped like a cigarette that kids like. The end dusted with red powder to look like it’s been lit. She chews it with the same composure she’s had since the crosswalk, completely unbothered by the fact that I now know she’s been standing at a public intersection with candy in her suit pocket.
She reaches into her jacket again and comes out with something else.
A blue crystal. Roughly the size of a golf ball, maybe a little bigger. It catches the thin light coming in between the buildings. She holds it out toward me between two fingers like she’s offering me a business card.
I take it. I’m not sure why. I just do, the same way I agreed to come down this alley. Nothing feels particularly high stakes when Alyssa isn’t standing next to me.
I turn it over in my palm. “Is this like an energy thing? Like it could suck up crazy? Because I’m not bringing this anywhere near Alyssa if your plan is to make her normal.”
She looks at me.
“It’s a listening device,” Lara says.
“Oh.”
I look down at it again. It’s a very pretty listening device. Whoever designed the housing has good taste.
“Huh,” I add.
I put it in my pocket.
“Just set it on your coffee table,” she says. “Or a bookshelf. Wherever. Somewhere central.”
“Okay.” I push off the wall and start back toward the mouth of the alley.
Her hand lands on my shoulder. Not hard, just present, the way you’d stop a door from swinging shut. I turn back.
She’s studying me with those blue eyes, the candy cigarette held loosely in her other hand. The dancing quality in them has gone somewhere quieter, replaced by something that looks almost like genuine curiosity.
“That’s it?” Her voice carries the same precision as before but with something new underneath it. “A stranger walks up to you at a crosswalk, drags you down an alley, and hands you a surveillance device, and you just take it and say okay?”
“I just assumed you’re with Sun Wei,” I say.
Lara tilts her head. “I’m not.”
“Okay.”
“And if Sun finds out we had this conversation,” she says, letting the words come out careful and evenly spaced, “it’ll go badly for Alyssa.”
Something moves through my chest at that. Not panic exactly. More like a wire being pulled taut.
“Alright,” I say.
“The crystal needs to make it inside your apartment, Caleb. That part isn’t optional. Whatever else you do with this information, that part has to happen.”
I look at her. Then I look down at my pocket where the crystal is sitting against my hip.
“I’m just going to tell Alyssa. And let her figure it out.”
Lara laughs. Her blue eyes are bright when she looks at me again, something satisfied sitting behind them.
“Good,” she says. “That’s exactly what I was counting on.”
Lara turns and walks toward the far end of the alley without looking back.
I start walking toward the train station again and I start to wonder if I’m going to get in trouble for talking to a woman.
The thought arrives with a kind of resigned inevitability, the same way you acknowledge incoming weather. Alyssa is going to look at me with those green eyes and she’ll ask me to describe Lara in detail and then she’s going to fixate on the red hair for approximately forty-five minutes before she gets to any of the actual information.
The crystal shifts in my pocket as I walk.
I should probably be more concerned about the listening device. Or the part where a stranger at a crosswalk knew my name and told me Sun Wei can’t find out she talked to me. Those seem like the load-bearing facts of the situation.
But instead all I care about is getting to see Alyssa go manic when she gets mad at me…
I can’t stop thinking about how much I want to see it happen.
That specific version of her. The one that comes in hot with both hands already moving, voice already three notes above where it started, green eyes gone wide and electric and completely unmoored from anything resembling reason.
Chaos incarnate is the only phrase I have for it and even that doesn’t fully cover it.
I finally start smiling when I make it to the train platform.
Lara: