Chapter 23

It happened on a Friday.

Not dramatically. Not with any warning. The way most difficult things happened — on an ordinary day, in an ordinary moment, when nobody was braced for it.

Lookmhee was at The Last Page in the afternoon, covering the front desk while Dao was in the back doing inventory. The shop was quiet — the particular quiet of a Friday afternoon in December when the pre-holiday rush had briefly paused, the kind of quiet Lookmhee usually liked, when she could straighten shelves and write cards and let her mind do the soft, unfocused wandering that produced good lines.

She was not producing good lines today. She was thinking about the interrupted conversation — the one that still had not happened, that kept getting deferred by the ordinary machinery of two people’s lives, Sonya’s work and her work and the building and the group and the thousand small things that filled the space between two closed doors.

She was thinking about this when the door opened and a woman came in.

She was somewhere in her fifties, with reading glasses on a chain and the purposeful manner of someone who knew what she wanted. She went straight to the poetry section — good instincts, Lookmhee always thought well of people who went straight to poetry — and spent a few minutes there before coming to the front desk.

“I’m looking for something by a new poet,” she said. “I heard an excerpt at a reading last week. The press that published it — very small, I don’t have the name — but the poem was about a city apartment. About sounds through walls. The person who read it said it was from a debut collection.”

Lookmhee looked at her. “Do you remember any of the lines?”

The woman thought for a moment. “Something about music. And coffee. And — waiting. It was very specific.” She paused. “The person who read it said the poet lived in the same building as the editor. That they had read it without permission and that was why the whole room laughed.”

Lookmhee went very still.

“The editor,” she said carefully. “At the press?”

“Yes — a young woman, apparently. Very composed. Someone said she bought every copy of a small magazine when it first came out.” The woman smiled. “The room found that very charming.”

The room.

The reading.

Sonya’s press.

Lookmhee thought about the green notebook. About the poems she kept private, had always kept private, had shown to no one. About the notebook she left on her desk and on her shelf and occasionally on the kitchen counter when she was moving between rooms.

She thought about how thin the walls were between 4B and 4C.

She thought: the sounds through walls.

She thought: she read them.

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She did not say anything for the rest of the shift.

She helped the woman find the collection — it took twenty minutes, a search through the small press catalogue, and when she found it she handed it over with steady hands and a steady voice and thanked her for coming in.

The woman left.

Lookmhee stood at the front desk.

She thought about the poems. About every poem she had written since moving to the city — the raw ones, the unguarded ones, the ones she had written in the half-awake early morning when her editor was not running, when the feelings came out directly without the careful layer she usually kept between herself and the page. The ones about music through walls. About coffee at a door. About a hand taken simply in a lobby. About not yet and soon and almost there.

She thought about Sonya reading them.

She thought about Sonya going to a reading at her own press and someone reading them — without permission, the woman had said, the room had laughed — and Sonya sitting in that room listening to Lookmhee’s private words read aloud by someone else.

She thought about all the things Sonya had said since the poems existed. The you should keep writing them from the first week. The which one am I doing conversation in the coffee shop about beginnings and endings. The careful, specific way she had spoken about Lookmhee’s writing as if she knew it better than someone who had never read it.

She thought: she has known. This whole time. She has read them and she has known and she has said nothing.

She did not know, standing at the desk of The Last Page on a Friday afternoon in December, whether what she felt was hurt or anger or something else entirely. It was big and it was complicated and it had several things in it at once and she could not sort them out here, now, at work.

She called Dao from the back room.

“I need to leave a bit early,” she said. “I’m not feeling well.”
Dao came out, looked at her, and said: “Go.”

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She walked home fast.

Not running — she was not going to run, she was going to be calm, she was a calm person and she was going to stay calm — but fast, with the particular energy of someone who has a lot of feelings and a limited amount of time before they arrive somewhere.

She thought about the private nature of the poems. About the rule she had kept since she was fifteen — not for sharing, not for anyone else’s eyes. About the specific trust that came with leaving a notebook in the ordinary spaces of your life and knowing the person across the hall would not — would never —

She thought about Sonya. About the composed, precise, careful person who dealt in truth and said things like facts and had — had gone to a reading and sat in a room and listened.

She thought: did she know I didn’t know? Did she sit there and let someone read my words out loud and say nothing to me?

The answer, she knew, was yes.

Because Sonya had not said anything. Not once, in all the weeks since the poems had existed, had she indicated by word or expression or action that she had read them. She had just — held the knowledge. Carried it. Used it, maybe, in the specific way she used everything she knew — carefully, without showing her hand.

Lookmhee pushed through the building door.

She pressed the elevator button.

She rode up to the fourth floor.

The light was on under 4C.

She stood in the hallway for a moment. Her hands were steady. Her voice, when she knocked, would be steady. She was going to be calm.

She knocked.

Sonya opened the door in her home clothes — the dark sweater, bare feet, the reading glasses she wore when she was working that Lookmhee had seen twice before. She looked at Lookmhee. Something in her expression shifted immediately — the quick, assessing look she had, reading the room.

“You’re home early,” she said.

“Did you read my poems?” Lookmhee said.

A pause.

Not a long pause. Barely a beat. But it was there — the microsecond of a person who has been found out and is deciding how to respond.

“Lookmhee—”

“Did you read them?”

Sonya looked at her steadily. Her expression was the composed one — not the cold version, not the defensive version, just the careful version, the one that was buying time. “Yes,” she said.

The word landed the way Lookmhee had known it would.

“When?” she said.

“A few months ago. I came to return something — you weren’t home, the door was open, the notebook was on the counter and it was open and I saw—” she paused. “I read more than I should have.”

“You read more than you should have,” Lookmhee said. The steadiness in her voice was real — she was not shouting, she was not crying, she was just very precisely angry in the way that precise people got angry. “And then you said nothing.”

“I didn’t know how to—”

“You went to a reading at your press,” Lookmhee said. “And someone read them. Without asking me. And you sat there.”

Something moved across Sonya’s face. “I didn’t know they were going to—”

“But they did. And you didn’t tell me.” Lookmhee looked at her. At the honest, complicated face and all the things she knew about it and the specific, particular hurt of finding out that the person you trusted most with your private self had been holding a piece of it without telling you. “I have never shown those poems to anyone. Not my family, not my friends, not anyone. They were—” she stopped, finding the word, “—they were mine. Just mine.”

Sonya was quiet.

“I know,” she said. Low. Even. Without excuses.

“You should have told me,” Lookmhee said. “The moment you realized what you’d done. You should have said — I’m sorry, I came in and I read something I shouldn’t have. That’s what you should have said.”

“Yes,” Sonya said. Simply.

“Instead you said nothing and you—” Lookmhee stopped. She thought about all the months of you should keep writing them and the essay about distance and the conversation about endings. She thought about how much Sonya had known, how long she had known it, and how that knowledge had shaped every interaction without Lookmhee’s awareness or consent.

“You knew everything,” she said. “Everything I felt, everything I was — I put it all in those notebooks and you read it and you knew and you used it and you never said a word.”

“I didn’t use it—”

“You knew how I felt about you,” Lookmhee said. “Before I told you. You knew and you still said not yet for months.”

The hallway was very quiet.

Sonya looked at her. The composed face had something underneath it now — not defensiveness, not the careful neutral. Something that was just — the weight of being seen completely and accurately and found wanting.

“I handled it wrong,” she said.

“Yes,” Lookmhee said. “You did.”

A silence.

Lookmhee looked at her. At the person she had been moving toward for five months, slowly and carefully and with her whole self, and the specific complicated feeling of having the ground shift under something she had thought was solid.

“I need some time,” she said. Quietly. Not in anger — the anger had moved through her and left something quieter in its place. Something that was just — hurt. Plain and clear. “I just need a few days.”

Sonya looked at her for a long moment. Her expression was the real one — the unguarded one, the one with everything in it — and what was in it now was the specific, careful acknowledgment of someone who knows they have broken something and is not going to argue about whether they broke it.

“Okay,” she said.

Lookmhee nodded.

She went to 4B.

She closed the door.

She stood in her apartment in the quiet and looked at the green notebook on her shelf and thought about all the things she had written in it and who had read them.

She sat down on the floor.

She did not cry. She just sat with the weight of it — the hurt of the privacy broken, the complicated feeling of being known without knowing you were known, the specific grief of something that had been moving toward something good and had just, unexpectedly, become complicated.

She picked up her phone. She texted Freen: can I come down?

Freen replied in four seconds: yes. now. come now.

Lookmhee put on her shoes.

She went downstairs.

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