Chapter 5

The bookstore smelled like paper and old wood and something faintly sweet that Lookmhee had never been able to identify but had decided was just the natural smell of a place where a lot of stories lived.

The Last Page was small — two rooms, floor-to-ceiling shelves, a reading nook in the back corner with an armchair that had seen better decades, and a front window display that Lookmhee had been trusted to arrange on her third day, which she had taken very seriously. She had spent forty-five minutes on it. Her manager, a quiet woman named Dao who communicated mostly in nods and the occasional approving sound, had looked at it for a long moment and then made the approving sound, which Lookmhee had taken as a great success.

She liked the job. She liked the rhythm of it — the morning quiet when she was shelving before the store opened, the way the afternoon light came through the front window and landed on the spines of the books in the display, the customers who came in knowing exactly what they wanted and the ones who came in with no idea and needed help, which were her favorite kind.

She was writing a recommendation card for a collection of short stories — quietly devastating, read it slowly, read it twice — when her phone buzzed on the counter.

It was a message from a group chat she had apparently been added to at some point in the last few days without being told. The chat was called 4th floor + guests and had five members.

The message was from Becky.

someone ate the last of the communal ramen and did not replace it. i’m not naming names. SONYA.

Then from Freen: oh no

Then from Engfa: Becky.

Then from someone saved as TK: it was me

A pause of approximately thirty seconds.

Then Becky again: TK.

Then TK: you’re welcome

Lookmhee stared at her phone for a moment. Then she laughed — a real one, sudden, loud enough that Dao looked up from the other room with a raised eyebrow.

“Sorry,” Lookmhee called. “Group chat.”

Dao made a neutral sound and went back to what she was doing.

Lookmhee looked at the chat again. There was one message she had missed, sent right after TK’s, from a contact saved as Sonya (4C):

I was going to replace it.

And then, three minutes later:

I replaced it. It’s in the cabinet.

And then Becky: there are now TWO packs of ramen in the cabinet. TK you also have to replace yours.

And TK: no

Lookmhee typed into the chat for the first time: this is the most chaotic thing I’ve ever read

Freen replied instantly with five exclamation marks and a message that said LOOKMHEE IS IN THE CHAT as though this was breaking news.

Becky sent: welcome to the madness new girl

Engfa sent: good morning Lookmhee, have you eaten breakfast

Sonya sent nothing.

But when Lookmhee looked at the chat later that evening, there was a small seen notification under her message. Which meant all five of them had read it.

She told herself this was not interesting information. She put her phone back in her pocket and finished the recommendation card.

Quietly devastating. Read it slowly. Read it twice.

She thought, for just a moment, about the way Sonya had said you should keep writing them.

She picked up her pen and added one more line to the card.

Some things are worth sitting with.

✦ ✦ ✦

A week and a half into living at Clover Hill, Lookmhee finally found the coffee shop.

It was three blocks from the building, tucked between a dry cleaner and a place that sold only umbrellas, which she found both impractical and admirable as a business concept. The coffee shop was called Common Ground and it had mismatched chairs and a chalkboard menu and exactly the right amount of noise — enough to feel alive, not so much that she couldn’t think.

She had come alone, on a Saturday morning, with her notebook and no particular plan except to sit and write and drink something that wasn’t tea made in her tiny kettle.

She had been there for twenty minutes when the door opened and Sonya walked in.

She almost didn’t see her at first — Lookmhee was looking at her notebook, pen in hand, trying to work out the ending of something she had started the night before. But then a chair scraped against the floor and she looked up and there was Sonya, setting a bag down at the small table one over from hers, pulling out her phone, not looking up.

Lookmhee watched her for a second. Then she looked back down at her notebook.

She was not going to say anything. Sonya clearly came here alone, just like Lookmhee had, and maybe she didn’t want company, and maybe this was one of those city things where two people who knew each other could exist in the same space without it meaning anything.

“You can stop pretending you didn’t see me,” Sonya said, without looking up from her phone.

Lookmhee looked up. “I wasn’t pretending.”

“You looked up, made a decision, and looked back down.” Sonya put her phone on the table and finally looked at her. “That’s pretending.”

Lookmhee opened her mouth. Closed it. “Okay,” she said. “Fine. I saw you.”

“I know,” Sonya picked up the small menu card from her table and looked at it, even though she had clearly been here enough times to know it by memory. “You come here to write?”

“I was trying to.”

“I won’t bother you then.”

“You’re not bothering me.”

A pause. Sonya looked up again. The morning light from the window was coming in at a low angle and it caught the side of her face and Lookmhee looked at her notebook instead.

“I come here most Saturday mornings,” Sonya said. “Since you’ll probably be here again. Now you know.”

It was such a strange thing to say — so practical, so utterly unromantic, delivered like a scheduling update — that Lookmhee felt something catch in her chest that she immediately categorized as amusement. Definitely amusement.

“Noted,” she said.

The server came. Sonya ordered without looking at the menu. Lookmhee ordered a latte and a piece of banana bread because she had skipped breakfast and Engfa would be disappointed if she knew.

They sat in their separate tables, doing their separate things. It should have been awkward. It was not, which Lookmhee found more interesting than the awkwardness would have been.

After a while, without looking up from her phone, Sonya said: “You’re writing about the ending of something.”

Lookmhee looked up. “How do you know that?”

“You’ve written one line in twenty minutes and you keep crossing it out.” She was still not looking up. “That’s an ending problem. Beginnings you write fast. Middles you write slow. Endings you cross out.”

Lookmhee stared at her. “That’s — very specific.”

“It’s just observation.”

“Do you write?”

“No.” Short, certain.

“Then how do you know about endings?”

Sonya looked up then, and there was something in her expression that Lookmhee couldn’t quite name — something layered and brief that passed before she could examine it. “I read,” she said. “A lot. Endings are where most writers give up or give in. You can always tell which one it is.”

Lookmhee looked at the crossed-out line in her notebook. “Which one am I doing?”

Sonya tilted her head slightly. Considering. “I don’t know yet,” she said. “I haven’t read enough of your writing.”

The implication — that she might, at some point, read more — sat in the air between them for a moment. Neither of them mentioned it. Sonya looked back at her phone. Lookmhee looked back at her notebook.

She uncrossed the line.

She wrote a new ending.

It wasn’t perfect but it was honest, which was sometimes the same thing.

✦ ✦ ✦

They walked back to the building together, which had not been planned but had happened anyway in the natural way that things did when two people finished at the same time and were going the same direction.

The morning was cool and bright. The city was doing its Saturday thing — slower than a weekday, more relaxed, people with coffee cups and dogs and no particular urgency. Lookmhee liked cities on Saturday mornings. They felt like a different place than the rest of the week.

“Can I ask you something?” she said.

Sonya glanced at her. “You can ask.”

“The first day I moved in. At dinner. You said something about my boxes.” She paused. “Everyone else introduced themselves properly. You just — commented on my boxes.”

A beat.

“That is a question?” Sonya said.

“It’s a question.”

Sonya was quiet for a moment. They crossed the street. A pigeon moved out of their way with great reluctance.

“You came in carrying too many things and pretending it was fine,” Sonya said finally. “I noticed that. The boxes were just — the most honest thing about you in that moment.” She paused. “Someone who labels a box emotional damage and brings it into a room full of strangers is either very brave or very tired of hiding things.”

Lookmhee thought about that. “Which one do you think I was?”

Sonya looked at her sideways. That not-quite-smile. “Both,” she said. “Obviously.”

They walked the rest of the way in silence. But it was the kind of silence that felt full rather than empty, like a room with all the furniture in it.

At the building entrance, Sonya held the door open. A habit, Lookmhee was realizing — she always held doors, always let other people through first, always managed to do small considerate things in ways that looked accidental.

“The elevator’s still broken,” Lookmhee said.

“I know.”

“Four flights.”

“I know.”

They started up the stairs. On the second floor landing, Freen’s door opened and Freen leaned out in pajamas with her hair everywhere, holding a bowl of cereal.

“Oh! Good morning!” She beamed at both of them. “Are you coming from outside? Together?”

“We were both at the coffee shop,” Lookmhee said.

“At the same time?”

“Yes.”

Freen looked between them with enormous eyes. She opened her mouth.

“Freen,” said Sonya.

“I was just going to say—”

“Whatever you were going to say — don’t.”

Freen closed her mouth. Then immediately opened it again. “I was just going to say it’s nice that you’re getting to know each other.”

“That’s not what you were going to say,” TK said, from somewhere inside the apartment.

“It’s what I’m saying now,” Freen said, with great dignity.

Sonya looked at the ceiling for a brief moment. Then she continued up the stairs. Lookmhee followed, biting the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling.

Behind them, Freen whispered something to TK that was not actually very quiet.

Sonya’s jaw tightened slightly but she kept walking.

“She means well,” Lookmhee said, low.

“She always means well,” Sonya said. “That’s the problem.”

But she didn’t sound annoyed. She sounded, if anything, fond — that specific kind of fond that came with someone who had known a person long enough to be exasperated by them all the time and wouldn’t change it for anything.

They reached the fourth floor.

Sonya went to 4C. Lookmhee went to 4B.

“Same time next Saturday?” Lookmhee said, before she could stop herself.

She regretted it immediately. It was too much. Too direct. Sonya didn’t do—

“Sure,” said Sonya. She said it simply, like it wasn’t a big thing, like it was just a scheduling update. Like last time.

She went inside.

Lookmhee stood at her door for a moment.

Then she went in, sat down on her mattress, opened her notebook to the new ending she had written, and read it back.

It was better than she had thought.

She turned to a new page.

She wrote one line.

Then she closed the notebook because she was absolutely not writing about this, and went to make herself some tea.

She made the tea.

She drank half of it.

She opened the notebook again.

✦ ✦ ✦