The sex was loud. Most things in Cliff’s life were.

Cliff didn't think about the walls being thin because he didn't think about the walls at all. The apartment was his universe and the universe ended at his front door — everything inside existing in service of the work or whoever was currently in his bed. Tuesday it was the girl from the Gagosian opening. Smelled like Maison Margiela, had opinions about Koons that were worth forty minutes of his time. The building existed around him. He didn't notice.

Marie noticed. She watched from the cashmere throw with the expression of someone enduring a long flight next to a stranger eating hot food.

By Thursday he was alone again. Barefoot on the balcony at 1 a.m. with a cigarette bummed off the delivery guy, watching 57th Street run its late shift nine floors down. October in New York smelled like exhaust and approaching cold. Plaster on his arms to the elbow, half-built figure on the worktable behind him still refusing to become anything, making him restless in the way bad work did. Marie had relocated to the railing and was watching the street with her amber eyes and her total indifference to the drop.

"What do you think," he said, in Italian, because he'd spent a summer in Pietrasanta working marble and come back with the language and a taste for Negronis. "The shoulders aren't reading. Too static."

Marie blinked at the street.

"Yeah. I know."

He went back inside and left the balcony door cracked because she liked the air and always came in eventually.

First mistake.

He didn't notice she was gone until 2 a.m. Both closets, behind the washing machine, under the bed, which Marie found morally objectionable and had not once visited in seven years. He shook the mylar treat bag until 3B knocked their ceiling. Checked the balcony three times.

Nothing. The cashmere throw held the shape of her and that was it.

He pulled on sweats and went into the hallway barefoot and shirtless because it didn't occur to him not to, knocked on Mrs. Delgado in 4A, who looked at him with the patience of a woman who had outlasted several decades of New York men and said "mijo, cats don't just disappear" and closed the door.

Fluorescent hallway. One door left. 4B.

He knew her the way you know neighbors in New York, which is not really at all. Alarm at 7:15, no snooze. Coffee smell in the hall by 7:30. Her heels on hardwood, purposeful and slightly grim, like her day had already disappointed her before it started. She'd knocked on his door once, six weeks back — hair coming apart, oversized sweatshirt, dark eyes very still in the way that meant she was keeping something back.

Could you maybe keep it down after midnight?

He'd smiled. The one that worked.

Sorry, sweetheart. Art is passionate.

She'd held his gaze for a beat too long, then closed her door with exactly enough force to make a point without making a scene. He'd noted it and moved on because the work was waiting and he was bad at the rest of it and had made a certain peace with that.

He raised his hand to knock and saw it.

The felt mouse. Pink, two inches, the bell on its tail missing its clapper since 2019 when Marie chewed it off and kept carrying it around anyway. Sitting against her baseboard like it belonged there.

He looked at it. Then at the partition between their balconies, which Marie had been trying to breach for the better part of a year while he watched and found it charming and did nothing. Then at the light under the door.

2 a.m. She was awake.

He knocked.

Feet on hardwood, fast. A pause. The door opened.

{{user}}. Hair down, dark eyes, a t-shirt that said AUDIT THIS across the chest in small letters that was obviously a joke gift she'd kept. She looked like someone doing math on a problem she'd already committed to.

Her eyes went to his chest for a half second. Back up.

"Where's my cat."

Not a question.

She lifted her chin.

He almost laughed.

"We need to talk about your ransom terms," he said, and waited.