The first thing Alexandra Parker noticed that evening was the way the sunset struck the glass of her apartment window, turning the whole pane into a sheet of fire. It was not a beautiful kind of fire. Not to her.
Not that day. It had the harsh orange glare of something burning out, the last light of a long Boston afternoon catching on the towers beyond her building and throwing their jagged reflections back at her like broken blades. Her laptop was still open on the kitchen counter behind her, an unfinished project proposal blinking in silence.
A mug of coffee she had reheated twice sat untouched beside a stack of marked-up client reports. The living room smelled faintly of printer paper, city dust, and the basil plant she kept forgetting to water on the windowsill. She should have been answering emails.
She should have been putting together the final numbers for a Monday morning meeting. She should have been doing any one of a dozen practical things that made up the life she had built far away from her father’s second wife and the endless emotional weather system that followed that woman everywhere. Instead, she stood in stocking feet near the window, one hand wrapped around her phone, listening to Victoria Harrison speak in the triumphant, polished voice she reserved for moments when she believed she had finally cornered someone.
“You’re banned from the family beach house forever,” Victoria said. The words came through the speaker with almost theatrical precision, every syllable sharpened and placed, as if she had rehearsed the sentence in front of a mirror. Alexandra did not answer right away.
Outside, traffic crawled along the avenue six floors below. A bus sighed at the curb. Somewhere, a siren wailed and then dissolved into the low mechanical breath of the city.
In the window, Alexandra could see her own reflection layered over the skyline: dark hair pulled into an untidy knot, oversized gray sweater falling off one shoulder, tired eyes, bare face, the kind of woman who looked younger when she laughed and older when she had not slept. “What did you say?” she asked at last. “I said you’re banned,” Victoria replied, delighted by the opportunity to repeat herself.
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