Chapter 4: The Pharmacy Apartment
Curiosity is a disease. I caught it two weeks later on a bus route I told myself was coincidental.
The pharmacy was real. The windows above it were real. A curtain hung in a second-floor frame. I did not ring the bell. I stood across the street with a paper coffee cooling in my hand and tried to fit Walter’s ballroom voice into a walk-up over cough syrup and greeting cards. The fit was ugly and exact.
A foundation staffer I recognized from the wedding came out of the pharmacy with a small bag and glanced at me without surprise. She crossed the street.
“He said you might appear,” she said. Not unkind. “He doesn’t want a scene.”
“I’m not making one.”
“Good.” She hesitated. “For what it’s worth, Helen—his wife—would have disliked the theater. She would have disliked gold-digging more. He is not a saint. He is a lonely man with a completed legacy and a sharp edge.”
“He publicly stripped me.”
“You publicly priced him,” she said, still calm. “The edge cut both ways. Take the bus home, Miss. The apartment is small. There is nothing upstairs you can collect.”
May you like
I took the bus home.
The suit-loan installments continued. The boutique kept me past the trial shift. My feet hurt in a way that had nothing to do with wedding heels. At night I lay in the dark and felt the absence of the future I had ordered—no mansion, no accounts, no audience. In its place was a thinner life that belonged to me whether I respected it or not.
