hours, though, and the gray shadows across the way blurred and shimmered in his vision. Still, he watched—legs trembling with exhaustion, queasy with hunger—like a cat that watches the crack between the molding and the floor for the mouse that appeared there once upon a time.
Police cars had clogged the street all afternoon. An ambulance had arrived, and uniformed officers were in and out of the building.
Why was he still watching Audrey’s apartment? Out of habit, he supposed. He’d known her intimately, having watched her in the privacy of her home for so long. He knew how she walked across a room, what she wore to bed, how long she brushed her teeth. Everything—almost everything—he’d known about Audrey he learned by watching out his window.
It had begun over a year ago, a few months after Alan and Quinn had moved in together. It had been a Saturday in December, a typical Saturday with Quinn. They’d had brunch with friends, then been shopping, then gone to the gym, then bought a Christmas tree that was almost too big to get up into the apartment and that had shed pine needles along the stairs and down the hall. The plan that night had been to stay in, decorate the tree (their first as a couple), drink eggnog, and watch a movie. But Quinn’s best friend Viv had texted that everyone was going over to some new hotel bar that had just opened.
“Let’s go,” Quinn said, finishing off the eggnog that she’d been sipping at for over half an hour.
“Really?”
“It’ll be fun. The bartender there is the same guy who used to bartend over at Beehive. You remember that drink he used to make, with the sherry in it, that you used to go on about . . .”
“The Aston Martin.”
“That’s right. The Aston Martin. Let’s go drink one.”
Alan was all set to agree, drank down his own eggnog, then surprised himself by saying, “Maybe I’ll just stay here tonight.”
“Seriously?” Quinn said. She was standing now, stripping off the Lululemon yoga pants she’d been wearing since they returned home.
“I’m tired,” Alan said. It was a lie. He wanted to stay home in order to spend some time alone. His head was pleasantly fuzzy from the brandy in the eggnog, and the idea of a Saturday night alone suddenly felt heavenly. He could keep drinking, find a horror film to watch, something gory that Quinn would never agree to.
“We don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” Quinn said.
“You go. I don’t have a problem with it. It’s a relationship milestone. You going out and me staying in, and neither of us minding.”
“Oh, you’re just assuming I don’t mind,” she said, but she was smiling. In the end, after changing, and having another drink, and putting on makeup, Quinn went out.
Alan had been alone in the apartment before, of course, but it felt different on a Saturday night with Quinn off with friends. Before looking for a film to watch, he put Chet Baker Sings on the old record player he had been dragging from apartment to apartment his whole life, made himself another drink, then wandered from lamp to lamp, adjusting the lighting to the way he liked it. It had just begun to snow earlier that evening, when he and Quinn had returned with the tree, so Alan went to the large picture window in the living room, parted the curtains, and looked out to see what the weather was doing. It had stopped coming down, but everything was covered with a thin scrim of pure white snow. He studied the footsteps in the courtyard, trying to identify Quinn’s, but there were too many.
There was a light on in the apartment on the other side of the courtyard. Alan looked, his eyes taking a moment to adjust. The woman who lived there—Alan couldn’t remember her name, if he’d ever known it—had left her own curtains half parted. She was seated on her couch, her back against one of the arms, a book open in her lap. There was a single tall lamp above her that produced a cone of warm yellow light. On the coffee table in front of the couch was a glass of red wine, an open bottle next to it. It was such an idealized image, almost cliché, that Alan laughed out loud to himself. He took a step to the left so that she was framed more perfectly in the space between the parted curtains.