The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,20

ends, the music replaced by applause, and Toby sidles up to the bar, orders a Jack and Coke because they’ll give it to him for free, and somewhere between the first sip and the third he sees her, and smiles, and for an instant Addie thinks—hopes, even now—that he remembers something, because he looks at her as if he knows her, but the truth is simply that he wants to; attraction can look an awful lot like recognition in the wrong light.

“Sorry,” Toby says, head ducking the way it does whenever he’s embarrassed. The way it did that morning when he found her in his living room.

Someone brushes Addie’s shoulder as they reach past her for the bar door. She blinks, and the dream falls away.

She has not gone in. She is still standing on the street, the cigarette burned away to nothing between her fingers.

A man holds open the door. “You coming in?”

Addie shakes her head, and forces herself to step back, away from the door, and the bar, and the boy about to take the stage. “Not tonight,” she says.

The rise isn’t worth the fall.

New York City

March 10, 2014

XII

Night settles over Addie as she crosses the Brooklyn Bridge.

The promise of spring has retreated like a tide, replaced again by a damp winter chill, and she pulls her jacket close, breath fogging as she starts the long stretch up the length of Manhattan.

It would be easy enough to take the subway, but Addie has never liked being underground, where the air is close and stale, the tunnels too much like tombs. Being trapped, buried alive, these are the things that scare you when you cannot die. Besides, she doesn’t mind walking, knows the strength of her own limbs, relishes the kind of tired she used to dread.

Still, it’s late, and her cheeks are numb, her legs weary, by the time she reaches the Baxter on Fifty-sixth.

A man in a trim gray coat holds the door, and her skin tingles at the sudden flush of central heat as she steps into the Baxter’s marble lobby. She is already dreaming of a hot shower and a soft bed, already moving toward the open elevator, when the man behind the desk rises from his seat.

“Good evening,” he says. “Can I help you?”

“I’m here to see James,” she says, without slowing. “Twenty-third floor.”

The man frowns. “He isn’t in.”

“Even better,” she says, stepping into the elevator.

“Ma’am,” he calls, starting after her, “you can’t just—” but the doors are already closing. He knows he will not make it, is already turning back toward the desk, reaching for the phone to call security, and that is the last thing she sees before the doors slide shut between them. Perhaps he will get the phone to his ear, even begin to dial before the thought slips from his mind, and then he will look down at the receiver in his hand and wonder what he was thinking, apologize profusely to the voice on the line before sinking back into his seat.

* * *

The apartment belongs to James St. Clair.

They had met at a coffee shop downtown a couple months ago. The seats were all taken when he came over, wisps of blond escaping the hem of a winter hat, glasses fogging from the cold. That day Addie was Rebecca, and before he’d even introduced himself, James had asked if he could share her table, saw that she was reading Colette’s Chéri, and managed a few lines of broken, blushing French. He sat, and soon easy smiles gave way to easy conversation. Funny, how some people take an age to warm, and others simply walk into every room as if it’s home.

James was like that, instantly likable.

When he asked, she said that she was a poet (an easy lie, as no one ever asked for proof), and he told her he was between jobs, and she nursed her coffee for as long as she could, but eventually her cup was empty, and so was his, and new customers were circling, buzzard-like, in search of chairs, but when he began to rise, she’d felt that old familiar sadness. And then James asked if she liked ice cream, and even though it was January, the ground outside slicked with ice and paving salt, Addie said she did, and this time when they stood, they stood together.

Now she types the six-digit code into the keypad on his door and steps inside.

The lights come on, revealing pale wood floors, and clean marble