“I love my job, too, and I still took a vacation this year to the Maldives. Had a great massage there—I can give you the number for my guy if you end up going.”

  Oh, yes, because I could afford that. Well, maybe now that I owned my aunt’s apartment, I could. I pushed a strained smile across my face. “I’m fine, really—and besides, Boston in the Fall is coming out that week, and you know that author is so persnickety. I’d rather deal with him than make Juliette handle—”

  “Clementine?” she interrupted. “Take your damn accrued vacation. That’s why you have it.”

  “But—”

  “Your request to rescind your request is denied.”

  “I’m not going on vacation anymore, though,” I said, trying not to panic. “I refunded my tickets!”

  She gave me a look over her red-frame glasses. “Then you have two months to figure out what else you want to do. Half of our collection is travel guides—borrow one. I’m sure you’ll get inspired. You’ll need a vacation, after all.”

  “I really don’t think I will.”

  In reply, she swiveled her chair toward me again with a sigh, and took off her glasses. They hung from a beaded strap around her neck. “Fine. Close the door, Clementine.”

  Oh, no. Quietly, I did what I was told—albeit a little hesitantly. The last time she asked me to close the door, I found out she fired the marketing designer. I sat down again, a bit gingerly. “Is . . . is there something wrong?”

  “No. Well. Yes, but nothing bad.” She steepled her fingers and gave me a long look. She wore dark mascara and darker eyeliner around her eyes, and they always made her looks all the more intense. “You are sworn to secrecy, Clementine, until the time is right.”

  I straightened in my chair. This was big, then. Was it a new book? A celebrity memoir? Was Strauss selling the company? Did Michael in HR finally quit?

  She said, “I’m planning to retire at the end of the summer, but I only want to go knowing Strauss and Adder is in good hands.”

  I didn’t think I heard correctly. “You—what? Retire?”

  “Yes.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  There weren’t words enough to describe my profound—sadness? Disappointment? Strauss & Adder without Rhonda was like a body without a soul—a bookshelf without any books. She built this company with Strauss—every single one of its bestsellers over the last twenty years came from her.

  And she wanted to retire?

  “Don’t give me that look,” Rhonda said with a nervous laugh. She was never nervous. So she wasn’t pulling my leg. She was telling the truth. “I’ve done my time! But I’m not going to leave if this ship’ll sink without me. I’ve put too much of my life here,” she added, seemingly as an afterthought to her name on the business. “However, only you and Strauss know at the moment, and I’d like to keep it that way. Who knows what kind of piranhas the news will attract once it’s official.”

  My mouth was dry. “O . . . okay?”

  “In the meantime, I want you to take the lead on most projects and acquisitions this summer, to see how you fare. I’ll be in the meetings, obviously, but let’s just call it a dry run.”

  “To see if I can manage with you gone?”

  She gave me a baffled look, and then she laughed. “Oh, no, dear, to take my place!”

  If I wasn’t already sitting down, my knees would have given out immediately. Me—take Rhonda’s place? I only half listened as she told me how hard I worked, how exemplary I was, how I was exactly the kind of woman she’d been at my age, and that this was the kind of opportunity she would kill for. What better way to foster the future than to give the future a chance to succeed?

  “Well, half of my place. When Strauss and I started the company, I took over for the director of publicity and marketing as well as copublisher because we were so small, but I would not wish that on anyone else. After all, they’re not me,” she added. “Depending on your performance this summer, however, I’m inclined to put your name up for the new director of publicity. You’ve been here the longest of anyone on the team, so I only think it’s fair—not to mention I’d be an idiot not to.”

  I . . . didn’t know what to say.

  As it turned out, she didn’t expect me to say anything, as she put her glasses back on and returned to her computer. “So, you see, I imagine you’ll need to take a vacation before you start your new job—I’ll get you the name of my masseuse in the Maldives.”

  My mouth dropped open. I gave a squeak. My head was spinning from all the information.

  “Now, can you send me my meetings for next week? Something tells me Juliette is going to forget. Again.”

  That was my cue to leave.

  I prayed that my legs would work as I pushed myself to my feet. “I’ll get that right to you,” I replied, and left her office.

  First, my vacation cancellation request was denied, and then Rhonda dropped that she might retire? And I might take her place as head of the department?

  I didn’t want to think about it.

  My cubicle was just across the hall from her door—ten feet, give or take. It was neat and pristine—the kind of space that Drew called a one-box walkout. Meaning that if I got fired, I’d need only one box to pack all my keepsakes before I left. I wasn’t planning on going anywhere—I’d been here for seven years—I just didn’t have much I wanted to display. Some photos, a few of my watercolor postcard paintings from around the city—Central Park’s lake, the Brooklyn Bridge from Dumbo, a cemetery in Queens. I had a bobblehead doll of William Shakespeare, and a collector’s box set of the Brontë sisters’ works, and a signed bookplate from an author I couldn’t remember and couldn’t read the name of anymore.

  I sank into my chair, feeling numb and a little out of my league—for the first time in years. Retiring—Rhonda was retiring.

  And she wanted me to take her place.

  My chest constricted in panic.

  A few minutes later, Juliette—a petite white woman with braided blond hair, big doe eyes, and cherry-red lipstick—trudged back to her cubicle, red-eyed and sniffling. She sank down at her desk. “W-we broke up again . . .”

  Absently, I grabbed my tissue box from under the desk and offered her one. “That’s rough, friend.”

  3

  Home Sweet Home

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to take my vacation—I did. Every year for the last seven years, I’d taken that week and I’d flown off to some distant part of the world. I just . . . didn’t want to be the girl who kept looking around airports for a woman with an azure-blue coat and a loud laugh, waving her large heart-shaped sunglasses for me to catch up.

  Because that woman didn’t exist anymore.

  And neither did the girl who loved her unconditionally.

  No, she was replaced by a woman who worked late on a Friday night because she could, who would rather attend work functions than first dates, who had a spare pair of tights and deodorant in her desk drawer just in case she pulled an all-nighter (not that she had yet). She was always the last one in the building, when even the motion-sensor lights thought she’d gone home, and she was happy.

  She was.

  I finally logged out of my work computer, stood from my chair, and stretched, the fluorescent light above me flickering to life again. It was around 8:30 p.m. I should get going before security started to make their rounds, because then they’d tell Strauss and Rhonda, and Rhonda had this policy against working late on Fridays. So I grabbed my purse, made sure that Rhonda had everything on her desk for the Monday morning meeting, and left for the elevator.

  I passed one of the company bookcases—the ones where people put freebies of extra galleys and final copies. Novels and memoirs and cookbooks and travel guides. Most I’d already read, but one caught my eye.

  Destination Travel: New York City

  It must have been a newer one, and there was a delicious sort of irony to reading a travel guide about a city you lived in. My aunt used to say that you could live somewhere your entire life and still find things to surprise you.

  I thought—for a split second—that my aunt would love a copy, but when I took it off the shelf and put it in my purse, reality hit me again like a brick to the head.

  I thought about putting it back, but I felt so ashamed for forgetting that she was gone that I quickly left for the elevator. I’d donate it to a secondhand bookshop this weekend instead. The lone security guard at the front of the building looked up from her phone as I hurried past, not surprised at all to find me working so late.

  I walked to the subway station, and headed uptown to the Upper East Side, where I got off the train at my stop and pulled out my phone. It was a reflex by now to call my parents on the walk from the station to my aunt’s apartment building.

  I never used to do this, but ever since Analea died, it’d become a sort of comfort. Besides, I think it helped Mom a lot. Analea was her older sister.

  After two rings, Mom answered with a “Tell your father that it is perfectly acceptable to finally move my exercise bike into your old room!”

  “I haven’t lived there in eleven years, so it’s absolutely okay,” I said, dodging around a couple looking at Google Maps on their phone.

  Mom shouted, making me wince, “SEE, FRED! I told you she wouldn’t care!”

  “What?” my dad called faintly in the background. The next I knew, he was picking up the phone from what I assumed was the kitchen. “But what if you come home, baby girl? What if you need it again?”

  “She won’t,” Mom replied, “and if she does, she can take the couch.” I massaged the bridge of my nose. Even though I’d been moved out since I was eighteen, Dad hated change. My mom loved repetition. They were a match made in heaven. “Isn’t that right?”

  Dad argued, “But what if—”

  I interrupted, “You can turn my room into anything you want. Even a red room, if you want.”

  “A red . . . ?” Mom began.

  Dad said, “Is that the sex dungeon in that movie?”

  “FRED!” Mom shrieked, and then said, “Well, that is an idea . . .”

  My father said, with a sigh that weighed about as much as all thirty-five years of their marriage, “Fine. You can put your exercise bike in there—but we’re keeping the bed.”

  I kicked a piece of trash on the sidewalk. “You really don’t have to.”

  “But we want to,” Dad replied. I didn’t have the courage to admit to my dad that home wasn’t their two-story blue vinyl house on Long Island anymore. Hadn’t been for a while. But it also wasn’t the apartment I was walking to—slower and slower by the minute, as if I didn’t really want to go at all. “So how was your day, baby girl?”

  “Fine,” I replied quickly. Too quickly. “Actually . . . I think Rhonda is retiring at the end of the summer, and she wants to promote me to director of publicity.”

  My parents gasped. “Congrats, sweetheart!” Mom cried. “Oh, we are so proud of you!”

  “And in only seven years!” Dad added. “That’s gotta be a record! Why, it took me eighteen years to make partner at the architecture firm!”

  “And it’s just in time for your thirtieth birthday, too!” Mom agreed happily. “Oh, we are going to have to celebrate—”

  “I don’t have the job yet,” I quickly reiterated, crossing the street to the block where my aunt’s apartment was. “I’m sure there will be other people in the running.”

  “How do you feel about it?” Dad asked. He could always read me in this alarming way that my mom absolutely couldn’t.

  Mom scoffed. “How do you think she feels, Fred? She’s ecstatic!”

  “It’s just a question, Martha. An easy one.”

  It was an easy question, wasn’t it? I should feel excited, obviously—but my stomach just couldn’t seem to unknot itself. “I think I’ll be more thrilled when I finally finish moving in,” I said. “There’s just a few more boxes I have to situate.”

  “If you want, we can come this weekend to help,” Mom suggested. “I know my sister probably left a lot of junk hidden places . . .”

  “No, no, it’s fine. Besides, I’m working this weekend.” Which probably wasn’t a lie—I’d find some work to do this weekend. “Anyway, I’m almost home. I’ll talk to you later. Love you,” I added, and hung up as I turned the corner and the towering building of the Monroe came into full view. A building that housed a small apartment that once upon a time belonged to my aunt.

  And now, against my will, it belonged to me.

  I tried to stay out of it for as long as possible, but when my landlord said my rent would be increasing in the apartment I leased in Greenpoint, I didn’t have much of a choice—here was my aunt’s apartment, sitting empty in one of the most sought-after buildings on the Upper East Side, willed to me.

  So I packed all my things into tiny boxes, sold my couch, and moved in.

  The Monroe looked like every other century-old apartment building in this city—a skeleton of windows and doors, having housed people long dead and long forgotten. A bone-white exterior with detailed trim work that looked vaguely mid-century, winged lions chiseled into the eaves and placed at the entrance with missing ears and teeth, and a tired-looking greeter just inside the revolving doors. He’d been there for as long as I could remember, and tonight he was sitting at the welcome desk, his hat slightly askew, as he read the newest James Patterson novel. He looked up as I came in and his face lit up—

  “Clementine!” he cried. “Welcome home.”

  “Good evening, Earl. How’re you? How’s the book?”

  “This Patterson guy never misses,” he replied happily, and wished me good night as I headed for the brassy elevators. My heart hurt a little, how familiar all of this was—how easy, how much it felt like home. The Monroe always smelled old—it was the only way I could describe it. Not musty or moldy, just . . . old.

  Lived-in.

  Loved.

  The elevator dinged its arrival to the first floor, and I slipped inside. It was gilded just like the lobby, in brass that needed a nice polish, with fleur-de-lis accents across the baseboard and a cloudy mirror on the ceiling where a tired and blurry reflection of myself stared down at me. Brown hair cut at the shoulders, curling in the summer humidity, and blunt-cut bangs that never quite seemed to look purposeful, but some haphazard job done at 3:00 a.m. with kitchen shears and a broken heart.

  The first time I came to stay at my aunt’s apartment, I was eight and the entire building seemed like something out of a storybook. Something I’d read about in the cramped library back home—somewhere Harriet the Spy or Eloise would live, and I imagined that I’d be just like them.

  Clementine was the kind of name you gave to a quirky children’s book character, after all.

  The first time I rode this enchanted elevator, I carried a too-big duffel bag with me, the color of cherries, clutching Chunky Bunny—my stuffed animal, which I still had—with all my might. Going somewhere new used to terrify me, but my parents thought I’d be better off with my aunt for the summer as they packed up our house in Rhinebeck and moved to Long Island, where they’d lived ever since. The mirrors on the ceiling were warped even then, and on the slow ride up, I found a spot where the mirrors were uneven and it bowed my face and twisted my arms like a fun-house mirror.

  My aunt had said in a conspiratorial voice, “That’s your past self looking back at you. Just a split second, from you to you.”

  I used to imagine what I’d say to that split-second-behind self.

  That was when I still believed in all of my aunt’s stories and secrets. I was gullible and fascinated by things that sounded too good to be true, a spark of something other in the mundane. A mirror that showed your past self, a pair of pigeons who never died, a book that wrote itself, an alleyway that led to the other side of the world, a magical apartment . . .

  Now the stories tasted sour in my mouth, but still, as I looked up at my mirrored self, I couldn’t help but play along, like I always had.

  “She lied,” I told my reflection, her mouth moving to my words. If my split-second-past me was shocked by the words, she didn’t show it.

  Because she already knew, too.

  The elevator dinged, and I got off on the fourth floor. The apartments were labeled with letters. In the summers after I first visited, I’d memorized how to say the alphabet backward with them.

  L, K, J, I, H, G, F . . .

  I turned the corner. The hall hadn’t changed in years. The carpet was a faded Persian design, the sconces forgotten with cobwebs. I trailed my fingers down the white chair-rail molding that lined the hall, feeling the rough wood underneath prick at my fingertips.

  E, D, C . . .

  B4.

  I stopped at the door and fished the keys out of my purse. It was almost 9:30 p.m., but I was so bone-tired, I just wanted to go to sleep. I unlocked the door and slipped off my flats in the doorway. My aunt had only two rules in this apartment, and the first was to always take off your shoes.

  When I moved in last week, my eyes had wandered over all the tall shadows, as if I expected to see a ghost. A small part of me wanted to—or maybe it wanted at least one of my aunt’s stories to come true. Of course, none did.

  And now I barely even looked up as I came inside. I didn’t turn on the lights. I didn’t study the shadows to see if they were stranger, if any were new.

  She said this apartment was magical, but it just felt lonely now.

  “It’s a secret,” she had said with a smile, pressing her finger to her lips. The smoke from her Marlboro curled out of the open window. I still remembered that day like it was yesterday. The sky had been crisp, the summer hot, and my aunt’s story had been fantastical. “You can’t tell anyone. If you do, it might not ever happen to you.”