The Apartment We Kept for a Better Person

How it begins

Someone had put a chipped blue chair in the apartment where Anna and David kept their better selves.

It stood beside the window, facing the empty wall.

Anna remained in the doorway with the key in her hand.

The apartment contained a table, two beautiful cups, and a shelf of books neither of them had read. They rented it as a workspace. At first that had been true. Later, it had become somewhere to visit when their own home felt full of unfinished things.

There should not have been a chair.

A woman came out of the bathroom wearing Anna's spare cardigan.

“Oh,” she said. “I thought you were coming Saturday.”

Anna checked her phone, as if the calendar might explain the cardigan.

“Who are you?”

“Ruth.”

“Why are you here?”

Ruth glanced toward the blue chair.

“David said it would be all right.”

Anna called him from the landing.

He answered with the bright voice he used when a problem had not yet reached him.

“Did you find the parcel?”

“There is a person in the apartment.”

A pause.

“I meant to tell you.”

“You usually mean to tell me before someone uses my clothes.”

“It's temporary.”

Everything about the apartment had been temporary for eighteen months: the extra rent, the unfinished manuscript Anna planned to edit there, David's drawings for a house they could not afford.

Inside, Ruth began folding the cardigan.

Anna watched through the open door.

On the immaculate table sat a mug with a tea stain beneath it. Beside the window, someone had planted basil in a cheap pot. The apartment smelled of lunch.

“Is she leaving?” David asked.

Anna looked at the blue chair.

For the first time, the room appeared useful to a person who was actually alive in it.

“I don't know,” she said. “Perhaps you should come and explain which temporary life you offered her.”