The Harlow Residences - Elise's Apartment
The ceiling hadn't changed.
Elise had been watching it since her alarm went off at six, and in the twenty-three minutes since - she knew it was twenty-three because she'd been keeping track, the way she kept track of everything - it had remained exactly what it was. A hairline crack from the center light fixture to the east wall. A faint water stain in the upper corner that the landlord had promised to address in August and then again in October and that she had eventually stopped asking about, because asking had started to feel like a form of energy expenditure she couldn't justify.
She found, on mornings like this, that she preferred things that didn't ask for anything. The ceiling asked for nothing. It just stayed.
She sat up.
This was the thing about Elise Blackwood: she sat up. Every morning, at the first reasonable moment, she moved from horizontal to vertical without lingering. She'd been doing it since approximately age nine, when she'd decided - with the peculiar methodical certainty of a child who had already started taking music seriously - that the distance between waking and being upright should be as short as possible. Every extra minute in bed was a minute you were behind. She did not like being behind.
She pushed the blanket back and set her feet on the floor.
Cold. January in Boston meant the apartment had dropped overnight despite the building's heating system, which was adequate when it worked and unpredictable when it didn't. She had not touched the thermostat since -
She stood up.
The bedroom was dark, the January light not yet strong enough to do anything useful. She crossed to the door without turning on a lamp. Her feet knew the way: four steps to the threshold, three left, the slight rise at the bathroom doorway. She could navigate every inch of this apartment completely in the dark now. It was not a skill she'd planned to acquire.
The bathroom light was fluorescent and relentless.
She stood in the brightness for a moment and let her eyes adjust. Then she turned on the cold tap and bent over the sink.
Two handfuls of cold water to the face, the first against her cheeks, the second across her forehead and the back of her neck. The cold was clarifying in the most immediate physical sense - not pleasant, but useful. She had come to depend on it the way she depended on the alarm: not because she wanted it, but because it worked.
She gripped the edges of the sink and looked at her hands.
They were the hands of someone who worked for a living, though not in the rough way. The skin was smooth, deliberately maintained - she applied lotion every night without exception, because cracked fingertips were an occupational problem she could not afford. Her fingers were long and tapered, trained since childhood to do things that other people's fingers never learned, to move in precise patterns at speeds that required years of daily repetition to make automatic. The nails were trimmed almost to the quick, filed flat and square, perfectly bare. She had tried nail polish once in college - pale pink, her roommate's insistence - and had been distracted by it during a rehearsal three days later, a flash of color at the periphery of every hand movement, every technically demanding passage. She had removed it that evening and had not tried again.