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.

No rings.

She had the specific look of someone who had never owned a ring, not because she was young or unattached, but because there was something in her that resisted declaring things visible and permanent and worn on the outside. She was private in ways that were bone-deep. What mattered to her, she kept interior.

Sebastian had known this. He'd never once asked her to be otherwise.

She turned off that thought the way she turned off the tap. Firmly. Completely.

She dried her face and went to make coffee.

She drank it standing at the counter because she was not ready to sit at the table.

This had been her morning protocol for two months, and she had given up pretending it was random. The table had two chairs. Both chairs were available. There was no rational reason to stand at the counter with a mug like someone waiting for a train. She did it anyway.

She drank slowly and looked at the far wall.

The bookshelf was to her left, just inside peripheral range. She was aware of it the way you're aware of something you're deliberately not looking at - present, known, heavy. On the third shelf: a photograph in a plain frame. Two women on a beach, summer, both squinting into the sun.

Olivia was the one laughing with her entire body, both hands slightly open at her sides, head tilted back. She was always the one laughing.

Vivian - their mother - had given Elise the photograph six weeks after the accident. She'd arrived at the apartment holding it in both hands, with the specific expression she wore when she was doing something difficult and did not want to discuss why it was difficult. Elise had taken it. Had said thank you. Had put it on the shelf and had not moved it since.

She could not look at it directly. Not yet. She had discovered, around November, that looking at it directly cost her the rest of the morning, and she had rehearsals to get to.

She was aware of it now, in the way she was aware of most things she wasn't looking at: completely.

She rinsed her mug and put it in the rack.

The last real conversation she had with Olivia was on a Thursday. Fifty-two days before the accident.