The nail salon had kept the original transom window, which Nina noticed because she was looking up to avoid looking in. The glass was cloudy with age, the same glass she'd looked through from the other side twenty years ago, lying on the futon with her feet on the radiator while Jess sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor and said, You have to leave him.
Not the boyfriend — that was later. Jess meant the job. The copy shop on Delancey where Nina worked doubles because the owner let her print her portfolio for free. Jess had been sitting on the kitchen floor because all four chairs were broken in different ways that each required a different accommodating posture, and by then it was easier to sit on the floor.
You're not going to become a photographer by making copies of other people's photographs.
Nina had known this. She'd known it the way you know the bus schedule — completely, and without it changing whether you're ready when the bus comes.
She kept walking. The block was shorter than she remembered, which happened every time. The bodega was a pharmacy now. The laundromat was still a laundromat, but a different one — the kind with an app. The place on the corner where she'd had her first real coffee date was a space that had been three things since then, none of which had lasted.
She was in town for a wedding. Not someone from this era — a college friend of David's, someone she'd met in her thirties, well past the period when this neighborhood was her whole world. She'd come a day early because she had a hotel room and the afternoon free and something in her wanted to stand on this block again, though she couldn't have said why.
Jess was in Christchurch. They hadn't spoken in five years, maybe six. Not a falling-out — the friendship just required a proximity neither of them had anymore. They'd tried the scheduled calls, the long emails, the thing where you send articles with notes in the margin. It had all been accurate and none of it had been enough. Like trying to heat a room by describing a fire.
But here was the thing Nina had come to verify, though she hadn't known that's what she was doing until she was standing here:
Everything from that year was gone. The apartment was a nail salon. The copy shop had closed in 2014. Jess was nine thousand miles away. The boyfriend she'd finally left — Jess had been right about him too, six months later — was someone she'd last heard about through a friend of a friend who'd seen him at a farmer's market with a stroller and an expression that could have been anything. The cat they'd adopted that winter, the one who'd lived seventeen years, the one who'd slept between them on the futon and purred like a diesel engine — she'd buried Gus in David's mother's garden in Connecticut.
Every piece of the infrastructure that had produced her current life had been dismantled, eroded, moved, or died.
And yet.
She lived in Portland. She was a photographer. She'd married David because Jess had convinced her to go to that first gallery opening where she'd met their mutual friend, the one who'd thrown the dinner party, the one where David had been seated across from her because the host had been wrong about the number of vegetarians.
The chain was nine links long. Every link was broken. The thing on the other end was still there.
Nina took a photo of the transom window. Not for the portfolio — she hadn't needed to print one in a decade. Just for the record. A document of the place where the ignition happened, long after the fire had moved on.
She sent it to Jess. No caption. Either Jess would recognize the window or she wouldn't. Either way, the message was the same: I'm standing where it started, and everything you set in motion is still in motion, and the place itself doesn't know.
Three hours later, on the other side of the world, Jess replied: Is that nail place any good? I need someone to do my nails for this work thing.
Nina laughed on a sidewalk in a city where she no longer lived, at a joke from a person she no longer called, about a building that no longer contained their life. It was the funniest thing she'd heard in months.