Russell Pond

The night the harbor burned, Raymond Flynn sued for peace. Over the radio, his voice cracked and wobbled and finally broke—not with emotion, the broadcast was too staticky for that, but with the particular failure of a man who’d run out of options and also, apparently, out of words. He surrendered the city at 11:47 PM. By midnight, Bonnet was issuing a statement from the headmaster’s house at Phillips Academy in Andover, twenty miles north of the siege line, where he’d spent the better part of two years directing the slow strangulation of a city he’d never once set foot in. The responsibility for Boston’s condition, he informed the assembled press, rested solely with the enemy command. Mayor Flynn had refused to capitulate. Mayor Flynn had prolonged the suffering of his own population. Mayor Flynn had chosen to let his people starve rather than accept the Reich’s generous terms, which had been generous, extremely generous, the Reich was always generous, and if the people of Boston were suffering, they knew exactly whom to blame. Bonnet had his own job to do. His own men to protect. His hands were tied. His hands were always tied. The man had more imaginary restraints than a bad paperback.

Flynn got cholera three weeks later.

He died in a cot at the Ritz-Carlton, no longer a hotel but a field hospital, the carpets rolled up, the chandeliers wrapped in sheets, the grand ballroom divided into rows of cots where the wounded from the harbor battle lay alongside the cholera victims. Surgeons who’d spent their careers removing gallbladders and appendixes were now sawing off limbs without morphine, their arms slick to the elbow, the floor beneath them slicker still. Volunteers moved between the cots with buckets and rags, cleaning up what came out of people faster than it could be cleaned. The Ritz had once been famous for its afternoon tea. Now the tea room reeked of carbolic acid and was a morgue and Flynn died there, the man who’d surrendered Boston, sweating while a girl who’d lost her brother on the Neponset Line held his hand and a soldier stood guard at the door, not to protect him but to make sure he didn’t leave. There was no state funeral.

Cambridge, meanwhile, had no mayor—alive or dead. Arthur DiMasi, Artie to his friends, had pulled a runner before the first shell even landed. Packed his car and drove west and never looked back and good riddance. Governor Peabody—Endicott Dearborn Peabody III to his friends—had been dead since December, killed in the relapsing fever outbreak or maybe just the sheer, crushing weight of his own irrelevance. No one really remembered. No one really cared. The chain of command had snapped, link by link, and when the last link broke, the Reich simply picked up the pieces and rearranged them into something that answered to Berlin.

The map of Reichskommissariat Neuengland—that neat little box swallowing Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, half of Connecticut, all of Rhode Island, and now Massachusetts—would’ve been drawn up by the Reichsministerium des Innern, specifically its Amt für Raumordnung und Planung—Office for Spatial Planning and Regional Development. That was the bureaucratic heart of territorial reorganization in the Nazi state: the people who turned conquered places into administrative units, who decided which old borders to erase and which new ones to invent, who gave the whole grim enterprise the tidy, clinical veneer of urban planning.

They were the same office that, back in Europe, had redrawn the map of Poland into Gaue and sketched out the proposed Reichskommissariats of the East—Ukraine, Ostland, Moskowien—before most of those places had even been fully conquered. Drawing boxes on maps was, in a very real sense, what they did best. The man in the basement, the one who’d put Massachusetts inside the lines, was probably some mid-level Beamter with a doctorate in geography and a passion for zoning regulations, a man who’d never been to Boston and never would, who’d decided the fate of half a million people on his lunch break and then gone back to his sandwich.

Reichskommissar Friedrich Pohl addressed them over the radio every Tuesday, his voice a smooth, unhurried drone that managed to sound both threatening and bored, as if the subjugation of New England were a mildly interesting administrative problem he was confident he could solve by lunch. He spoke of reconstruction. He spoke of reconciliation. He spoke of the bright, prosperous future that awaited under the Reich’s benevolent guidance, and Zelda listened because the radio was the only thing that still worked, and she hated him with a purity she usually reserved for bologna and Constance’s opinions.

The fliers came with the rations. Tucked into the relief boxes alongside the BP-5s and the shelf-stable milk, printed on cheap paper that absorbed grease and left ink smudges on your fingers. ASSURANCES, they were called, as if reassurance were a commodity you could ration out like cooking oil. Things would improve. The Reich was here to help. The suffering was temporary, the recovery permanent, the future bright. They were illustrated with little drawings—a family smiling around a table, a child holding a loaf of bread, a soldier handing a bandage to a grateful civilian—and the drawings were so clean, so earnest, so utterly divorced from the world she lived in that she almost had to laugh. Almost. She used the fliers to start fires. She used them to line Zipper’s litter box. She used them, once, to wipe herself when the toilet paper ran out, and the ink smeared on her thighs, and she looked down at the blurry, smiling family and thought: Things will improve. The suffering is temporary. The recovery permanent. And then she threw the flier away and went back to work.

She watched him from her table, the napkin-turned-rag motionless in her hand. Alex had given up on the mug and was now leaning against the bar with his back to her, staring at the wall with the particular intensity of a man who wanted you to ask what was wrong so he could say “nothing” and then hold it against you for the rest of the evening. The shaft of light from the one unbroken pane had shifted; it caught the back of his neck now, illuminating the fine, soft hair above his collar, the kind of detail that, in another timeline might’ve done something to her. She could see, objectively, that he was handsome. Broad shoulders. Good jaw. The kind of face that would’ve played a nurse on a daytime drama, the one who always had a stethoscope and a troubled past and a knack for saying exactly the right thing to the weeping widow in the third act. He was twenty-three and she’d be eighteen next month and by every law of romantic geometry she should’ve been interested. Should’ve noticed the way his forearms looked with his sleeves rolled up. Should’ve felt something when he glanced at her over his shoulder, his expression carefully arranged into something he probably thought was brooding and sensitive and was actually just constipated.

She felt nothing. Less than nothing. A negative amount, a debt of feeling, as if every time he looked at her like that she owed interest on a loan she’d never taken out.

It was the ownership that killed it. How he leaned in doorways and waited for her to pass. How his eyes tracked her across the room with a quiet, accumulating resentment, as if she were a bill he’d paid and the services had not been rendered. How he talked about the women before her—the girl in his nursing program who’d “led him on,” the ex-girlfriend from high school who’d “ghosted him” before ghosting was a word, the friend of a friend who’d “friend-zoned” him long before anyone knew to call it that. He never used those words, of course. The words didn’t exist yet. But the architecture was there, the blueprints already drawn: a sense of grievance so deeply embedded it’d become part of his posture, a belief, never stated outright but present in every sigh and silence and significant look, that he was owed something. Affection. Gratitude. A reward for basic decency.

She’d known him since middle school. Sixth grade, when she was still young enough to believe the world was essentially good and spent her recesses hanging upside-down from the monkey bars, hair brushing the dirt, watching the sky swap places with the ground and feeling, for those brief, suspended moments, like nothing could touch her. He’d been in high school then, four years older, already broad-shouldered, already handsome in that generic, afternoon-TV way and one day he’d just appeared at the edge of the playground, leaning against the chain-link fence with his hands in his pockets, watching. She’d waved, upside-down, her face flushed with blood and the simple, uncomplicated friendliness of a child who hadn’t yet learned that friendliness could be taken as a promise. He’d waved back. He’d come over. He’d said something about the swing, something about how high she could go, and she’d been flattered—a high schooler, talking to her—and she’d pumped her legs harder, showing off, the sky and the ground blurring together, and when she’d finally dragged her feet to a stop he was still there, still watching, still smiling that slow, unreadable smile, and he’d never fully explained why he’d come. Not then. Not in the years since. And she’d never asked, because at some point—maybe that day, maybe a year later, maybe just now, watching him stare at the wall with his wounded, waiting silence—she’d realized she didn’t want to know the answer.

He’d never once been mean to her. Never raised his voice. Never said an unkind word. And yet she felt, every time she was alone with him, like a mouse being stared at by a cat who hadn’t decided whether to pounce. The patience was the scary part. He was so patient. He’d been patient since she was eleven years old and hanging upside-down and too young to understand that some men kept a ledger, that some men counted every smile and every wave and every conversation and tallied them up like deposits in an account that would one day, surely, pay out. He was so sure that if he just waited long enough, if he just kept leaning in doorways and staring at walls and not saying what he meant, she’d eventually realize that the thing she’d been looking for had been standing right in front of her the whole time. It was romantic, probably, if you were the kind of person who confused patience with entitlement. If you were the kind of person who thought “nice” was a currency that could be exchanged for love at a fixed rate. If you were Alex.

Alex had no intention of going back to nursing school. He’d announced this at least six times in the past month, always with the same pause afterward, the same waiting look, as if she were supposed to argue with him. He’d spend the rest of his life as a fry cook, a spatula and a griddle and a lifetime of grease burns, because what was the point, what was the point of anything, the Reich had made sure of that. He said this like it was a profound philosophical position and not just the same defeated shrug everyone else wore like haute couture. She’d met people with actual grievances—people who’d lost children, limbs, entire families—and they complained less. Alex had lost nursing school, which he’d apparently never wanted in the first place, and somehow this loss had calcified into a permanent, low-grade resentment that he polished daily.

But who was she to talk? She wasn’t about to be a fashion designer. Not in this life.

Not in any life, probably, but definitely not in one where the Reich decided which women got to do what. So the silence between them stretched and settled, familiar now, expectant—the silence of a man waiting for her to arrive at conclusions he’d already drawn for her. The realizations he’d been cuing up since she was eleven. You’re not going to Tisch, he’d tell her. Again. Delivered like a diagnosis, grim and solicitous, the kind of thing you got told before being sent home to die.

The Reich wasn’t real big on women in higher education. She knew this. Everyone knew this. Alex especially knew this, because he’d told her half a dozen times, each repetition landing with the soft, satisfied thud of a man proving himself right. And what would she do, anyway—design dirndls for the Deutsches Modeamt? The official fashion bureau of the occupying regime, a room full of gray-faced women sketching gray dresses for a gray future, all pleats and no joy. The thought was almost funny. Almost. She’d rather design this season’s trendiest support hose. Compression stockings for the apocalypse. Varicose veins as a fashion statement. At least that would be useful. At least that would be honest. At least that wasn’t Alex, leaning against the counter, waiting for her to admit that her dreams were dead so he could feel better about his own.

And then—

Marta Kaczynski did not walk. She forged. Cutting through the Green Dragon like the prow of an icebreaker, her hips clearing a path through the empty tavern that the silence itself seemed to yield, not out of deference but out of physics. The room was deserted save for the three of them, the dust motes drifting in their slow, unimpressed circles, but Marta moved through it as if she were navigating a crowd, as if the ghosts of all the patrons who’d once filled these chairs were still there, still drinking. She was thirty-seven years old and built like a sofa that’d seen things: wide, solid, upholstered in layers of wool and flour-dusted apron and the particular, unyielding confidence of a woman who’d stopped caring what anyone thought of her somewhere around puberty and had never looked back. Her hair was a rust-colored riot, piled on top of her head and pinned with whatever was handy—a pencil, a knitting needle, once, memorably, a disposable chopstick—and it listed slightly to the left after noon, when the day’s work began to overwhelm the architecture. Her face was broad and pink and perpetually damp, the face of a woman who spent her life in proximity to boiling things, and her expression swung between two poles: cheerful, which meant she was about to say something awful, and flat, which meant she already had.

She was fat. Which was a fact, not an insult—the way a mountain was tall, the way the Charles was brown. Marta had been fat before the siege, and she was fat now, two years into the calorie desert of the Great Tribulation, and Zelda didn’t ask. Like she didn’t ask where the dogs had gone. Some questions had answers, and some answers had teeth, and Marta’s continued, inexplicable stoutness raised questions Zelda was perfectly happy to ignore. She liked Marta. Marta was her boss and her friend and the only person in the Green Dragon who could tell one of Bonnet’s lackies to go fuck himself with a smile so broad and a tone so pleasant that he’d thank her for it before he realized what she’d said. Marta had taught her how to pull a pint when there was still beer to pull. Marta had taught her how to smile at a soldier while counting the bullets in his belt. Marta had given her a job when jobs were a myth, had slipped her an extra BP-5 on days when Charlotte looked especially translucent, had once—and Zelda still wasn’t sure how—produced an entire jar of pickles from somewhere in the depths of her apron and presented them with the ceremony of a sommelier uncorking a vintage. The pickles had been warm. They’d been glorious. They’d tasted of a world that still had vinegar and garlic and reasons to preserve things, and Marta had watched her eat them with the flat, unsurprised satisfaction of a woman who had decided, long ago, that the apocalypse could take everything else but it could not take her.

Marta stopped. This was, in and of itself, an event—the great prow of her swinging around, the floorboards confessing their age beneath her weight, the rust-colored riot of her hair listing a little further as she turned. She planted her hands on her hips, which were considerable, regarding Alex with the flat, unhurried contemplation of a naturalist observing a disappointing specimen. He was still leaning against the bar. He was still staring at the wall. He had not moved in fourteen minutes, a fact Marta appeared to log and file before she shifted her gaze to Zelda. Expression remaining—almost magnificently—neutral, the kind of neutral that took effort, that was one dropped thread away from a sigh that’d level what was left of Harvard Square. She held it for a beat. Two beats. Then she jerked her chin toward Alex the way you’d indicate a couch someone had left on the curb. “Don’t mind him,” she counseled, and her voice was the voice of a woman who’d run out of patience sometime in kindergarten and had never bothered to restock. Warm like a cast-iron skillet was warm: capable of great comfort, capable of great damage, and heavy enough to break bone if you didn’t respect it. “Our patient little lamb is communing with the wall.”

Saint Alex of the Perpetual Sigh. Lighting a candle for his own suffering. “Our brave little soldier,” Zelda replied. “Fighting discolored plaster. Very heroic. No casualties yet, but he’s hopeful.”

Alex did not move. The wall did not move. The dust motes drifted in their slow, unimpressed circles.

“They have a deep spiritual connection,” Marta replied, turning back to Zelda with the air of someone confiding a secret. One eyebrow lifted—just one, a tiny, expressive shrug of the brow that managed to convey every single thing she thought about men who stared at walls instead of doing something useful. “Our resident nice young man and his friend.” The faintest emphasis on friend. The former infantilized him; the latter named the thing he thought was his greatest virtue and made it sound like a chronic condition. “The wall doesn’t answer. That’s why it works.”

Zelda giggled.

Alex shot her a sour look.

Marta leaned back, settling her weight against the bar with the slow, deliberate creak of wood that’d learned to accept its fate. One meaty arm came to rest on its surface—a forearm that could’ve doubled as a Thanksgiving turkey, solid and pink and faintly dusted with something—and she regarded the empty room with the air of a monarch surveying a kingdom that’d seen better centuries. “New curfew,” she announced, flat enough to pave a road. “Seven sharp. Effective tonight, what fun. Another gift from our masters in their infinite wisdom.”

Alex, still communing with his wall, did not respond.

Zelda, still confronting the same table she’d sat down at an hour ago, raised one eyebrow and waited.

Marta’s free hand, the one not anchoring her to the bar, rose in a gesture of grandly bureaucratic futility. “Darkness is already dangerous enough. The streets are pitch black after sunset. Anyone out there is already navigating rubble, corpses, rats, and the occasional jumpy soldier. The curfew doesn’t make the dark scarier—the dark was already doing fine on its own.” If exhaustion had a sound, it would’ve been the creak of her neck. “What exactly are we trying to stop, here? Midnight strolls? A black-market cheese ring? Someone’s been sneaking out to admire the rubble by moonlight?”

The production of her afternoon’s libation wasn’t a magic trick, but it had the same effect on those who witnessed it: a small, disorienting lurch of reality, a brief crisis of what-happened-and-where-did-that-come-from. Marta never reached for anything. Reaching implied searching, and searching implied uncertainty, and Marta was not uncertain about the location of a single item in her tavern, including the ones that were, technically, not supposed to exist. Her hand simply—arrived. One moment it was resting on the bar. The next it was holding a bottle, as if the bottle had been waiting for her palm and had finally decided to materialize, a Force ghost of booze.

The bottle itself was unassuming. Squat, clear glass, gone pale and soft with age, the Polish lettering faded to a whisper: Śliwowica. Plum brandy. One hundred forty proof. A liquid that, under normal circumstances, could also be used to strip paint or sterilize a wound. There was about a third left, the rest consumed in increments over the two years since the siege began—some of it in celebration, some in mourning, most of it in the flat, unsurprised space between the two.

Unscrewing the cap with a twist of her thick wrist, and the smell hit before the liquid did: sweet and sharp and faintly medicinal, the ghost of plums that’d died a long time ago and gone to heaven. She didn’t bother with a glass. Glasses were for guests, and guests were a joke. Instead she tilted the bottle to her lips—a single, economical motion, no flourish, no preamble—and took a swig that would’ve felled a smaller woman, a smaller liver, or Mothra. Her eyes closed, not in pleasure, not in pain, but in the particular, private acknowledgment of a ritual that’d outlived its context. When she lowered the bottle, her expression was unchanged. Flat. Patient. Waiting for the warmth to spread through her chest like a fire spreading through a building.

She held the bottle out toward Zelda, an offering, an afterthought, the little remainder of plum-colored fire sloshing gently. “Don’t tell our new Blockleiter.”

Zelda knew how it tasted. That was the problem. She’d been offered the bottle maybe five times in two years—never more than a sip, Marta wasn’t wasteful—and every time, every single time, some stupid, optimistic corner of her brain convinced her that it wouldn’t be that bad. That she’d imagined the horror. That her memory had exaggerated. That maybe, this time, it would just taste like plums.

She raised the bottle to her lips with the grim resignation of a Digger going over the top, took the smallest sip humanly possible—a sip so small it was technically a geometric concept rather than a volume of liquid—and her face immediately betrayed her. Not with the shock of the first time, the wide-eyed, what-have-I-done-to-deserve-this betrayal of the uninitiated. No, this was worse. This was the face of someone who’d known exactly what was coming and had done it anyway, the face of a woman who’d shaken hands with the devil twice and somehow convinced herself the third handshake would go differently. Her eyes didn’t widen. They narrowed, squinting against the injustice of a liquid that could taste this bad and still exist in this dimension. Her mouth—her entire mouth, lips and tongue and the general vicinity—seemed to be having an argument with itself about whether to swallow or spit or simply cease to exist. Her cheeks hollowed. Her nose wrinkled so violently it nearly took her eyebrows with it. For one long, horrible second, she looked like a baby that’d been fed a lemon, if the baby was seventeen and malnourished and deeply, existentially furious.

She handed the bottle back. Marta took it without comment, which was somehow worse than if she’d laughed.

Zelda’s neck gave up. Her head followed, briefly, before rallying out of habit. “It never gets better, does it.”

Marta considered the bottle, then considered Zelda, her expression as incurious as a lizard’s. A tiny muscle near her mouth—the one that’d once, long ago, been capable of smiling—gave a single, abortive twitch. “No. But you get worse. And eventually the gap between you and the brandy is so small it doesn’t matter.” She took another swig, easy as breathing, and screwed the cap back on. “I was you once, minus the siege and the weird little boyfriend who isn’t your boyfriend. The drinking, though. The partying. The boys who don’t matter. That part I know.” A pause. “You’re going to be a monster when you’re forty. I mean that as a compliment. The best women are monsters,” she finished, second arm joining the first. “It’s the only way to stay alive.”

And underneath the bar was a bottle of Homeless, a pre-war brand of potato vodka so cheap it came in a plastic jug. Marta kept it there for emergencies. The emergencies were frequent. The vodka tasted like industrial shoe polish and false hope. She called it the good stuff and she was not joking. Next to it was a bottle of Żubrówka—bison grass vodka. The real stuff, smuggled in before the war. She had four bottles left and treated them like liquid gold; a shot of that and she started singing in Polish.

“A curfew assumes there’s a city left to protect, a civilian population worth regulating, a normalcy that can be imposed. They’re telling corpses to go home and do their homework.” Marta shifted her weight, and the bar groaned. “I asked the soldier who delivered the notice. Sweet boy. Eighteen, maybe nineteen. Face like a baby goat. I said, ‘Son, where exactly does the Heer think we’re going? The theater? The opera? A romantic dinner for two at the cholera tent?’ He didn’t have an answer. He just stood there blinking at me like I’d asked him to solve for x. So I told him to go home and tell his commanding officer that the Green Dragon would comply. We’d lock the doors at seven. We’d turn off the lights.” She gestured broadly at the room—the empty chairs, the dust-film windows, the single, fading shaft of light that was the only illumination they had. “Oh, wait. We don’t have lights. We don’t have customers. We don’t have anything worth stealing or anyone worth arresting. But we’ll lock the doors. We’ll be very, very compliant. Wouldn’t want anyone sneaking out after curfew to enjoy the nightlife.” She folded her arms across her chest—a feat of engineering—and fixed Zelda with a look that was half amusement, half exhaustion, and entirely Marta.

Alex’s mouth opened, closed, opened again. He looked at Zelda, appealing. “I just—I don’t think it’s right to talk about her like she’s—”

“Like she’s what?” Zelda’s tone was dust.

He drew himself up the way a pigeon drew itself up before cooing at a rival: puffed, ridiculous, quivering with misplaced purpose. “Like you’re somebody you’re not. You’re not one of those girls.”

Drawer one: Those girls. The ones who drank. The ones who slept with people. The ones who wanted things, who had appetites, who said yes and sometimes said no but always said something, who existed in their bodies without apology or explanation. Sluts! Whores! Not waiting to be chosen, doing the motherfucking choosing. Girls with a past, who didn’t pretend otherwise. In Alex’s system, these girls were not girlfriend material. Not—gasp—wife material. Not even really people but cautionary tales, punchlines, warnings. Existing to be judged and discarded and talked about in lowered voices.

Drawer two: Not those girls. The good ones. The ones who were sweet and innocent and waiting. Waiting for him, specifically, even if they didn’t know it yet. They didn’t have histories. They didn’t have appetites. If they did have appetites, those appetites were tragic, not chosen—something that happened to them, not something they did. Pure, not because they’d made choices about their own lives, but because they’d been preserved. Protected. Kept clean. These girls were the reward, not the players. The thing you got at the end of the story, along with a magic sword.

That was the tragedy of Alex, if you were feeling generous. The horror, if you weren’t. He’d fallen in love with a blank. He’d been courting a mirror. And when the mirror finally talked back—when it said I am a person, I am not your reward, I have done things you’d probably cry about—he didn’t hear a woman telling the truth. He heard his fantasy shattering. And he blamed the mirror. He blamed the woman. He blamed her for not being the blank he drew on her. “One of those girls. Say it again. I want to see if it sounds less stupid the second time.”

There it was—that soft, searching expression, the one that made her feel like a specimen under glass. “You were just a kid, Zelda. You didn’t know what you were doing. Those guys took advantage of you.” Every word came out wrapped in a little blanket of condescension. “That wasn’t the real you. You were just—acting out. I know who you really are underneath all that.”

She leaned back against her chair, arms crossed, the picture of a woman who had better things to do and was choosing, inexplicably, not to do them. She knew, logically, that she didn’t owe him anything. That a relationship wasn’t a debt, that kindness wasn’t currency, that six years of waiting didn’t entitle anyone to her body or her heart or her attention. And still—still—there was this small, tired voice at the back of her head: He’s not that bad. He’s just sad. Maybe if you were nicer. Maybe if you explained it better. Maybe if you sat him down and really, really made him understand.

You are seventeen years old, the voice mourned, and you are doing the emotional labor of a therapist, a mother, and a hostage negotiator, all for a man who will never understand because understanding would require him to admit that he’s been wrong for six years, and he’s not going to do that. He was never going to do that. So she was left holding a guilt that wasn’t hers, apologizing for a crime she didn’t commit, managing the feelings of a person who’d mistaken her existence for a promise. “My body is not a thing you get to have opinions about.” She sounded like a dial tone. “You didn’t build it, you didn’t buy it, you don’t get a say in what it does or who it does it with.”

The sigh that came out of him was so overladen with meaning, it should’ve been weighed on a scale and rationed along with everything else. “You’re not proud of that stuff. I know you’re not.” His tone was patient, so patient, the patience of a man who’d been waiting six years and was perfectly willing to wait six more, and he wanted her to know how generous that was. “You don’t have to pretend.”

She met his eyes and held them. With the patient, unblinking endurance of a woman who’d seen men cry, seen men beg, seen men die, and was not about to be impressed by a man who sighed. “I’ve done things. With people. Some of them were mistakes, some of them were fun, and exactly none of them involved you. That’s not a coincidence. You talk about my reputation like it’s a window you need to wipe clean. It’s not dirty, Alex. It’s mine. Stop trying to wash it.”

“The jaw thing.” Marta peered at him. “Does he practice the jaw thing? He has to practice the jaw thing.”

He retreated to his wall with the heavy, deliberate steps of a man walking to his own funeral, and he wanted her—wanted them both—to know it was her fault he was dead. “You’re not the only one who’s had a hard time, you know.” The sigh: his signature, his art form, his weapon. “We’ve all done things we’re not proud of, Zelda. The difference is, I don’t brag about it.”

“I didn’t ask you to defend me.” She said it the way you’d tell a child their hamster had gone to live on a farm. “I didn’t ask you to do anything.” He just—showed up. He’d been showing up since she was eleven, uninvited, like a rash. And she’d never, ever been so tired. “You’re not defending me. You’re defending a girl who doesn’t exist. She lives in your head. Tell her I said hello, and and also tell her she’s boring.” Her gaze flicked to his. “I don’t need a white knight. I need a man who can pronounce my last name.”

His eyes went soft with the particular, liquid tragedy of a martyr who’d been wronged by facts. “I was just trying to help. I don’t know why you’re getting so upset.”

Waving one hand in a small, lazy circle—the universal gesture for wrap it up, you’re boring me. “You want to protect me from something?” Zelda’s mouth did something that was technically a smile but spiritually a shrug. “Protect me from this conversation.”

His shoulders collapsed—not in defeat, but in the slow, theatrical crumple of a man who wanted you to know exactly how much you’d disappointed him. “You’re not like that. I’ve known you since you were eleven. Eleven-year-olds don’t—you weren’t—you were sweet.” He turned away, but not all the way. Just enough to show her his profile, the noble angle of his jaw, the suffering slope of his brow. “The girl I met on the playground wouldn’t talk like this.”

You are not a person to him, came the voice. You are a role.

He’d cast her in a play he wrote. The play was called My Life, Finally Recognized. She wasn’t the lead—he was the lead—but she was the most important supporting character. Her job was to realize, at some point in the third act, that she’d loved him all along. He’d been waiting for her to realize this. Every conversation she’d ever had with him, every smile, every moment of basic human courtesy, had been entered into evidence. He was building a case. The case was airtight! Its only flaw was that she, inexplicably, refused to testify on her own behalf. And if you try to correct him—if you say I’m not that person, I don’t feel that way, I never did—you are not offering new information. You are flubbing your lines. He will wait. He will cue you. He will run the scene again. The play must go on, and you are in it, whether you auditioned or not.

If you did things before him—loved people, slept with people, made mistakes, had fun, lived a life that didn’t include him—every single one of those things was a wound he was generously willing to overlook. He didn’t say I hate that you have a history. He said I know that wasn’t the real you. He said those guys took advantage of you. He said you were acting out. He rewrote your own autobiography and handed it back to you with the messy parts torn out, and he expected you to be grateful. He’d forgiven you for a sin you didn’t commit, and now you owed him. That was the transaction. You didn’t agree to it, but the invoice was already in the mail.

“You used to smile more. Before. When it was just us.” His hand went to the bar—not slamming, never slamming, Alex wasn’t the type to slam—but pressing down with the weight of a man who was restraining himself for your sake. He spread his fingers on the counter like he was laying claim to a small, rectangular kingdom. One hand lifted, palm out, in a gesture that was half stop and half I am the only reasonable person here. “Forget it. Forget I said anything. I should’ve known you’d throw it back in my face.” He sighed and shook his head this time, a combo move, the one-two punch of a man who’d given up on being understood. “I’m on your side, Zelda. Why do you always act like I’m the enemy?”

“You keep talking about who I really am, underneath it all. Alex. I am exactly what’s on the surface. There is no underneath. I’m a shallow pond. You’re looking for depth that isn’t there and drowning in six inches of water.” She enunciated every syllable with the patient, unblinking malice of a cat pushing a glass off a table. “I’m not the girl you met on the playground. You invented her.”

He gripped the edge of the bar as if the bar were trying to escape and he was holding it down for questioning. His hands opened and closed at his sides—not fists, not quite fists, just the manual manifestation of a man who couldn’t believe he wasn’t being listened to. “I’ve known you for six years. Six years,” he repeated. “And you still look at me like I’m a stranger.”

The bar creaked. The dust motes drifted. Somewhere, a rat probably died of old age. “You keep acting like you’ve earned something, Alex. What? What exactly have you earned? A receipt for all the conversations you’ve had with me and decided were deposits in some kind of emotional savings account?” She could’ve been reading a grocery list. If there were still groceries. If there were still lists. “You want a prize for not leaving. Congratulations. Here’s your medal. It’s invisible, like your chances.”

Your anger is a performance.

If you finally snapped—if you raised your voice, if you told him to leave you alone, if you said the cruelest, truest thing you could think of because you just needed him to stop—he didn’t hear it as anger. He heard it as passion. He heard it as proof that he mattered to you. Look how emotional she’s getting, look how much I affect her. Your fury was absorbed into the fantasy. Alexander Davidson Woods had built an entire immune system out of wishful thinking, and her rage was just another pathogen it knew how to handle. “Alex.” A deep breath. “You don’t love me. You love the idea of me. The idea is thin. The idea has no scars, no history, no past. The idea doesn’t talk back. The idea doesn’t have a body that does things without your permission. The idea is a doll. And I am not a doll. I am a person who is sitting right in front of you, telling you who I am, and you keep looking past me at the doll. The doll isn’t real. I’m real. And I’m tired.”

His face, when it finally came, did not crumble. It did not break. It did not do any of the things a face in a movie would do at the moment of rejection—the single tear, the trembling lip, the slow collapse into understanding. Instead it executed a series of small, precise, almost mechanical adjustments. First, the confusion: his brow furrowing, his mouth opening slightly, the look of a man who’d just been handed a document in a language he didn’t speak and suspected it might be his own fault for not learning it. Then the appeal: his eyes searching her face for the real meaning, the hidden message, the yes tucked inside the no like a secret she wanted him to find.

Then, when the secret didn’t come, the shift. His jaw tightened. His nostrils flared—just once, just slightly, the controlled, almost polite flare of a man who’d been deeply wronged and was choosing, with tremendous effort, not to make a scene. His eyes, which had been soft and searching a moment before, went flat. Not angry. Not hurt. Something worse: a kind of clinical, evaluative coldness, the look of a collector who’d just been told the item he’d been preserving for years was a forgery. Reappraising her. She could see it happening in real time: the quiet, furious recalibration, the drawer sliding open in his mind, the girl he’d built being taken apart piece by piece and reassembled into something he could despise. And then, finally, the retreat. Shoulders dropping, face shuttering, looking at her the way you looked at a stranger who’d accidentally brushed your arm on a crowded street: with the distant, unseeing acknowledgment that she existed, and that it was a shame, really, that she hadn’t turned out to be the person he’d ordered. “You know what your problem is? You’d rather be miserable than let anyone care about you.”

She looked at the ceiling as if it might intervene. It did not.

What made Alex’s obsession so profoundly stupid right now was the sheer, staggering mismatch between the scale of his feelings and the scale of reality. The world had ended. Not metaphorically—literally. The city was a charnel house. Its water was poison. The dead were stacked in piles like some lumberjack’s macabre display. The living were shitting themselves to death in the streets. A foreign army had walled them in with barbed wire and paperwork, and the only calories anyone was getting came from a foil packet that tasted like a Band-Aid. And Alex was standing in the middle of all this, leaning against a bar, sighing because a girl he’d known since middle school wouldn’t reward his patience with her body. He wasn’t out scavenging. He wasn’t tending the sick or doing literally anything to engage with the apocalypse unfolding around him. He was nursing a crush. Auditing his emotional ledger. As if this were a rom-com, as if the world hadn’t already skipped to the credits. Cambridge was still on fire, he was worried about the friendzone. People were eating their own pets, he was tallying up six years of conversations like a bank statement. It wasn’t just selfish—it was delusional. It was a failure of perspective so complete it looped back around to almost impressive. He’d mistaken Armageddon for a backdrop.

“Fine,” he shot back. “Keep acting tough. Keep pretending you don’t need anyone. See where it gets you.”

Marta, in her wisdom, upgraded to Homeless.

He’s not violent, the voice concluded. That’s what makes it so hard to name.

If he hit her, she could tell someone. If he threatened her, she could get help. But he wasn’t violent. He was patient. Gentle and so, so nice. Everyone said so. He brought her things she didn’t ask for. He remembered details about her life she didn’t remember telling him. Always there, leaning in the doorway, waiting. Just waiting. And she was the bad guy, wasn’t she? For not appreciating it? For not rewarding his patience with the thing he’d so clearly earned? He’d never raised his voice. He’d never laid a hand on her. The only thing he’d done was be there, quietly, for years, accumulating her presence like interest, and what kind of monster punished a man for being consistent?