The Climb
The agency had emptied out the way it always did after ten — not all at once but in stages, like a tide pulling back. First the account managers, then the junior designers with their earbuds and tote bags, then the mid-level creatives who'd learned that staying late only impressed people who'd already left. By eleven, the fourteenth floor belonged to the cleaners and whoever was desperate enough to still be there.
Maren was still there.
She sat cross-legged in her office chair, shoes kicked under the desk, toggling between two versions of a campaign deck that had started to blur together around hour six. The Voss Automotive pitch. Thirty-two slides. Eleven days out. The account that would either make her career or reveal that her career had already been made and she just hadn't noticed.
Her phone buzzed against the desk. She glanced at it — Rae, again — and set it face down.
The meeting with Dominique had been at four. Corner office, the one with the view of the bridge that everyone pretended not to care about. Dominique had poured two fingers of something Japanese and expensive, slid it across the desk, and said the thing Maren had spent three years positioning herself to hear.
"The board wants fresh blood in the ECD chair. I told them you're the one. But I need this pitch to land, and I need it to be yours. Solo."
Solo. Maren had smiled and said something about being ready. She'd shaken Dominique's hand. She'd walked back to her office on legs that felt borrowed from someone more confident, closed the door, and stood there for a full minute with her palms flat against the glass.
Solo meant without Elliot.
She hadn't told him yet. That was the thing sitting in her chest like a stone she kept swallowing around. Eight years they'd been building campaigns together — since the Fleischer rebrand, since they were both junior enough to argue about font kerning like it mattered. He'd been on the Voss deck since day one. His fingerprints were on half the slides she was currently toggling between.
A knock on the open door. Elliot leaned against the frame, two coffees in hand, his jacket off and sleeves pushed up past the elbow. He looked like he'd been here as long as she had.
"You're doing the thing where you stare at slide fourteen like it owes you money."
Maren took the coffee. It was the right order — oat milk, no sugar. He never asked anymore.
"Fourteen's the transition into the digital suite. The pacing's off. It feels like we're apologizing for the traditional buy."
"Because we are. Pull the interstitial, let the OOH numbers breathe. I mocked something up around eight, it's in your inbox."
He dropped onto the couch against the far wall — the ugly green one they'd rescued from a set build two years ago. His shoes were off. His feet were on the cushion. He looked, for a moment, exactly like the version of himself she'd met at twenty-six, pitching ideas from a beanbag in a shared office that smelled like burnt coffee and ambition.
Her phone buzzed again. She could see the edge of the notification reflected in her monitor — Rae's name, truncated.
"Dominique pulled me in today."
"Yeah?"
"The ECD chair. She said it's mine if Voss lands."
Elliot was quiet for a beat. Not long — two seconds, maybe three — but Maren had known him long enough to hear everything in it.
"Maren. That's huge."
He sat up. The smile was real. That was the worst part — it was completely real, and it made her want to tell him the rest of it, and it made her not tell him the rest of it.
"We should celebrate. There's that place on Ninth that's open late — the one with the bad wine and the good fries."
"I should probably keep working. Eleven days."
"Eleven days is eleven days. Tonight you got the best news of your career. Come on. One drink."
She looked at him on the ugly green couch with his shoes off and his coffee going cold, and she thought about the word solo, and she opened her mouth to say yes.
"Rain check. I want to get through the back half of the deck tonight."
Elliot held her gaze for a moment. Then he nodded, picked up his shoes, and padded toward the door in his socks.
"Check your inbox. The slide fourteen fix is good, I promise."
He left. The hallway swallowed the sound of him.
Maren picked up her phone. Three texts from Rae — the first asking about dinner, the second saying she'd eat without her, the third just a period. She opened the pitch deck instead.
The office was quiet now. Not the same quiet as before — that had been empty. This one had a shape to it, the outline of a person on a couch who'd just walked out. Maren pulled up Elliot's email, opened his slide fourteen, and saw immediately that it was better than hers. She stared at it for a long time. Then she started rebuilding the deck around it, alone, the way Dominique wanted.
Maren closed the laptop at 12:40. Not because she was done — the deck was nowhere near done — but because she'd read Elliot's slide fourteen fix for the third time and caught herself changing a word just to make it feel less like his. She stopped, sat back, and recognized what she was doing.
She called a car. The ride home took eleven minutes through streets that had given up on the day. She watched a bar's neon bleed across wet pavement and didn't think about anything at all, which was its own kind of effort.
The apartment was dark. Maren locked the door behind her, set her bag on the counter, and stood in the kitchen listening. The dishwasher was running — Rae had loaded it, eaten alone, cleaned up. The whole evening archived in a quiet machine cycle.
She poured water from the Brita and drank it standing at the sink. Her phone sat on the counter, screen down. Three texts she still hadn't answered. She picked it up, typed 'home,' then deleted it. Rae would hear the door. Rae had already heard the door.
The bedroom was almost completely dark. Rae was on her side, facing the wall, the covers pulled up to her shoulder. Her phone was screen-down on the nightstand. Maren undressed in the half-light, leaving her clothes on the chair instead of hanging them, and slid into bed.
The sheets were cold on her side. She lay on her back, staring at the ceiling, and felt the specific weight of Rae being awake three feet away from her and choosing not to speak first.
"I got offered the ECD chair today."
She said it to the ceiling. The room held the sentence for a moment.
Rae shifted. Maren could feel her looking in the dark, and her skin prickled with it — the back of her neck, her arms above the blanket.
"That's what you've wanted."
Not a question. Maren let the words sit. She replayed them once, then again. That's what you've wanted.
"If the Voss pitch lands. Eleven days."
"So eleven more days like this."
Maren turned her head on the pillow. Rae's eyes caught the faint light from the street. She looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.
"It won't always be like this."
Rae held her gaze. Then she reached over and found Maren's hand under the covers, held it for a few seconds — warm, deliberate — and let go. She turned back toward the wall and pulled the covers up.
"Come home earlier tomorrow."
Maren stared at the ceiling. She could hear Rae's breathing slow, and the dishwasher cycling in the kitchen, and somewhere outside a siren pulling away into distance. She thought about Elliot's slide fourteen — the clean version, the one that was better — and how she'd already started rebuilding around it without his name anywhere near it. She thought about the word solo. She thought about Rae's hand, the warmth of it, how briefly she'd held on. Maren lay there for a long time before sleep came, and when it did, it felt like something she'd lost an argument with.
Maren woke to the sound of the front door closing. Not a slam — just the latch catching, the deadbolt turning. Rae leaving for work at her usual time, which meant it was seven-fifteen and Maren had slept through the alarm she didn't remember setting.
The apartment held the particular stillness of someone recently gone. Rae's coffee mug was in the drying rack, already washed. Her keys had left a faint impression in the mail pile by the door. On the nightstand, Rae's water glass sat untouched.
Maren reached for her phone. Two notifications. The first was from Rae, sent twenty minutes ago: 'Coffee's made.' No good morning, no emoji, no question mark inviting a response. Four years together and Maren could track the weather of their relationship in punctuation.
The second notification was Elliot's email, still sitting unread in her inbox from last night. Subject line: 'slide 14 — told you so.' She'd opened the attachment three times without ever opening the email itself. Hadn't needed to. She'd taken what she needed and left the wrapper.
She opened it now, sitting up in bed with the sheets pooled around her waist. The email body was two lines: 'Try this. Kill the interstitial, let the OOH breathe. You'll see it.' Casual, generous, the way he'd always been with ideas — tossing them over like they cost him nothing. She scrolled down to his sign-off. 'Our back half is going to sing. —E'
Our. She sat with that word. Then she opened the deck on her laptop — the version she'd been working on at midnight, the one she'd brought home on the agency cloud. She toggled to the contributor log. Thirty-two slides. Elliot's initials appeared on eleven of them, or had, before last night. She'd rebuilt six of those eleven between ten and midnight. His initials were on five now. By the time the deck was done, she could get it to two, maybe one. Maybe zero.
She clicked to slide fourteen. His fix, metabolized. She'd swapped the header, reworked the bullet cadence, restructured the visual hierarchy. Kept his insight — the breathing room for the OOH numbers, the confidence of letting data speak without apology. Lost his fingerprints. In the revision history, it would look like iteration.
She clicked to slide fifteen. Fully hers. She stared at it for ten seconds and closed the laptop.
The shower ran hot and she stood under it longer than she needed to. She kept thinking about Dominique's office, the Japanese whiskey, the word that had rewritten everything. Solo. Dominique hadn't said 'without Elliot.' She'd said 'yours,' which was cleaner and worse — it made the amputation sound like authorship.
Maren toweled off, dressed in the bathroom, and came back to find her phone lit up on the bed. A text from Elliot: 'Morning. Did you try the 14 fix? Also — celebratory bad wine tonight? No excuses this time.' She could see him typing it with his feet on the ugly green couch, coffee balanced on the armrest, already at the office because he always beat her there. Already working on their pitch. The pitch that wasn't theirs anymore.
She typed 'Tonight works' and almost sent it. Her thumb hovered. She thought about what tonight would look like — Elliot across a table, talking about the deck, offering ideas she'd absorb and anonymize. Every generous thing he gave her was another thing she'd have to take credit for. The math was getting ugly.
She deleted the message and typed 'Slammed today, let me see how the afternoon shakes out.' Sent it. Watched the delivered confirmation appear. A holding pattern. The kind of answer that preserved the friendship in theory while hollowing it out in practice.
Maren poured the coffee Rae had made — still warm in the carafe, the good beans, ground fine the way Maren liked. She drank it standing at the counter and looked at the apartment. Rae's book on the couch arm, spine cracked to hold her place. The throw blanket folded with a precision that was either care or anger. Two sets of keys should have been by the door and only one was.
She picked up her phone and texted Rae: 'Thank you for the coffee. I'll be home for dinner.' She stared at the promise. Eleven days. Thirty-two slides. Dominique expecting a solo deck that sang the way it only sang when Elliot was in the room. The distance between 'I'll be home for dinner' and actually walking through that door at six-thirty was the same distance as the one between Elliot's name and the contributor log — closable, technically, if she was willing to do what closing it cost.
Rae's reply came as Maren was pulling on her jacket. One word: 'Good.' Maren waited for a follow-up. The typing indicator appeared, held for five seconds, and vanished. Whatever Rae had started to say, she'd decided Maren hadn't earned it yet.
Maren set down the coffee and opened the thread.
She'd meant to skim — find last night's texts, confirm what she already knew. But her thumb kept scrolling, pulling the conversation backward through days she hadn't been paying attention to, and then weeks.
Three weeks ago, Rae had sent a photo of a dog wearing a bandana outside their grocery store. 'Look at this absolute criminal.' Maren had replied four hours later with a heart emoji. Rae had typed 'we should get a dog someday' and Maren hadn't answered at all.
Two weeks ago: 'That documentary about the architect is playing at the Coolidge Friday. Want to go?' Maren's reply, Saturday morning: 'Sorry, just seeing this. How was it?' Rae hadn't gone. Rae had said 'Didn't end up going' and changed the subject to groceries.
Ten days ago, Rae had texted at 2:14 PM on a Tuesday: 'Miss you.' Two words in the middle of a workday, arriving like a hand extended across a widening gap. Maren had replied at 6:47 PM: 'Miss you too. Crazy day.' The 'crazy day' doing the work of turning an emotional bid into a scheduling problem.
Last week: 'Finished the Ferrante. Want to talk about it when you're home.' Maren had said 'Definitely' and then come home at eleven-thirty and found Rae already asleep with the book on the nightstand, spine cracked, waiting for a conversation that never happened. She hadn't mentioned it again.
Then yesterday. The sequence she already knew but hadn't read in order:
5:12 PM — 'Making the pasta you like. The one with the shallots.' 5:58 PM — 'What time are you heading home?' 6:34 PM — 'Eating without you' 7:20 PM — '.'
Two hours and eight minutes from the pasta with the shallots to a period.
Maren locked the phone and set it on the counter. Picked it back up. The thread was still there — weeks of Rae reaching out in smaller and smaller gestures, adjusting her expectations downward with each attempt, until yesterday's period had closed the account entirely. And this morning: 'Coffee's made.' Not cold. Not cruel. Just the version of Rae that had stopped expecting Maren to show up and started leaving provisions instead.
Maren stared at the text field. The cursor blinked. She typed 'I'm sorry about last night' and then kept going — 'and the Ferrante and the documentary and the dog with the bandana and every night I said I'd be home and wasn't.' Fourteen words that covered three weeks without touching any of them. She sent it anyway.
The typing indicator appeared almost immediately. Rae was at work, phone in hand, already reading. The indicator held for ten seconds. Twenty. Maren watched it pulse like a heartbeat she was listening to through a wall.
The reply came as two words, no period. Maren read them three times.
Not 'it's okay.' Not 'we'll talk tonight.' Just 'I know' — Rae confirming that she'd already catalogued every absence Maren had just discovered, had been carrying the inventory alone for weeks while Maren accumulated it unread.
Maren stood at the counter with the phone in her hand and the apartment around her — Rae's book on the couch arm, the folded throw, the single set of keys by the door. She had promised dinner. She had eleven days and thirty-two slides and a contributor log she was methodically hollowing out. She had Elliot's text unanswered and Rae's 'I know' sitting on her screen like a test she hadn't been told the format of.
She pulled on her jacket, shouldered her bag, and paused at the door. Rae's book on the couch — she'd never asked what happened in the Ferrante. Three weeks of thread and she hadn't asked Rae a single question that wasn't logistical. She couldn't find one. She scrolled back to be sure. Not one.
Maren pulled the door shut behind her and took the stairs instead of the elevator, moving fast, the way she always moved when she didn't want to be alone with what she'd just learned about herself.
The cab dropped her at the curb at eight-twelve. Maren crossed the lobby without stopping at the coffee cart, took the elevator to fourteen, and turned left toward the corner office instead of right toward her own. She'd rehearsed the argument on the stairs out of the apartment and refined it in the back seat — Elliot's contributions were structural, not cosmetic. Cutting him didn't strengthen the pitch; it weakened it. The board wanted results. She could deliver results and still credit the people who built them.
Dominique's door was open. She was standing at the window with her phone to her ear, silhouetted against the bridge and the flat morning light. She saw Maren and held up one finger — not dismissive, not warm. Precise. She finished the call, set the phone face-down on the desk, and gestured to the chair.
"You're here early."
"I want to talk about the solo condition."
Dominique didn't sit. She moved to the credenza, poured two glasses of water from the carafe there, and set one in front of Maren. Then she leaned against the edge of her desk, arms crossed loosely, and waited. The posture of someone who'd already mapped this conversation.
"Elliot's been on this pitch since the brief came in. His structural work on the back half is why the deck holds together. Pulling his name off it doesn't make the pitch stronger — it makes it dishonest."
"It makes it yours."
"It's already mine. I'm the creative lead. His contributions don't diminish that."
"Maren. The board isn't promoting a partnership. They're filling a chair. One chair. And the person in it needs to be someone who can walk into a room and own the work without looking over her shoulder for a co-sign."
"Then why can't he be on this and I still take the chair? He's not competing for the same role."
"Because every time you present with Elliot, the room reads a duo. I've watched it happen. You defer to him on instinct — the look before you answer, the way you reroute to his slides when someone pushes back. It's not weakness. It's habit. And habits read as dependency from the board's side of the table."
Maren opened her mouth and closed it. The specific examples landed because they were true. She did look at Elliot before answering. She did reroute. She'd never thought of it as dependency — she'd thought of it as trust. But she could hear how Dominique heard it, and she couldn't unhear it now.
"What about after? Once I'm in the chair. He's still my best creative."
"After is after. You'll have the authority to structure your team however you want. But right now, in this window, the board needs to see you stand alone. Nine days, Maren. That's all I'm asking."
Nine days. Dominique made it sound like a held breath — brief, bearable, a small passage between Maren and everything she'd worked for. And maybe it was. Maybe she could take the credit, land the pitch, get the chair, and then bring Elliot back in from the cold with a title bump and a corner office of his own. Maybe after was real.
"The deck is stronger with his work in it."
"Is it stronger than yours?"
Slide fourteen. The fix that was better than hers. The breathing room she'd kept and the name she'd already started erasing.
"It's better. Yes."
Dominique watched her for a moment. Then she picked up her water glass, took a slow sip, and set it down.
"Then make it yours. That's the job. Not having the best idea in the room — making sure the best idea has your name on it. The people who built this place weren't the most talented ones, Maren. They were the ones who understood that."
"Okay."
Dominique touched her shoulder as she stood — brief, firm. The gesture of someone closing a deal.
"Get me Voss. We'll take care of the rest."
Maren walked out of the corner office and turned right toward the creative wing. Through the glass walls of her own office she could see Elliot — not on the couch this time but standing at her whiteboard, uncapped marker in hand, mapping something. He'd gotten there before her and started working on the pitch. Their pitch. He was adding to it while she was down the hall learning how to subtract him from it.
He saw her through the glass and knocked on the whiteboard with his knuckles — two quick raps, grinning, pointing at whatever he'd drawn. She couldn't read it from the hall. She lifted her hand in a wave that she held a beat too long, then kept walking past her own door to the restroom at the end of the corridor. She locked the door, ran the faucet, and stood with her hands braced on the sink, watching the water spiral down the drain. In the mirror, she looked exactly like someone who had gotten what she came for.
Her phone buzzed in her jacket pocket. She dried her hands and checked it. Elliot: 'Got an idea for the Voss open. Come look before it gets cold.' Below it, from an hour ago, still unanswered — Rae's 'I know.' Both of them reaching toward a version of her she was in the process of dismantling. She pocketed the phone and turned off the faucet. Nine days.
Maren pushed through the glass door of her office. Elliot was standing at the whiteboard with his back to her, marker uncapped, still drawing. He hadn't taken off his jacket. His bag was on the floor by the door, not the couch — he'd walked in and gone straight to the board without settling in.
"Okay. Don't talk yet. Just look."
He stepped aside. The whiteboard was covered edge to edge in his handwriting — three frames roughed out in blue marker, each one showing a Voss sedan in a different landscape. Mountains. Desert. City at night. In every frame, the car was small. The space around it was enormous. Across the top, in block letters twice the size of everything else, he'd written: QUIET QUIET QUIET. And below the frames, circled three times: 'Say nothing louder.'
"The whole category is screaming. Horsepower, torque, zero-to-sixty. Every automotive spot is a man yelling at you about acceleration. So we don't yell. We don't even whisper. We just — hold the frame. Let the silence do the selling."
He was pacing now, marker still in his hand, drawing lines in the air between the frames like he could see the edit already cut.
"Three spots. No voiceover. No copy until the final card. Thirty seconds of a car existing in a space that respects it. The tagline lands because you've been sitting in silence for half a minute and your brain is desperate for language. 'Say nothing louder.' It's a dare. It's a brand position. It's the whole fucking campaign."
Maren stood in front of the board and let it hit her. It was good. It was better than good — it was the kind of idea that reorganized everything around it. The digital suite, the OOH buy, the experiential activation she'd been grinding on for a week — all of it suddenly had a spine. She could feel the deck reshaping itself in her head, every slide clicking into a new alignment.
"When did you do this?"
"Around five this morning. Couldn't sleep. It just — showed up."
"It's the campaign, Elliot. This is the open. This is the whole thing."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
His face opened. Not a grin — something less guarded than that, something she hadn't seen in a while. He capped the marker and tossed it on her desk.
"So. Bad wine tonight. You can't say no to me after I just handed you the campaign."
The surprise on his face when she said yes was brief and real.
"Tonight works. The place on Ninth."
"Eight o'clock. Don't be late. Don't bring your laptop."
He picked up his bag from the floor, slung it over one shoulder, and headed for his own office down the hall. At the door he turned back and knocked twice on the glass — the same two-knuckle rap from earlier, a punctuation mark she'd been hearing for eight years.
Maren stood alone in her office. The whiteboard filled the wall behind her desk. She took out her phone and photographed it — three careful frames, making sure she caught every line of his handwriting.
Then she sat down, opened her laptop, and pulled up the Voss deck. The contributor log loaded in the sidebar. Thirty-two slides. Elliot's initials on five — down from eleven two days ago. She clicked on the open, the slide that didn't exist yet, the one his whiteboard had just built from nothing. She typed her own initials into the contributor field. The cursor blinked once and accepted them.
Behind her, his handwriting covered the wall. She didn't erase it. She didn't need to. The deck was the record that mattered, and in the deck, this was hers now. She had promised Rae dinner. She had promised Elliot drinks. She opened the slide and started building, and the morning light through the glass walls was bright and even and revealed nothing.
The Voss pitch landed on a Wednesday. Maren stood at the head of the conference table in Studio A while twelve people from Voss Automotive's brand team watched three silent films play on the wall behind her. No voiceover. No copy. Just a sedan holding its ground in a landscape that dwarfed it, and thirty seconds of quiet that made the room lean forward. When the tagline appeared — Say nothing louder — the CMO exhaled through his nose and wrote something on his notepad. His team followed. Maren didn't look at the whiteboard in her office on the way back. She didn't need to. Elliot's handwriting had been erased three days ago.
Dominique called her in at four. Same corner office, same view of the bridge, same two fingers of something Japanese and expensive slid across the desk.
"Voss signed the letter of intent twenty minutes ago. Full campaign, eighteen-month commitment, digital and traditional. You start as Executive Creative Director on Monday."
Maren picked up the glass. The whiskey was smooth and probably cost more per ounce than her first apartment. She set it back down without drinking.
"This is the part where you smile."
"I'm smiling."
"You're holding a glass of Yamazaki like it personally wronged you."
"It's a lot to take in."
"It's supposed to be. Sit with it. Let the team know tomorrow — I'll handle the board announcement Friday. Your office moves to this end of the floor next week. We'll get you settled."
Dominique poured herself a second glass, which Maren had never seen her do. She held it up. Maren lifted hers. They touched rims — a small, clean sound in the quiet office — and Dominique drank. Maren brought the glass to her lips and set it down again.
"You earned this. I want you to hear that."
Maren nodded. She shook Dominique's hand, walked back down the corridor, and closed her office door behind her. The whiteboard was blank. She'd cleaned it herself on Sunday night, photographing each panel first, saving Elliot's layouts to a folder on her desktop she'd labeled 'reference.' She stood in front of the empty board for a while. The afternoon light came through the glass walls and made the whole room feel like an exhibit.
Her phone buzzed. She checked it expecting Rae, but it was Elliot. 'Heard the news. Congrats, Mare. You killed it.' She read it twice. The period after 'killed it' was the kind of punctuation that could mean anything or nothing, and she was no longer sure she could tell the difference.
She found him at his desk. Not the couch in her office — his own desk, in his own space, two doors down. He was standing, jacket on, sorting papers into a box that sat on his chair. His shoes were on. His bag was packed and leaning against the wall by the door.
"What are you doing?"
"Cleaning up. You know how it gets — six years of printouts and you're basically a hoarder."
"Elliot."
He stopped sorting. Set down the stack he was holding. Looked at her straight on for the first time in — she tried to count — a week. He'd been in the office every day, working, present, but always slightly angled away from her. She'd let it happen because the alternative was a conversation she couldn't afford to have before the pitch.
"I took a job at Hatch + West. I start in two weeks."
Five. Three. One. None. His initials disappearing from thirty-two slides, and he'd watched every subtraction.
"How long have you been interviewing?"
"Six weeks."
Six weeks. Before the pitch. Before the solo condition. He'd started looking while they were still building the deck together, while he was still sending her slide fourteen fixes at midnight and knocking on her glass and calling it 'our' back half.
"You could have told me."
"I kept thinking you'd give me a reason to."
Maren stood in his doorway. The hallway behind her was bright and empty. She could hear someone's phone ringing two offices down, unanswered.
"The campaign was yours. You know that. 'Say nothing louder' — that was you at five in the morning at my whiteboard. I should have —"
"Yeah."
He picked up the stack again. Tapped it even against the desk and placed it in the box. The gesture was careful, unhurried — the hands of someone who'd already done his grieving and was now just handling logistics.
"I'm glad it landed. The pitch. I watched the playback — the silence in those spots is something else. Voss is going to eat it up for years."
"Come to drinks tonight. The place on Ninth. We never went."
"I know we didn't."
He held out his hand. Maren looked at it — the hand that had drawn three frames on her whiteboard at five in the morning, that had passed her the right coffee for eight years without asking. She shook it. His grip was warm and brief and when he let go he picked up the box from the chair and settled it against his hip.
"Take care of yourself, Mare."
He walked past her into the corridor. One knock on the glass as he went — not two. She listened until she couldn't hear him anymore.
Maren went back to her office and sat in the chair. The blank whiteboard. The whiskey she hadn't drunk, still on Dominique's desk down the hall. The Voss deck open on her laptop, every slide carrying her name. She pulled out her phone and opened Rae's thread. The last message, from this morning: 'Working late tonight?' with a question mark that had already answered itself.
She typed: 'Got the job. Coming home.' Her thumb hovered over the send button. She could picture the apartment — Rae's book on the couch arm, the folded throw, one set of keys by the door. She could picture walking in and Rae looking up and the particular effort it would take to meet Maren's eyes and say something that matched the occasion. She sent it.
Rae's reply came in forty seconds. 'Okay.'
Maren hailed a cab on the street outside the lobby. She gave the driver her address and sat in the back seat with her bag on her lap and her phone dark. The blocks slid past in the early evening light. At Ninth Street, the bar was visible for a moment through the window — the bad wine, the good fries, the table she'd never sat at — and then it was behind her.