The warehouse had been a textile mill in a previous life, and before that, something else — the building had that quality of structures that have outlasted their original purpose by long enough that the purpose itself becomes archaeology. The bones of it were late nineteenth century: load-bearing brick, thick enough that the interior stayed cool even when the city outside was running hot, the walls carrying a residue of their industrial past in the form of old bolt patterns and ghost outlines where machinery had once stood. Someone had started a renovation at some point and stopped — there were new electrical conduits running along one wall that ended in midair, ambitions interrupted, the city's economic tides having retreated before the job was finished.
What remained was a space that was neither what it had been nor what it was going to be. An in-between space. Mia thought, walking through it behind Damien on a gray Saturday morning with two coffees he'd brought in a carrier from the place on Memorial Drive, that she understood this building the way you understand something you recognize from your own interior life.
"Here," Damien said. He stopped in the center of the main floor and turned so that he was facing east, and waited.
She stopped beside him and looked up.
The skylight was perhaps thirty feet above them — a long rectangular opening in the roof that had been partially sheathed in translucent corrugated panels at some point, some of which were cracked or missing, so that the October morning came through it in uneven columns, some diffused and milky, some direct and sharp-edged where the gaps were. The damaged light moved across the concrete floor in slow increments as the clouds outside shifted, and the effect was of something living — a space that breathed differently moment to moment, that was never exactly the same twice.
She stood in it for a long time without speaking.
"The panels need replacing," Damien said, eventually, in the tone of a man making an observation rather than a complaint. "But the structural opening is original. Someone in 1887 made a decision about where to put that light. And they got it exactly right."
"You can feel it," Mia said. "The rightness of it." She turned slowly, reading the room the way she read every room — not for aesthetics but for the logic underneath aesthetics, the spatial argument a room makes about how humans should move through it and where they should stop. "An event in here would need to work with the light, not against it. You couldn't fight it. You'd have to figure out what the room was already trying to do and then just — help it do that."
He was watching her with the quality of attention she had come to recognize as simply how he operated, not performed interest but actual interest, the focused patience of a person for whom attention is a form of respect. "That's the argument I'd make about the renovation. Stop trying to make it into something new. Find out what it already is."
"Is that what you'd do with it? If you were hired?"
"I'm not going to be hired. The owner wants a boutique hotel, which this building will successfully resist. But yes. If it were mine, I'd let it keep its damage. The cracked panels, the exposed conduits. All of it. I'd just make it safe and let people be inside something honest."
Mia looked at him. He was looking up at the skylight, the damaged light moving across his face in the slow way of things that don't know they're being watched, and she had the sensation that she was seeing something unguarded — not accidentally, the way you sometimes catch someone off-guard, but deliberately unguarded, a person choosing to be observed in an interior state rather than managing what was observed.
She said: "I met Jack on Tuesday."
He looked at her then. He let a beat pass before he spoke, the beat that she'd learned meant he was deciding to receive something fully before responding to it. "How was it?"
"Clarifying," she said. She looked back up at the light. "I went in expecting to need closure and came out understanding that I'd already had it — I'd had it for months, I just hadn't named it yet. Seeing him in person was—" she paused, reaching for the accurate word rather than the available one, "confirming. Like a document you already know the contents of, signed."
"That's a relief or a sadness?"
"Both. Mostly relief." She turned the coffee cup in her hands. "I told him something that I'd been working up to saying for weeks. About my part in it. The way I organized everything so well that there was never any room for anything to actually be difficult between us. And he told me something in return that I needed to hear." She paused. "It was — we were honest with each other in a way we weren't in two years of being together, which is its own kind of sad. But there it is."
He was quiet. The light shifted — a cloud moved somewhere above the broken skylight and the room changed, briefly brighter, then returning to its diffused gray-gold.
"Do you want to talk about it more?" he said.
"Not right now." She looked at him. "Is that all right?"
"Of course it's all right."
She believed him, which was itself something to notice. She was accustomed, she realized, to gauging whether the people she told things to actually wanted to hear them or were performing the wanting. She was accustomed to managing even her own disclosures, shaping them for the comfort of the receiver. He had said of course it's all right with the simplicity of a person who meant exactly that and nothing more, and she found, to her own surprise, that the of course landed differently from the way okays and of courses usually landed. It was not reassurance dressed as permission. It was just permission, plain.
"Tell me about the hotel," she said. "The one this building is going to resist."
They walked the building for an hour.
This was not something Mia had expected to take an hour. She had thought of it as a look, a single pass through the space to see the thing he'd wanted her to see. But the building had more to it than the main floor — there were two upper levels, accessible by a concrete staircase that groaned and held, and the upper levels had their own logic, their own damaged beauty, windows that opened onto the Summerhill street below where the neighborhood was in the early stages of its own slow becoming, the particular Atlanta process of a place passing through the hands of one era and into the hands of the next.
Damien knew the building in detail. He'd been back twice since the initial site visit — she could tell by the specificity of his knowledge, the way he pointed out not just the obvious things but the subtle ones, a shadow line on the third floor wall that told you where the original roofline had been before an addition was put on and later removed, a column on the second floor that was slightly off-center in a way that was not a mistake but a correction for an underground condition discovered mid-construction. He'd read the building the way she read rooms — for the argument underneath the surface, for the decisions that were still visible if you looked at the right level.
"You came back here twice," she said. They were on the third floor, at the window that looked south toward the city skyline, Atlanta's glass towers catching the morning cloud in their surfaces and giving it back altered. "For a project you're not getting."
"Buildings like this don't happen often." He said it without defensiveness, the way he said most things. "And I'd already told Marcus about it. It seemed worth understanding before it gets ruined."
"You'd already told Marcus — you mean before you told me."
"I told Marcus because he handles my calendar. I told you because—" He paused. Not a hedging pause, not a careful retreat, more the pause of someone choosing the true version of a sentence they have several versions of. "Because I thought you'd see it the same way I did. And I wanted to know if I was right."
She looked at him for a moment. "Were you?"
"Mostly." Something shifted in his expression — the very edge of something that was not quite a smile, not yet, but was in the same vicinity. "You'd put the bar in the north end of the main floor, by the old loading door. I'd put it there too."
"The light falls away from it," she said. "So the room draws toward the center. And the center is where the—"
"Skylight," he said.
"Skylight," she agreed.
They stood at the south window in the gray October morning light of a building that would probably not survive its next owner's ambitions, and they were quiet together, and the quietness was not weighted with anything unresolved. It was simply the quietness of two people who had found, to their own mild astonishment, that they could be in a space together without performing being in a space together.
Mia thought: this is what I couldn't have with Jack.
She did not say it.
They had lunch afterward at a place in Summerhill that was still new enough to be good — a counter-service spot, bare-bones, the kind of place that will either become an institution or disappear in three years with no middle outcome possible, and Mia's professional instinct said institution. She ordered the thing the woman behind the counter recommended without looking at the menu, which was something she only did when she was sufficiently at ease to abandon her usual system of assessing and deciding, and she noticed herself doing it and noted it without making too much of it.
They took their food to a table by the window and talked — easily, without the slight performance quality that first and second conversations still carry, that self-consciousness of people who are aware of being assessed and are assessing in return. She had the impression, sitting across from him over a lunch that neither of them was paying much attention to, that they had moved past the audition phase of each other's company without quite deciding to, which was not something she was accustomed to. Usually the audition went on longer. Usually she kept it going, for reasons she could trace directly to item six on the list.
"Can I ask you about her?" she said.
He didn't ask who. He set down his fork and looked at her. "Celeste."
"Only if—"
"You can ask," he said. "What do you want to know?"
She thought about this, the same way she'd thought about what to ask Jack — not what was she like, which was a conversation about the other person, but the question that got at the actual thing. "What did she show you about yourself that you hadn't seen before?"
He was quiet for long enough that she thought she might have gotten the pitch wrong, gone too deep too fast. Then: "That I disappear when things require more from me than I think I can give." He said it with the flatness of a man who has examined something carefully enough to hold it without drama. "Not physically. I stay. But I — go somewhere interior. I manage the situation from in here"— a brief gesture toward his chest, no self-pity in it — "rather than actually being in it. Celeste used to say that talking to me when I'd gone interior was like talking to someone through a window. You could see them, but the sound didn't carry right."
Mia held this.
"She wasn't wrong," he said. "I've thought about it a lot since. The window thing. The thing is—" He paused, reached for the honest version again, the version below the first available version. "The thing is, I go interior because I don't trust what I'll do if I'm fully present. I don't trust that what I feel, in the moment, will be the right thing to act on. I've always been more confident in the considered response than in the immediate one."
"But feelings don't operate on that kind of timeline."
"No. They're immediate or they're—" He stopped.
"Or they're performed," Mia said.
He looked at her. "Or they're performed," he agreed.
"So you went interior," she said. "And she felt it as absence."
"She felt it as preference. As though I preferred my own company to hers, which wasn't — it wasn't that. I preferred the version of events I could manage from the inside. The problem was that a relationship is not a thing you can manage from the inside of yourself. By definition."
"No," Mia said quietly. "You can't."
He looked at her. She looked at him. There was something between them in that moment that neither of them named, not because it was unspeakable but because it was too early to give it a name, the way it's too early to name something that's still forming, that names itself wrong if you rush it.
"You managed from the outside," he said. It was not an accusation — he said it with the same careful accuracy she'd been trying to apply to herself. "And I managed from the inside. Two people managing different surfaces of the same room."
"And nobody in the room."
"And nobody in the room," he said.
The table next to them erupted briefly in laughter — a group of four, some private joke, the specific joy of a table that has been together long enough to have its own language. Mia and Damien both glanced over and then back, and the glancing-back was simultaneous, and neither of them commented on it.
"Is that what you're working on?" Mia said. "Being in the room."
"Trying to be." He picked up his fork again, looked at it. "It's not — it doesn't come naturally. The instinct is still to step back and assess. But I'm trying to notice when I'm doing it. And stay, instead."
"How's it going?"
He looked up. "Better than I expected," he said. The something that was not quite a smile made another appearance, more definite this time, closer to the real thing. "Today, specifically."
She looked back at him. She thought about the east-facing window, the morning reader, the light. She thought about a man who came back twice to a building he wasn't hired for because the building deserved to be understood. She thought about a deleted text message — It was good to meet you properly — and its replacement: something about the damage in it.
She thought: I am not managing this.
She thought: I am just here. In the room.
"Today," she said, "is pretty good."
She drove home in the early afternoon with the heat on low and the radio off, which was how she drove when she needed to think, though she was not precisely thinking — she was doing the thing that follows thinking, the settling, the slow integration of a day that had been more than she'd expected when she woke up.
She called Renata from the car.
"Tell me," Renata said, without preamble, which was how she answered calls from Mia on Saturday afternoons.
"I went to the building."
"And?"
"And I think—" Mia paused. The city moved outside her window, Summerhill giving way to the long commercial stretch of Memorial Drive, the landscape shifting through its registers. "I think I need to go slowly."
"Okay."
"Not because of anything bad. Because of something good. Because when something feels this — uncomplicated, I tend to wait for the complication. I go looking for it."
Renata was quiet for a beat. "Maybe this time there isn't one."
"There's always one."
"There's always complexity," Renata said. "That's different from complication. Complexity is just — the texture of real things. Complication is when you create problems to feel like you're solving them." A pause. "Which one are you waiting for?"
Mia drove through a green light. "I don't know yet."
"That's actually progress," Renata said. "A year ago you wouldn't have been able to sit with not knowing."
"A year ago I was in a relationship where not knowing wasn't an option."
"Also progress. The knowing kind."
She said goodbye to Renata and pulled into her street and parked and sat for a moment. The dogwoods had finally surrendered — their leaves were mostly down now, the branches bare and specific against the pale sky, the trees in the honest state of things stripped back to their essential structure. She had always liked trees in winter for this reason. You could see what was actually there.
She went upstairs. She made tea. She sat at her kitchen table with the eleven-item list and read it through, which was something Dr. Anand had asked her to do weekly, not to punish herself but to stay honest, to keep the evidence of her own patterns close enough to reference rather than storing it in the past where it could calcify into history rather than remaining usable as a map.
She read through the eleven items.
Then she got a fresh piece of paper and wrote at the top: Things I did differently today.
She sat with the pen for a moment.
She wrote: I told him about Jack without being asked. I asked about Celeste without softening the question. I said today is pretty good when I meant it, which is the kind of true thing I usually let pass unsaid because I'm not sure the other person wants to hear it.
She looked at what she'd written.
She wrote: I was in the room.
She put the pen down. She drank her tea. Outside the bare dogwoods held their shape against the sky and the October afternoon moved through its last hours, the light going amber and final over the rooftops, Atlanta doing its nightly thing of becoming something softer than it had been during the day.
Her phone lit up.
Damien: The skylight in the Decatur house, I've just realized, has the same southeast orientation as the mill. The owners don't know it yet but morning light is going to fall across their breakfast table in a way they'll probably spend ten years thinking is just luck.
She read it twice. She felt the warmth of it move through her like a thing she hadn't known she was cold enough to need.
She typed: Some things look like luck from the inside.
She sent it.
His reply came back in under a minute: Exactly.
She set the phone down. She sat in her kitchen with the tea and the list and the last of the October light and she thought about a skylight broken enough to let in uneven, unpredictable, living light, and a man who thought its damage was the most honest thing about it, and she decided — carefully, with full awareness of her own history and its eleven items — that she was going to let herself find out what this was.
Not manage it. Not organize it toward a predetermined shape.
Just find out.
Damien, across the city, set his phone down on the kitchen counter and looked at it for a moment as if it might say something further. It did not. He picked up the Decatur drawings he'd brought home and unrolled them on his desk and found the southeast roof detail and sat with it, and he thought about a house he was building for two people who would eat their breakfast in light they had not chosen and would call it luck, and he thought that there was something worth considering in that — in the things that are given to us by other people's careful attention without our ever knowing they were given at all.
He had spent most of his adult life being careful. He had been careful with his work and careful with his time and careful with the people who moved through his life, not coldly but with the particular caution of a man who had decided, at some point that he could no longer precisely locate, that the cost of full presence was higher than he could reliably afford.
He was beginning to think he'd been working from bad numbers.
He rolled the drawing back up. He went to his kitchen and cooked something simple, which he did on the evenings when he was actually hungry rather than eating from obligation, and this evening he was actually hungry, which he also noted without quite knowing what to do with the noting.
He ate at the table rather than the desk.
He did not check his phone again that evening, not because there was nothing he wanted to read on it, but because he was practicing being in the room he was in — his kitchen, his food, the October dark pressing against the windows of the apartment he'd lived in for three years and had never quite finished arranging, the boxes in the second bedroom that he'd told himself were temporary for going on twenty-seven months.
He thought: tomorrow I might unpack those boxes.
He thought: that's probably a metaphor.
He thought: I'm going to do it anyway.