Chapter Text
RAMONA'S POV
New York’s light never really dies. It only changes texture. During the day, it’s a gray, metallic sheet bouncing off the glass of skyscrapers; at three forty-four in the morning, it becomes a murky orange dust, filtered through sodium-vapor streetlights and the smog settling between the asphalt canyons.
I’m sitting cross-legged on the inner windowsill of my bedroom, my back pressed against the white-lacquered wooden frame, my knees pulled to my chest and covered only by a pair of old sweatpants hanging loose around my calves. The window is halfway open, raised just enough to let in the icy late October draft rising from the sidewalks and to let the smoke slip outside without setting off the fire detectors Steven had installed in the ceiling with obsessive engineering precision.
Between my index and middle fingers, I’m holding a half-smoked joint. The ember is a tiny glowing pinhead pulsing to the slow rhythm of my breathing, releasing into the cold air a sweet, thick, sharp smell that tastes like dried resin and wet earth. It’s the only genuine smell in this apartment, which still reeks of parquet wax, fresh plaster, and expensive detergent.
I inhale. The heat slides straight down my throat, scraping my bronchi with a familiar roughness before spreading through my chest, loosening that permanent knot of tension I’ve carried wedged between my shoulder blades ever since I set foot on this island of concrete. I hold the smoke for four long seconds, then let it drift toward the dark glass, watching the grayish veil dissolve into the Manhattan night, swallowed by the city’s constant, low hum that never shuts up: the steady buzz of air-conditioning units on the surrounding rooftops, the distant echo of a siren heading downtown, the hiss of taxi tires over steel manhole covers.
I can’t sleep. It’s been two months, but my insomnia has simply changed ZIP codes. Back in Sterling Point, when my brain refused to shut down, there was the heavy silence of the bay’s black water slapping against Gordon’s dock pilings, the sharp calls of owls hidden among the pine tops, and the creak of the cottage’s old wood settling in the wind.
Here, insomnia tastes like metal, like the central heating whistling through exposed pipes, and like this artificial light that never lets you forget where you are.
I tap the ash into an empty can sitting on the shelf and close my eyes for a second, letting the THC do its dirty work: blunting the edges of my thoughts, slowing my heartbeat, laying a heavy hand over the memories trying to float back up like rotten wood after a flood.
Behind me, beyond my half-open bedroom door, the apartment is steeped in geometric quiet. Steven owns this loft, with its ridiculously high ceilings and cast-iron columns, and he keeps trying to make it feel cozy, but to me it still looks like the showroom of an art gallery.
Everything is too clean. Too linear. At the end of the hallway is Connor’s room. If I listen closely, through the thick walls, I can almost hear the steady rhythm of his breathing.
Connor, with his orderly life, his stacks of microeconomics textbooks piled on the glass dining-room table, his color-coded folders, and his travel mugs left beside the sink after fourteen hours at the NYU library studying for exams on financial markets. He’ll wake up at six-thirty, put on a perfectly ironed shirt, make drip coffee in the American coffee maker, and gently ask me if I slept, without realizing that my answer is just another way of telling him to leave me alone.
Steven and Connor are trying to make room for me. They cleared out drawers, bought new sheets, let me choose the desk. But I still feel like a foreign object temporarily placed on an expensive piece of furniture: a piece of bark picked up from the ground and forgotten on top of a Scandinavian designer table.
I look outside, toward the intersection three floors below. The traffic lights change in a rhythmic, silent sequence. Red to green, then orange, then red again. To my color-blind eyes, that dance of lights is barely a variation in muddy tones, shades of gray and ochre bleeding into one another. Steven has the same eyes, the same genetic glitch in the code. He thought sharing a retinal defect might somehow make up for years of emptiness. I wonder if, when he looks at the traffic light on the corner of Church Street and Franklin, he sees the same washed-out brown where everyone else sees bright green.
A sudden, slimy, completely unsolicited thought slips between my synapses: Your color blindness is ridiculously sexy.
The voice echoes inside my head with such clarity that I almost whip around toward the empty bed. That drawn-out British accent, those open vowels, that teasing, velvety tone Oona used whenever she wanted to disarm me, when she’d lie on her stomach on my mattress at Sterling Point, chin resting on her closed fists, staring at me with those eyes that always seemed one second away from either laughing at me or jumping me.
I clench my jaw. Take another drag, deeper this time, until my throat burns.
Stop. Don’t.
I rest the back of my head against the cold glass. The temperature contrast between my overheated skull and the freezing surface sends a welcome jolt through me. College started a little over two months ago, and I still have no idea what I’m doing here. I sit through introductory lectures in three-hundred-seat auditoriums where professors don’t even know your name; I always take the last row, close to the emergency exits, hood pulled over my head, with a notebook where I draw sailboats instead of taking sociology notes.
I walk through Washington Square Park dodging tourists, skaters, and students passionately arguing about things that feel light-years away from me, wondering if I’ll ever stop feeling like I’m starring in a silent movie whose script I lost.
On the floor, near my bare heel, my phone screen suddenly lights up.
The vibration is a dull buzz against the polished wood: Bzz-bzz.
I slowly look down. In the darkness of the room, the bluish glow of the smartphone cuts through the shadows like a blade.
A WhatsApp notification.
Sender: Annie. Time: 3:48 AM.
I stay perfectly still for a few seconds, the joint smoking lazily between my fingers, staring at her name glowing in the dark. Annie. My sister. Or whatever we’ve become since our lives switched places like pieces on some insane chessboard: her, the city girl, staying in Muskoka to dig into the roots of a mother who’s no longer there; me, raised among mud and boats in Sterling Point, transplanted into the heart of the city she ran away from.
I blow a thin cloud of smoke outside, reach down, and pick up my phone. I unlock the screen. The brightness stings my eyes, forcing me to squint until they adjust.
I open the chat.
Annie: You’re awake, aren’t you? Don’t even try lying and saying you were asleep.
A bitter half-smile tugs at the corner of my mouth. She knows my schedule better than anyone.
I press my thumb against the keyboard, holding the joint in my other hand.
Me: I’m awake.
The reply comes almost instantly. Three gray dots bounce inside the speech bubble for a moment before turning into text.
Annie: Knew it. What are you doing by the window?
I raise an eyebrow, instinctively looking toward the glass as if she could see me through three hundred miles of distance and maple forests.
Me: Who says I’m by the window?
Annie: Because you’re always by the window when you can’t sleep. At Sterling Point, you used to sit on the cottage windowsill staring into nothing for hours. Bet you’re smoking.
I swallow a dry laugh that dies in my throat.
Me: It helps.
Annie: It’s just killing your neurons, Mona. But whatever. I’m not gonna be the preachy older sister...
I slide my back farther down the doorframe, bracing one knee against the inner edge of the windowsill. The room is silent except for the radiator hissing as it kicks on, heating the room with a sharp knock through the pipes.
Me: Why are you awake? Does Ellis snore?
Annie: Ellis sleeps like a log. He passed out at ten, still wearing his work clothes.
The image hits me like a punch to the gut. The little dock. The dark wood soaked with tar, the rusty chains creaking when you pulled them with the hand winch, Grandpa Gordon with his old blue wool cap pulled low over his forehead, muttering curses about the damp getting into his bones.
That used to be my job.
Every year, at the end of October, I was the one who pulled on thigh-high rubber boots and stepped into the freezing water to unhook the iron pins while Gordon worked the cable from shore. Ellis does it now. The city boy who learned how to use a wrench for Annie.
I feel a dull ache at the base of my neck. A nasty mix of nostalgia and territorial anger that I try to shove back down by taking another drag.
Me: He shouldn’t be straining his back. I told him to call his dad for the heavy stuff.
Annie: You know what he’s like. Anyway, Ellis did great. His hands are just covered in blisters.
Me: Give him some Vaseline. Or linseed oil.
Annie: Already did. How are classes in Manhattan? Does Connor still explain the difference between real GDP and nominal GDP over breakfast?
A small sigh escapes my lips. Connor’s a good guy. Really. He’s almost too nice. The other morning he left a yellow Post-it on the coffee maker that said: “If you need a summary for Macroeconomics I, I’ve got my freshman-year notes on the drive. Have a good day, R.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’m not even taking Macroeconomics. I picked random classes in American literature and film history just because they didn’t require too much talking in class.
Me: Connor is obsessed. He highlighted three books in four different colors just tonight. I think he dreams in bar charts.
Annie: Poor Connor. That’s just who he is. And dad?
I look toward my bedroom door. Steven is the other giant question mark in my life. He’s thoughtful, almost intimidated by my presence. He tries not to be intrusive, gives me my space, gives me a credit card for everyday expenses that I barely use except to buy rolling papers and tobacco from a Pakistani convenience store on the corner. Sometimes the three of us have dinner together, sitting in polite silence that Steven tries to fill by talking about his projects in Brooklyn or asking whether the light in my room is good enough for reading.
Me: Steven’s fine. Always working. He bought me a heavy jacket for winter. Says the wind in New York cuts your face off before Christmas.
Annie: That’s sweet of him. You should wear it. You’re always dressed in those hoodies that look like they came straight out of a dumpster.
Me: You’re almost funny. They have character!
Annie: They have holes. Different thing :)
I smile through clenched teeth. The joint is almost finished; the ember is dangerously close to the cardboard filter. I take one last deep drag, feeling the heat sting my fingers, then crush the butt against the bottom of the metal can.
The silence of the night settles heavily again. Outside, a stronger gust shakes the windowpanes, carrying with it the damp smell of rain that must have fallen over the Hudson a few hours ago.
I rub my knuckles against the fabric of my sweatpants. The skin on my hands is still rough, but it no longer has the engine-oil cuts or the crusted salt under my fingernails that I used to have at Sterling Point.
My hands are getting clean. Smooth. City-girl hands. I hate them.
I look at the screen. Annie hasn’t written anything for two full minutes. The chat sits perfectly still, the green online status glowing beneath her name.
Then it disappears. Then typing... appears again.
The three dots bounce for five seconds. Ten. Fifteen.
Then they stop. No message.
Then again: typing...
I frown. When Annie hesitates that long over a keyboard, it’s never because she wants to talk about the weather or Ellis’s back pain. There’s always something burning underneath, something weighing on her fingers that she doesn’t know how to let out without making noise.
I straighten slightly on the windowsill, planting the soles of my feet against the wood. My heart, suddenly immune to the cannabis haze, speeds up by half a beat. An automatic, stupid, animal reflex my body still hasn’t learned to disable.
The screen flashes.
Annie: She asked about you yesterday.
The air in the room seems to thicken all at once, heavy as molten lead. The radiator’s whistle disappears into the background. All that remains is the sound of blood pumping through my ears, dark and violent.
There’s no name in the message. There doesn’t need to be.
There are hundreds of people in Sterling Point, but for Annie and me, for the past few months, the singular pronoun has had one—and only one—owner.
My fingers freeze above the screen. My thumb hangs a millimeter above the glass.
I want to turn off the phone. I want to close the app, throw the smartphone onto the mattress, crawl under the heavy blankets, and keep my eyes shut until noon. I want to do what I know how to do best: run, isolate myself, pretend the world beyond this fifteen-square-meter perimeter never existed.
Instead, I stay there.
My eyes locked on those four words.
She asked about you yesterday.
I don’t answer. I can’t form a single coherent syllable.
The three dots reappear beneath the green bubble. Annie doesn’t wait for my reply. She knows perfectly well I’m sitting there frozen on the windowsill, my throat dry.
Annie: She misses you.
One second of silence.
Then another line, blunt and merciless, dropping like a guillotine.
Annie: Really fucking badly.
The words remain there, black against pale green, illuminated by the cold light of the display.
She misses you. Really fucking badly.
I feel a violent contraction in my stomach, as if someone has grabbed my insides and twisted them hard. I lose my breath for a second. The smoke in my lungs feels like it’s turned into shattered glass.
Oona.
Her name explodes inside my head with the force of a wave crashing over a cliff during a November storm. I instantly see her messy, wind-tossed blonde hair, constantly tangled by the lake wind and humidity; the heavy silver rings covering her slender fingers, tapping rhythmically against the boat’s steering wheel or the wooden bar at the local pub; the low-cut tank top, the plaid swimsuit hanging loose around her shoulders, her sun-golden skin, and that cocky, provocative expression she used to hide the enormous emptiness her mother had carved into her before leaving to send postcards from the other side of the planet.
“She misses you.”
A lie.
Oona doesn’t need anyone. Oona gets tired of people after a few weeks, throws them away before they get the chance to leave her first, uses the island’s rich tourists to get free drinks while putting on an East London accent, then disappears the next morning without leaving a trace.
Oona is the one who screamed at me in the shed, who told me to leave, who turned my departure for New York into yet another betrayal she’d suffered, pushing me away with a cruelty so lucid and calculated it took my breath away.
You’ll forget about me. You won’t come back...
Now it’s all about you and your fucking mommy issues!
Our last words ricochet around the walls of my skull like shattered pieces of glass.
The memory of that fight is an open wound that never scabbed over. I remember her lips trembling, the desperate anger in her pale eyes as she tried to destroy everything before distance could do it for her. She would rather tear me apart with her own hands than risk waiting for me and being abandoned all over again.
And now Annie is telling me she misses me.
I swallow with difficulty. My throat burns. My defense mechanism, sharpened by years of silence and doors slammed in the world’s face, snaps back into place with surgical speed.
The armor locks shut with a metallic click.
Don’t show anything.
Don’t give in.
Don’t ask questions.
I place my thumb over the keyboard. I type the first thing that comes to mind to defuse the explosive charge of that message.
Me: Oh.
One syllable. Two letters. A full stop. I stare at the sent message. It looks like an insult, a door slammed straight in someone’s face. But it’s the only way I have to keep from screaming at four in the morning in the middle of Manhattan.
Annie’s dots appear immediately.
Annie: “Oh”? Seriously, Ramona? That’s all you have to say?
The tension in the chat rises another notch. I can almost hear my sister’s exasperated voice, the way she sighs and runs a hand through her very dark hair while sitting on the bed beside Ellis.
Me: Yeah.
Annie: Don’t do the detached bitch thing with me. It doesn’t work. I know you.
I grip the phone so tightly my knuckles turn white. The metal edge digs into my palm.
I want to tell her she doesn’t know me at all. That she doesn’t know what it’s like to wake up every night feeling like your rib cage is completely hollow. That she doesn’t know what it feels like to remember the exact sensation of Oona’s skin beneath my fingers, the softness of her mouth when she kissed me for the first time inside Gordon’s cottage, telling me she’d been waiting for that moment for so long—only to then pretend it had all been some stupid dream before boarding a fucking plane.
Me: What am I supposed to say?
Annie: I don’t know. Something human? Literally anything except this void.
I stare at the screen. The cursor blinks at the beginning of the empty line.
What am I supposed to say? Should I ask how Maple is? If Oona still takes her to school every morning, letting her sit on the handlebars with her helmet undone? Should I ask if she’s still working, if she ever fixed the engine on that old outboard motor that never started, if she still wears those heavy rings that used to jingle every time she touched my arm?
Should I ask if there’s someone else? If she’s found another girl to tell her bullshit to, just so she can kiss her behind the boat sheds after dark?
The thought of Oona touching someone else causes such a sharp physical pain beneath my sternum that I have to bend slightly forward over the windowsill until it passes. It’s a poisonous, slimy jealousy I have no right to feel after everything we said to each other, after we erased each other from our lives.
I delete everything I was thinking. All that’s left is ash.
Me: I’m good here.
Annie: I didn’t ask if you’re good in New York, Ramona. I’m talking about her.
Me: It doesn’t make sense.
Annie: What doesn’t make sense?
Me: Talking about her.
Seconds pass slowly. A yellow taxi drives beneath the window, its headlights slicing through the thin mist rising from the manholes, illuminating the red bricks of the building opposite for a moment in a dark, muted shade.
Annie: I ran into her at Sully’s market the other day. She was there with Maple, buying cereal. She barely said anything at first, just the usual sarcastic bullshit. Then Maple went to look at the comics, and she stopped.
I don’t want to read.
I want to block the phone.
And yet my eyes devour every word with a desperate, self-destructive hunger.
Annie: She asked how you were. If you liked college. If Steven was taking care of you. She had that look, Mona... that look she gets when she’s desperately trying to seem untouchable but her eyes are all glassy. She asked if you’d cut your hair...
My hand instinctively goes to the back of my neck. My hair has grown out, falling messily past my shoulders, frayed and shapeless. I haven’t touched it since I left.
A heavy lump rises in my throat, solid as a stone.
She asked if you’d cut your hair.
Why the hair? Why did Oona used to spend hours playing with it, threading her fingers through the strands while we lay on the bed doing absolutely nothing, gently tugging until I was forced to look at her whenever I stubbornly kept staring at the ceiling so she wouldn’t see me blush?
You’re so beautiful, Mona. Every single thing about you is beautiful...
You never have to show me anything you don’t want to. I’ll still find you ridiculously attractive.
The words come back exactly as she said them, spoken in that August half-light, her warm hand stopping at the hem of my shirt without pushing any further, respecting every inch of my panic, my shame, my fear that I wasn’t enough.
I blink hard, trying to push back the burning sensation at the corners of my eyes.
Me: Okay.
My reply is a stone thrown into a frozen pond.
Annie: Ramona, please. You drive me insane when you do this. I know what you’re doing. You’re shutting down again, like you always do!
Me: What do you want me to do, Annie?
Annie: I want you to admit that you miss her too. I want you to stop acting like Sterling Point was some horrible dream you need to erase.
My fingers tremble slightly above the keyboard. Anger begins to push through the haze of weed, hot and defensive, the only thing keeping me from falling apart.
Me: She’s the one who ended it.
Annie: You know why she did it!! She’s spent her whole life watching people get on boats and never come back. She saw you packing your bags for Manhattan and thought you’d forget her in two seconds. She did what she always does: she struck first so she wouldn’t get killed.
Reading those words in black and white hurts. A physical, dull pain radiating from my ribs into my stomach.
I know.
God, I know.
I knew exactly what was going through that messed-up blonde head of hers. I knew every cruel word, every insult she spat out in that sharp accent during our last fight was just a cry for help, a desperate prayer to force me to stay, to prove to her that I wasn’t like her mother, that I wouldn’t leave her behind.
But I couldn’t stay.
If I’d stayed in Sterling Point, I would have died inside. I would have remained Gordon’s orphaned granddaughter forever, the girl with secrets buried in the lake, the girl who doesn’t know who her father is and doesn’t know where to go.
I had to leave.
And she never forgave me for it.
Me: It doesn’t change anything.
Annie: It changes everything if you stop being so fucking stubborn.
Me: It’s not stubbornness.
Annie: Then what is it?
I stare at the window. Outside, the sky above Manhattan’s rooftops is beginning to lighten, turning an ash-gray that promises dawn. Soon the city will wake up completely. Connor will walk out of his room with his neatly organized notes, Steven will smile at me with that careful kindness he uses around fragile people, and I’ll have to put on my sneakers and walk to university like I’m a normal person.
I can’t afford cracks in the plaster.
If I let even the smallest sliver of what I left behind in Sterling Point in, the whole building will collapse.
And I don’t know how to rebuild myself from scratch for a second time.
Me: It’s over, Annie.
Annie: I don’t believe you.
Me: I don’t care whether you believe me or not.
Three minutes of silence. Three minutes in which I watch the screen go dark, then light up when I touch it with my fingertip, then go dark again.
Then one last message from Annie.
Annie: Before she left the market, Maple gave me a drawing to give you. She drew me and Ellis on Gordon’s boat. Then she drew Oona holding hands with a figure colored entirely gray. I asked her why the figure was gray and she said, “Because Ramona doesn’t see the right colors, but Oona lends her hers.”
My breath catches permanently in my throat.
I shut my eyes.
One single tear, hot and heavy, slides down my left cheek, past the line of my jaw, and falls onto the rough fabric of my sweatpants, leaving a dark spot the size of a coin.
Ramona doesn’t see the right colors, but Oona lends her hers.
I see the wooden dock again, in August.
Oona sitting beside me, her legs dangling over the dark water, pointing toward the horizon at sunset:
That’s a deep orange, Mona. Like the color of a ripe peach rotting in the sun. And that up there is purple, like velvet. What do you see?
And me looking at her—looking only at the straight profile of her nose and her parted lips—and answering: I only see you. I bring my hand to my mouth, pressing my fingers against my lips to muffle a sob threatening to tear through my chest in the silence of the apartment.
The pain is so strong, so alive and vicious, that for a moment I feel like I’m suffocating.
Nothing has changed.
I’m not healed.
New York hasn’t erased a single millimeter of her.
It’s all still there, buried beneath a thin layer of anesthesia that takes only one message in the middle of the night to blow apart.
The phone vibrates one last time between my fingers.
Annie: Get some sleep, Mona. Love you.
I stare at the screen through the watery veil blurring my vision. The letters dance, smeared and impossible to make out.
My fingers move on their own across the keyboard.
The automatic reflex of the shell sealing itself back together. The gravestone being put back into place with a dull thud.
Me: Love you too. So fucking much. Goodnight!
I turn off the screen.
This time, I don’t turn it back on.
I place it facedown on the cold windowsill, far enough away that I can’t reach it.
I pull my knees to my chest, hide my face in my crossed arms, and stay there, completely still, while the first bruised light of the New York dawn begins to filter through the glass, filling the room with a dull, flat gray that has no color left to lend me.