Chapter 2: The Man With the Ficus

Theo Marsh had never met a moving day he didn't hate, and this one was shaping up to be no exception, mostly on account of the ficus. It was an enormous, unreasonable plant — a housewarming gift from his sister two apartments and one bad breakup ago, and somehow the only thing he'd carried through every move since without once considering leaving it on the curb. It did not fit in the elevator at any angle he tried, which was how he ended up wedged in the hallway of the fourth floor at four in the afternoon, arguing with a six-foot houseplant, when the door across from his open apartment swung open and a woman in chef's whites nearly walked directly into a branch. "Sorry — sorry," Theo said, wrestling the ficus sideways. "It doesn't usually attack people. I think it's stressed about the move." The woman looked at him. Then at the plant. Then back at him, with an expression he couldn't quite place — somewhere between amused and deeply suspicious, which struck him as a strange combination to aim at a stranger holding a ficus. "New neighbor?" she said. "Guilty. Theo." He stuck a hand out, realized both of his were full of plant, and laughed instead. "I'd shake your hand, but." "Wren," she said, not offering her own hand either, arms crossed now, still looking at him like he was a puzzle she hadn't decided was worth solving. "You're in 4B?" "For the next year, apparently. Longer if the ficus has anything to say about it." That got something out of her — not quite a laugh, but the corner of a laugh, gone as quickly as it came. She had flour on one forearm and the specific exhausted set to her shoulders of someone who'd been on her feet since before dawn, and Theo found himself wanting, with an intensity that surprised him, to know what had put that look on her face. "You cook?" he asked, mostly to keep her there another minute. "I run a restaurant. Marrow. Two blocks over." Something in Theo's chest went very still. He knew Marrow. He knew Marrow intimately, in the specific and slightly guilty way a critic knows a restaurant he has recently, anonymously, taken apart in four hundred words for the paper. He had eaten there twice under a fake name and a worse haircut, and he had gone home both times turning her scallop dish over in his mind for hours, trying to figure out why something he wanted to hate had tasted so much like the best thing he'd eaten all year — and had written a review that gave away almost none of that. "I've heard of it," Theo said, which was, if you squinted, technically true. "Everyone's heard of it this week," Wren said, and something dark passed behind her eyes. "For the wrong reasons." "What happened?" "A critic happened." She said the word critic the way other people said certain other words, the ones you weren't supposed to say in front of children. "Anonymous. Cowardly. Apparently thinks unearned confidence is a crime you can prosecute in a newspaper." Theo's mouth had gone dry. "That sounds — harsh." "It was accurate, which is worse." Wren shook her head, visibly deciding this was too much to unpack with a stranger and a ficus in the hallway. "Sorry. You didn't ask for the whole rant. Welcome to the building." "Thanks," Theo said, and watched her disappear back through her door, and stood very still in the hallway for a long moment afterward, his ficus listing gently against the wall, thinking that of all the apartments in this city, he had somehow, impossibly, moved across the hall from the one person he most needed to never, ever find out who he really was.

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