Page 23 of The Lies We Play

“You don’t have to walk me down.”

“I know that too.”

She considers me for about three seconds. Which is, I’m learning, the full duration of Livia Sabine Crane’s consideration window. After three seconds, you have either passed her test or you haven’t.

“Okay,” she says.

We take the back stairs.

I let her go first because the stairs are narrow and the back-stair railing is somebody’s idea from 1923 of a railing, and if she missed a step, I would rather catch her from behind than from above. She doesn’t miss a step. She walks down the two flights ahead of me with the same comfortable competence with which she sat on the parapet, and when we get to the ninth-floor landing, she pushes the door open and holds it.

Her apartment is the second one on the left. 9B.

She stops at her door. Hand on the knob.

“Creed.”

“Yeah?”

“What are you doing tomorrow night at eleven?”She asks.

“Reading Cloud Atlas.”

“Are you going to be insufferable about it?”

“Probably,” I say.

“All right. I’ll see you up there.”

“Yeah.”

She opens the door.

She stops with one foot inside and turns back to look at me then says, “Have a good night, Creed, and thank you for the company.”

She is on the roof the next night at eleven.

I am on the roof the next night at eleven.

We sit diplomatically at a forty-five-degree angle facing each other, and she gives me grief about Cloud Atlas, and I give her grief about The Subtle Knife, and at one o’clock in the morning, we go down the back stairs.

She stops at 9B and says, “Same time tomorrow,” and I say, “Yeah,” and we do this—we, plural, like a unit — for the next three weeks before either of us figures out we are doing it.

Chapter Four

Livia

Then . . .

I’m on the roof earlier than usual.

Creed isn’t here yet.

That should not matter. I tell myself that with the firm tone of a woman who has taken exams on three hours of sleep and survived worse things than waiting for a hockey player on tar paper.

But . . . it matters.

I sit on the parapet and open my book, or I try to. The book is in my hands. The page is in front of me. The words are behaving like a room full of people talking at once. I read the same sentence twice and understand absolutely none of it, which is rude of the sentence and not at all my fault.