Chapter 3: The Empty Apartment
The bus ride back to the East End was a miserable, grinding forty minutes of stopping at every dim street corner under flickering sodium lights. By the time we climbed the three flights of stairs to Apartment 3B, the sun had dropped entirely below the horizon, leaving the sky a bruised, metallic purple.
The hallway smelled of boiled cabbage and old linoleum, a familiar, heavy scent that always made my stomach tighten. I pushed our heavy brass-keyed lock—the one my mother had polished every Sunday night—and swung the door open.
The apartment was pitch black and freezing. The utility company hadn't just threatened; they had followed through while we were dressing up in our church clothes that morning. The small electric baseboard heaters along the baseboards were stone cold, and the digital clock on the microwave across the kitchenette flashed a dead, mocking series of dashes.
"It's so cold," Lily whispered, her teeth beginning to chatter as she dropped her small wicker basket of wedding petals onto the cracked vinyl floor.
"Hold on. I'll get the lantern," I said, moving cautiously through the familiar dark.
I knew every floorboard in this place; I knew which ones groaned underfoot and which ones stayed silent. I made it to the kitchen counter, found the heavy brass kerosene lamp my mother kept for emergencies, and struck a wooden match. The sudden yellow flare of light illuminated the cramped, spotless kitchen: the stack of unpaid bills by the breadbox, the empty fruit bowl, the calendar on the wall with yesterday's date circled in red ink—the day my mother had been buried in the small municipal cemetery across town.
I lit the living room heater with a secondary propane canister we kept in the hall closet, and within ten minutes, a small, stubborn pocket of warmth began to bloom in the center of the room. Lily curled up on the threadbare plaid sofa, wrapped in two wool blankets I pulled from the hall chest, her eyes heavy with exhaustion.
"Leo, I'm hungry," she murmured, her voice trailing off into a sleepy sigh.
"I know, bug. Let me check the pantry," I lied.
I already knew what was in the pantry: half a box of salted soda crackers, a single can of creamed corn with a dented lid, and a jar of generic peanut butter that was so old the oil had separated into a thick pool at the top. I took down the peanut butter and a butter knife, along with the crackers, and carried them over to the sofa. We ate in near silence, the only sound being the ticking of the wind against the single-pane windows and the low rumble of traffic passing down on the avenue below.
While Lily ate, I pulled the metal lockbox out from the bottom of my mother's bedroom closet. It was an old gray metal box with a latch that didn't quite catch unless you pressed down hard on the lid. My mother had given me the key two weeks before she went into the hospital, telling me to keep it safe no matter what happened.
I carried the box to the kitchen table, sitting down in the pool of yellow lamplight. I slid the small silver key into the padlock and turned it with a soft click.
Inside lay the real history of our lives—not the polished version Julian Vance presented to the glossy magazines, but the ledger of quiet desperation. There were birth certificates with Julian's signature scrawled in the father's blank box; there were medical receipts from the clinic where my mother had spent her final months; and there was a stack of cashier's checks, each one for exactly twelve hundred dollars, dated the first of every month for the past five years.
Except the checks had stopped six months ago. Right around the time Julian’s engagement to Evelyn Sterling had been announced in the Sunday Herald.
I flipped through the checks, my fingers tracing the embossed bank seal. Each one had been mailed from an account at the First National Bank downtown—an account in Julian’s name, but managed by a corporate trust firm. My mother hadn't cashed the last three. Instead, she had written Returned—insufficient for care across the memo lines in her precise, sloping cursive.
Beneath the checks lay a thick manila envelope sealed with red wax bearing a notary stamp I didn't recognize. On the front, written in my mother's hand just three days before she died, were the words: If anything happens to me, take this directly to Sarah Vance. She still remembers what her son agreed to.
Sarah Vance. Julian’s mother. The matriarch of the Vance family, who lived in the sprawling, iron-gated estate up on the North Ridge, far away from the cramped apartments and the grime of the East End.
May you like
I stared at the envelope for a long time, listening to Lily's breathing steady into deep sleep on the sofa behind me. The wedding today had been a disaster, a public humiliation that would be buried by tomorrow morning's news cycle if Evelyn’s father had anything to say about it. But Sarah Vance was cut from a different cloth—an older, harder generation that remembered when a Vance’s word was supposed to mean something before they started buying up downtown city blocks.
I slid the envelope into my jacket pocket beside the legal notice.
