“I hear you.”
“Can you come to the city this weekend? I want to talk in person. Owen wants to be there too, if that’s okay.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s okay.”
“I’m not calling because of the venue situation,” she said. “I want to say that directly. I mean, the venue situation is real and we have to figure it out, but I would be calling you even if it didn’t exist because I’ve been sitting with what I did and I can’t anymore.”
I believed her. Not uncritically, not without the awareness that the financial pressure was part of the system that had moved things along. But I believed that she meant what she was saying in the moment she said it.
“This weekend,” I said. “Saturday.”
## What We Found in Brooklyn
I took the train to the city on Saturday morning, which I prefer to driving when I have time, and got off at the stop nearest their apartment and walked the four blocks with my coat collar up against the March wind. The city had that particular late-winter quality where spring feels theoretically possible but the air is not cooperating.
Owen buzzed me in. The apartment was warm and smelled like coffee and something savory — he’d apparently made shakshuka, which I found out was a thing he did on weekend mornings when there was something that felt like an occasion. He handed me a cup before I’d even taken my coat off.
Claire was sitting on the couch. She looked tired in the way she looked when she’d been sleeping badly, which I recognized from our twenties when she used to crash at my apartment after difficult things happened. She was wearing a sweater I’d given her two Christmases ago, which I noticed and did not remark on.