Page 45 of The New Couple in 5B

The responding officer has asked us to wait for the detective to arrive, so that’s what we do. But I want to get far from this place, her disturbing images, all the pictures of my husband, whom she’s clearly been following around for years. The sight of her—I’ll carry that with me, I suspect. Maybe forever.

“Did she seem unstable?” Max asks unhelpfully.

“No,” I say. “Yes?”

She was enraged in our East Village hallway, cryptic and strange on the phone. So yes, maybe. But she seemed too wild, too full of feeling and power, to kill herself. Her immense talent, her beauty, her inner fire. How could she just snuff herself out that way? Why? So violently. On her face—fear, pain. Regret? Did she change her mind too late? Or—

“I don’tknow, Max.”

“Okay,” he says, soothing. “Okay.”

The voices of the police officers carry from the other room, low and serious. More people arrive, footfalls heavy, radios crackling. They wear navy blue jackets indicating that they’re from the medical examiner’s office. They glance at us, strides purposeful, eyes seeing, but say nothing, disappear through the door at the end of the hall.

“She called me up here totell me something,” I whisper. “She obviously wasn’t planning to kill herself today.”

Max rubs a nervous hand on his leg, nodding slowly, considering.

“Or,” he says quietly. “Maybe she just wanted you to be the one to find her.”

The idea is unsettling. Could she hate me that much? She doesn’t even know me.Didn’tknow me. Strange how tenses shift so soon after death.

“Why? Why would she want that?”

“You said she was angry, right? About the apartment.”

I look up at him, incredulous. “You think she killed herself over an apartment? That she was taking some kind of twisted revenge on us by arranging for me to witness her suicide?”

He raises his eyebrows, pushes up on his glasses. “The thing is never the thing, right? Didn’t you tell me that?”

Meaning when you’re angry, hurt, in despair about something, it’s rarely about the situation before you, or not just about that. In Dana’s case, her rage about the apartment was about her father not loving her enough, not being there, abandoning her and her family. That was the source of her anger and despair. Not the apartment. Or not just that.

“No,” I say. “No one would do that.”

But people do all kinds of dark and terrible things for reasons that don’t seem sound to others. Max doesn’t press the issue, wears his so-reasonable-lets-agree-to-disagree face. He’s on his phone now, scrolling.

“‘Dana Lowan is a world-renowned fashion and art photographer,’” he reads aloud from something he’s found in his search. “‘She has photographed celebrities, authors, and world leaders, traveled to fashion shoots and movie sets around the world. Her work has been displayed in galleries and museums in New York, Paris, Prague, and London.’”

This is all news to me. “I didn’t know she was so successful. Ivan never said.”

Max continues. “‘Her upcoming exhibit,Body and Soul, will open at Artists Space in SoHo’—looks like Sunday.”

Artists Space is a world-class gallery; a show there is a career-maker for any artist or photographer. Even I know that.

“So she had an opening at one of the most prestigious galleries in the city this week and she kills herself?”

He’s quiet a second. “You can’t apply logic to things like suicidal depression.”

He’s right about that. I’ve never been suicidal, but I know how you can sink into places so dark you think that there will never be light again. I wonder if that box would have made the difference, if it would have been healing in some way. If shedidkill herself.

“Says she’s divorced,” Max goes on. “Two kids.”

She left her kids. I wrap my arms around my center. If a child isn’t enough to tie you to this world, what could be?

“Ms. Lowan?”

I look up into the gaze of a man who has dark, watchful eyes, the shadow of stubble at his jaw and deep lines etched in his forehead. Max and I rise quickly, gracelessly, from our place on the floor.

“I’m Detective Grady Crowe.” He offers a firm handshake. “You discovered the body?”