Page 5 of The New Couple in 5B

“Fuck,” she says between breaths. “That’s a lot of stairs.”

“Yeah.” I step aside so she can enter the apartment. “You get used to it. I’m Rosie, Chad’s wife. He’s not here.”

She stays in the hallway, looks me up and down, makes some kind of an assessment that I can’t read. Then, a smirk. “You’re just his type.”

I smile uncertainly. What does that mean? Like she knows him, knows me. She doesn’t.

I steal a glance at my phone. Ten minutes.

“Come in.” But she stays rooted.

“Well,” she says, looking around. “The Windermere will be abigupgrade for you two, won’t it?”

The flush on her cheeks, I’m getting, is only half from effort. The other half is from anger.

“I’m sorry. What?”

But she doesn’t seem to hear me.

“You know what my father gave me in this life?” she asks. Her mineral-blue eyes blaze, but her bluster doesn’t fool me. All I see is sadness, loss.

“Nothing,” she says when I don’t answer. “Absolutely. Fucking. Nothing.”

Join the club, I want to say, thinking of my own father, but it doesn’t seem like she’s looking to bond. Her stare is hard and unyielding.

“Do you want to come in? Have some water?”

But she’s obviously lost to her anger.

“Ivan was a drunk,” she goes on. “He beat my mother. Did you know that?”

I shake my head.

“Then he left us. Like with nothing. My mom struggled all her life to take care of us. The whole world lauded him, you know, forhis art. But you know what he gave us? Nothing.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. And I am. Ivan was good to me—kind, loving, a father figure even though I didn’t know him that long. But he wasn’t my father; we didn’t have any history, any baggage. “He regretted it, that he wasn’t a good father to you. Deeply.”

Hehadadmitted his failings as a father and a husband. I don’t know if he regretted it necessarily. He was practical about his flaws. But it seemed like the right thing to say to her now. Wrong.

She lifts a pale, hard palm. “Don’t.”

Dana is a beauty with high cheekbones and a wide, full mouth. I can see Ivan’s cool intelligence in her eyes. Her brows are perfect arches, crinkling now in anger and sadness.

“He was a monster,” she says.

I want to tell her that he wasn’t. But I stay quiet, look down at the black-and-white tiles on the ground. I could say the same thing about my father. And I would fight anyone who disagreed with me.

She glances up at the ceiling, still breathing hard, then gives a slow shake of her head. “Do you ever look at them? His photographs. All those images of mayhem and gore. His portraits of war criminals. The battlefield shots, the corpses of children, the burned villages.”

“He was awarphotographer,” I say. “But no, I haven’t spent a lot of time looking at his work.”

“Right, because you’re a decent human being. You turn away from images of violence. But think about it. He was there, watching, doing nothing, just taking pictures. He was a voyeur, someone who gazed upon disaster, murder, death, and did nothing but watch.”

I never thought about it that way. Maybe she has a point. Or maybe she’s just demonizing him because it’s easier to hate him than it is to be the sad, abandoned little girl of a man who couldn’t love her.

“I think he saw it as bearing witness, reporting the truth,” I venture.

“Sure,” she says with a derisive laugh. “That sounds like him.”