The Last Window

She had been standing at the window for three hours when the snow finally stopped. Not because she was waiting for anything — she had stopped waiting years ago — but because the window was the only place in the apartment where the cold came through the glass in a way that felt honest. The city below had gone quiet in the way cities never quite manage. A borrowed quiet, she thought. The kind that gets returned by morning. She made tea she didn't drink. She reread the last paragraph of a novel she'd already finished twice. She pressed her palm flat against the glass until her hand print fogged, then faded, then vanished entirely — as if it had never been there at all. There was a message on her phone she hadn't answered. Not because she didn't know what to say, but because she knew exactly what to say, and that felt worse somehow. Precision had always been her problem. She could see the edges of things too clearly: where the feeling stopped and the habit began, where kindness ended and performance took over. The snow had been falling for six days. She'd counted. Not obsessively — just...