Raphael watched the door close behind Nora.
The bar was empty. Chairs turned upside down on the tables, clean glasses lined up on the shelf, the register closed. He stood motionless for a minute—a whole minute, his hands flat on the counter, his gaze fixed. Then he picked up the bar phone and called his boss.
Three sentences. Immediate resignation. Sorry. Thanks for everything.
His boss said something—probably “Are you serious?” or “You can’t do this.” Raphael didn’t hear him. He hung up, emptied the register of his tips—three weeks’ worth of coins and crumpled bills—and stuffed them into the pocket of his leather jacket.
He turned off the lights. The music first, then the counter spotlights, then the neon sign. The Counter went dark like a theater after the final performance. He locked the door and slipped the key into his boss’s mailbox.
Outside, the November air was biting. Raphael walked toward the building. Passing in front of 8 Branly Street, he didn’t look up at the second-floor right apartment. Not tonight. Tonight, he had something more important than a game.
Stephanie. He’d thought about her, of course. The cold woman, the ultimate challenge, the gaze that counted the seconds. He’d worked on her patiently—the drinks he bought her, the carefully calibrated lines, the silences that said more than words. And she had taken the bait. Not much—just enough for him to know he could go further. Just enough to make the game interesting.
But the game was over. Not because he’d lost—because he’d heard Nora. And listening to her, he’d heard himself. The professional seducer, the charmer of women in relationships, the guy who wrecked lives for sport—that was him. That was exactly him. And for the first time, it disgusted him.
He went up to his apartment. The center ground-floor apartment—the one between Diane and Nora’s empty apartment. He packed his bag in twenty minutes. An entire life in a duffel bag. Clothes, a toiletry kit, a charger, a book he’d never finished. No pictures. No memories. Raphael Music traveled light—it was both sad and liberating.
He went down to the parking lot. The motorcycle was there—black, gleaming beneath the streetlamp. He fastened the duffel bag to the back, set both helmets on the handlebars, and sat on the seat.
He looked at the building. The second-floor windows. On the right, Stephanie and Timothy’s light—they were probably watching a movie, or Timothy was watching a game while Stephanie put something away by color. On the left, Tatum and Jimmy’s light—maybe they were talking, maybe they were silent, maybe Jimmy was still staring at the wall, thinking about the photo of Geneva.
Lives. Real lives. Not games.
Raphael looked away. He waited.
Nora packed her bag in silence.
Not the boxes labeled in marker—those would stay. Just a suitcase. The essentials. Clothes, her medical-school notes, her passport, her grandmother’s picture—the only person in her family who had loved her unconditionally.
She looked around the apartment. Three months of living here. The couch where Tatum used to sit and drink tea. The table where she wrote her reports to Vanessa. The window from which she had seen the pool incident. Everything was clean, orderly, impersonal—as if she had never really lived there. As if she had always known she would leave.
Her phone vibrated. Vanessa. She didn’t even look at it. She turned off the phone and set it on the kitchen table. She wouldn’t take it with her. That phone belonged to the old Nora—the spy, the puppet, the girl who obeyed.
But before she left, there was one thing to do.
She sat at the table. She took out lined paper—the kind she used for her classes—and a blue pen that bled a little around the edges. And she wrote.
Not on a computer. By hand. In her rounded handwriting, the same handwriting she used on the labels for the moving boxes, the kind Tatum had thought was pretty on the first day.
She wrote slowly. She crossed things out. She started over. She cried over some of the lines and the ink ran, but she didn’t rewrite them. The tear stains were part of the letter.
When she finished, it was two in the morning. She folded the letter. Slipped it into an envelope. Wrote “Tatum” on it.
Then she took her suitcase, her oversized cardigan, and went down into the night.