It’s only 10 AM when she gets back to the apartment, but there’s music coming from the end of the hallway. It’s Martha and the Vandellas, which means Hadley’s in a particularly good mood, because Motown is her happy music (followed by reggaeton and anything by the Rolling Stones). She drops her keys with a clang in the glazed ceramic Astier de Villatte bowl that sits on their entryway table and sits down on the rattan bench to untie her shoes and peel off her socks.

The sun is watery but strong, filtering down through the canopy of dogwoods that marks the boundary between their lawn and the neighbors’. She sets her laptop down carefully on the patio table. A bowl of sliced plums, ice cold and just on the firm side of ripe, sits next to a glass of fizzy salted lemonade. The lemonade is something she picked up in college: Her sophomore year roommate in college had been dating a chemical engineer named Atid who’d grown up in Thailand.

The first time the phone rings, she doesn’t hear it.

The second time it rings, she picks it up on the third ring and says breathlessly, “What happened?”

His voice comes across the line, deep and happy, and she can picture him smiling as he answers. “It worked! We’re celebrating. If, that is, you’re free.”

She glances out of the window where the snow is falling thick and fast, the flakes so fat and heavy it’s as if they can barely stay aloft. The afternoon is tilting rapidly towards dusk, and the curtain of snow obscuring the city only serves to hasten the departure of daylight.