"It is a professional disease."
They talked about the snow, and about how the city smelled different in December, and about Ms. Kwan, whom Gideon had never met and whom Celeste had known, she admitted carefully, for years. She did not say how many years. She did not say why. Gideon told her his sister June was staying with him for a while with her daughter, Hattie, who was seven and currently of the opinion that Christmas trees ought to scrape the ceiling. Celeste laughed again, softer, and felt the danger of liking him settle in her chest like a warm stone.
When they stood to leave, Reza wiped the counter and said, without looking up, "Tree stays outside next time. Needles in my drain, I start charging rent."
"Yes, Reza," Celeste said.
On the sidewalk Gideon hesitated with the pot in his arms. "I feel like I robbed you."
"You bought coffee," she said. "And you have a corner in crisis. Consider it triage."
He gave her his number. She gave him hers. Snow collected in the folds of his scarf. She walked home toward her building and did not look back a second time, because looking back twice would have meant something she was not ready to name.
Celeste's apartment was on the third floor of a walk-up that smelled, permanently, of someone else's cooking oil and the lemon cleaner the super used on Tuesdays. Her neighbor across the hall was Tully Brennan, fifty-eight, retired transit dispatcher, who kept a radio on low and a cat named Pocket who had opinions about strangers. Tully opened his door when he heard Celeste's keys, the way he always did when she came home after nine.
"You look like you almost had a good night," he said.
"I almost bought a tree," Celeste said. "Then a man bought it instead and bought me coffee as reparations."
Tully considered this with the gravity he used to give delayed trains. "Reparations or courtship?"
"I have not decided which crime it is."
"Bring him soup if he lasts a week," Tully said. "Men who last a week deserve soup. Men who last a month deserve to meet Pocket, which is a higher bar."
Celeste smiled, went inside, and stood for a long time in front of the empty spot on her windowsill where a small pot had sat every December of her childhood in a different apartment across town. Her mother's lease on that other place ran out on January second. The landlord had been patient, then less patient, then politely firm. Celeste had been packing boxes for three months in twenty-minute intervals, the way a person edges into cold water. She had not yet touched the closet where the ornaments lived.