Outside, it started to snow. The first snow of 1994 had been the night they’d all decided to stay. This snow felt different. It felt like permission.

“Remember?” he said, not looking at her, but at the mug. “The night you tried to make clam chowder from a recipe in The New Yorker ?”

They’d been a strange quartet. Maggie, the aspiring playwright who could talk her way out of a parking ticket. Leo, the musician who composed symphonies for the subway’s screeching brakes. Paul, the quiet one, the photographer who saw stories in cracks on the sidewalk. And Claire, who wanted to be a novelist but spent most nights editing other people’s grocery lists at a publishing house.

“It’s not,” Paul said, and he sounded sincere.

“You put oregano in the chowder,” Maggie said, laughing. “It tasted like a forest floor.”

“Tell them to buy Microsoft stock,” Maggie said, and they laughed.

“You coming in, or are you just going to air out the place?” Maggie’s voice, still sharp as a tack after ten years, echoed from the gloom.

They did and they didn’t. Maggie was tugging at a lumpy sofa, her red hair now a sensible bob, her freckles faded. Leo, who’d once sworn he’d die in this very apartment, was carefully wrapping his vintage guitar in bubble wrap. He’d sold his first song last year—a jingle for a breakfast cereal. And then there was Paul.

They didn’t say goodbye when they left the storage unit. They said “next Thursday.” And for the first time in ten years, Claire believed it.