Before husbands, before babies, before life claimed other loyalties, it started with a wish. Each of them wanted a place to return to that they could call home, a nest where they could hatch and polish their dreams.

They didn’t say it even to themselves—they might not even have realized it—but most of all they wanted friends.

• • •

Chloe refolded her paper napkin, propped her knife and fork at five o’clock, and reread the ad she’d circled. Across the table Talia sucked a drag from what was now a cigarette stub. Chloe couldn’t understand why anyone as clever as Talia would smoke, but the virtues she’d attributed to her—intelligence, passion, kindness—outranked this detail. Talia surfed the inhospitable sea of Manhattan as if she’d lived there all her life, while Chloe, who’d grown up an hour north of the city, found it as foreign as Marrakech, not that she’d visited Marrakech or, for that matter, Miami.

“Four real bedrooms,” Chloe said.

Talia leaned back in the booth and crushed her cigarette in the metal ashtray. Her eyes were too dark for Chloe to make out the pupils. “One ‘bedroom’ is going to be the foyer, which will have no window,” Talia said. “The second is the dining room—it will face an air shaft—and the third and fourth will be a living room sliced down the middle.”

“The open house starts at two,” Chloe said. “It’s a man who’s looking for a roommate, and I don’t want to”—
can’t
—“walk in there alone.” She and Talia had during the course of the last six weeks vetoed fourteen possibilities, each wrong in its own dreary way. Today’s apartment was ten blocks north of the boundary Chloe considered a secure border for her first adult home. She was trying to be flexible. Talia flagged the waiter, placed two bills on the tabletop shiny with grease, and reached for her coat. She started laughing. The sound reminded Chloe of her mother, whom she was surprised that she missed, because half the point of moving had been to escape her unremitting perfection. “Thanks, but we can split it,” Chloe said. Talia was as strapped for cash as she was. While stalking jobs of the sort liberal arts grads dream of, they’d registered as temps, whose sporadic assignments—receptionist for a chiropractor, assistant to a head of circulation—had been notches below interesting.

Talia thrust her arms into her newly acquired winter coat, red bouclé wool with a black Persian lamb collar—a Saks pedigree found at a thrift shop for ten dollars, a dollar more than lunch. “You’ll get the next one,” she said, and pulled a beret over her curls. She was proud of her hair—nearly black, though by the time she was thirty she’d be plucking gray strands, and by thirty-five coloring it sable brown. “I know where to find you.” They were living in a starchy women-only hotel, their rooms identically overheated and overpriced.

“Okay,” Talia said. “Let’s do the open house.”

Outside the diner, she and Chloe threaded their way up Broadway, kicking aside litter. Chloe counted the storefronts: four Irish bars, three Chinese laundries, and two check cashers happy to wire money to Puerto Rico. Outside an OTB parlor, a patron shouted,
“Hola, mamí,”
then whistled.

Chloe picked up the pace. “Big mistake,” she whispered.

“En sus sueños,”
Talia yelled back. “Relax, it’s the quiet guys you worry about,” she added as they turned west on Ninety-second, a street with leafless trees and the odd bicycle held hostage to a lamppost. “And I like the look of this neighborhood. I believe Edith Wharton just stepped out of that brownstone.” Talia pictured Edith as tall and handsome, though photographs she’d check later would suggest otherwise. In the absence of a social life—Talia’s boyfriend, Tom, was studying at Oxford—she’d been exercising her English major. She’d tried to sell Chloe on
The Age of Innocence
, but Chloe’s loyalty remained with Mary Higgins Clark.

The women paused at the corner of West End. Despite her headband, a gust carrying the November damp of the Hudson tangled Chloe’s fine blond hair. She pointed across the street. “That one,” she said. The building’s foundation and first five stories were limestone covered by soot, the upper portion red brick enhanced by gargoyles, whose scowl Chloe returned. The women walked toward the entrance and pushed open a heavy wooden door. Across a terrazzo floor dulled to the color of dirty rainwater, grocery store flyers sat on a table where a uniformed man was resting his well-lubricated hair. The air smelled of yesterday’s cigars and today’s salami.

“A
doorman
building,” Talia said.

Chloe stepped forward and cleared her throat. A deep snore answered her.

“Let’s go up,” Talia mouthed, cocking her head toward the elevator. She pressed the button. Minutes passed before the door swung open. When they reached the tenth floor, Chloe rang the appropriate doorbell. She buzzed twice more, knocked loudly, then shrugged as she felt her face redden. “I should have called to confirm. It’s probably rented.” She bit her lip. “I’m sorry.”

“We schlepped uptown,” Talia said. “Let’s call him.”

Chloe followed Talia’s suggestion, as she often would during the years to come. They retraced their way out to the avenue.

As they approached a pay phone on the corner, a tall woman, her sandy
hair cropped, took note of
The New York Times
real estate section in Chloe’s hand and stopped her. “Excuse me,” she said. “Are you here for 10-B?”

“Do you know the owner?” Chloe asked, thinking that Quincy Peterson, Columbia grad, was fortunate to have not only a large apartment but a girlfriend with no hips and cheekbones like jutting parentheses, the type of bones Chloe had always wished were the scaffolding of her soft, round face.

“I’m Quincy. I don’t own the place, but I did just sign a three-year lease.” She held up an orange and white bag. “Snacks,” she said as she smiled to reveal a slight gap between her front teeth.

“We like you already.” Talia grinned, extending her hand.

Quincy took in the elbow-length gloves. Actress/waitress? She hoped not.

“Talia Fisher.”

“Chloe McKenzie.” Her cheeks were nearly as pink as her turtleneck, her voice high.

Quincy shifted the bag to the other hand. “You two are my first customers this weekend.” They reentered the building. “
Buenos tardes
, Jorge.”

“Help with your package, Missus Quincy?” The doorman stood to his full five-five.

“I’m fine,
gracias
.” The elevator arrived as if it were expecting her. At the tenth floor, she opened three locks and the women were met by sunlight that blasted the vast, vacant foyer. Quincy placed the bag on the scuffed parquet floor. “Take your coats,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

Talia and Chloe followed her past a shiny brass chandelier as big as the scratched oak table beneath it. “Dining room,” Quincy announced as she continued toward four naked casement windows that faced west. Between two buildings, a sliver of river was visible a block away. Quincy cracked one window a few inches, letting in the cold. “Sorry—it’s an oven in here.” And none too quiet—a small orchestra’s percussion section rumbled from the radiators. “Why don’t you look around?” With that, she disappeared.

Chloe grabbed Talia’s hand and squeezed it tightly. “The place could use some work—”

“But we haven’t seen the rest.”

The first door off a hall opened to a bedroom, empty but for a rocking chair. On peeling wallpaper, purple irises clung to a background of green. The next door led to a bathroom. “Clawfoot tub,” Chloe announced. It was ancient, spotless, deep. She pictured herself soaking in froth and allowed a few bubbles of optimism to float to the surface of her big-city dream. She and Talia returned to the corridor. Behind the next two doors were bedrooms, each with a closet the size of a cupboard; the last opened into a larger room whose iron bed was crisply made with white linen. From a window, the Hudson shouted for attention. Chloe squinted into the sun, turned to Talia, and for the first time that afternoon noticed that she no longer felt a yoke of tension harnessing her narrow shoulder blades.

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