Walking uphill, heading home, Gwen ducked her head against the wind. Her mind was swimming with confusion, looking for the devil in the details, and as she walked, her fingertips purpled from the weight of her groceries.

Gwen paused and lowered her bags onto the sidewalk while she waited for the light to change. Standing there, she caught sight of a man in his car lip-synching opera with remarkable gusto. She could only hear the faintest swell of notes, but his animated hands and his pouted lips made him impossible to ignore, even at a distance. Something in his sheer liberty produced such an unexpected pleasure in Gwen that she almost laughed out loud.

It had been a long day on the heels of a long and sleepless night. Yet, pushing her fatigue aside, Gwen was hurrying home to get dinner started. Today marked her one-year anniversary with Oscar, her alleged boyfriend, and though her shopping bags bore the contents of a romantic meal for two, she couldn’t be sure he’d show up to eat it.

She arrived at her building a few blocks later and punched in her security code with her free pinkie. Unable to use her overloaded hands and elbows, she wrangled the door open against all odds and tumbled toward the elevator—an astounding relic prone to frequent, inopportune delays and a regular source of significant jeopardy. With its prehistoric pulley system and the acuity of a drunk old man, this elevator was among Gwen’s great adversaries; she frequently found herself stuck in its shaft, suspended face-to-face with time.

And yet it remained a risk she was willing to take. Gwen had a notorious habit of flying like a turbo-powered moth straight into the nearest flame.

That’s how she met Oscar. They were introduced by mutual friends at an Ides of March party where the ambiance flirted with fate and the details—lighting, laughter, little glossy baubles— were intoxicating. From the very start, he was fairy-tale tall and princely charming, and she couldn’t get enough of him.

Gwen had spent the first few months marveling at Oscar’s majesty, his razor mind, his deep affection for doughnuts, his ability to put any room at ease. But as the weeks went by she saw less of all that, and now the fog that had obscured her view was burning off like dew at dawn to reveal his impenetrable shortcomings. Almost suddenly, she could see their relationship fraying, as though maybe it had never been woven at all.

By the time the elevator finally arrived in the lobby, she could feel anxiety climbing the rungs of her spine, and she shuddered as she entered. The mechanical beast heaved its doors closed and began its slow ascent to the 11th floor as Gwen set down her bags, habitually pushing her hair behind her ears and picking at the tiny pills on her sweater. She breathed deeply and the cables clanged above her.

Last night had been nothing short of a neon revelation. Oscar had just returned from two days in New York, where his firm was bidding to gut a vacant building in Alphabet City and outfit it with green lofts. Meanwhile, Gwen hadn’t talked to him in over a week, though she’d been fairly engrossed in a project of her own, hanging antique wallpaper (found triumphantly on eBay) in her living room. She had recently finished a major shipment in the fashion design office where she worked and was hoping some hands-on nesting might clear her head.

Only she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Oscar, who’d been acting increasingly distant and strange, their communication reduced mostly to a string of infrequent text messages. It didn’t make sense to her: One day they were two atoms joined by a valence electron; the next his valence was already full. To reconcile this inconsistency, Gwen had been ignoring his absences and half-truths for quite some time. She adapted, she compensated, she compromised—and she never said a thing.

This effort was taking its toll—not just on her concentration, but on her heart. It got so that every time Gwen called Oscar she worried about whether he’d pick up, whether she’d leave the right voicemail. She felt embarrassed when people asked her how he was doing and she had to make something up. Then, while he was in New York, Oscar made plans with Gwen’s brother for drinks and never showed. Gwen was humiliated. Something needed to change.

So before Oscar waltzed in her door, Gwen was determined to confront him. But then he was there, effervescent and drug-like, tickling her with kisses as though he’d been returning her phone calls. Her resolve fell away all too immediately and the next thing she knew he was shaking martinis in the kitchen.

Most of the time, Gwen rode the elevator alone. Maybe because her neighbors had the sense to take the stairs, maybe because her timing was always off. But she often found herself hoping someone else might be waiting in the lobby or joining her on the way back down. She relished those little brushes with humanity, the occasional witness, the momentary chance to be in it together, with somebody.

With a bit of wit and a work ethic, Gwen effectively cloaked her loneliness in independence. Still, she hated to think it might take a full 48 hours—if not longer—for anyone to find her if she dropped dead in the kitchen (or plummeted down the elevator shaft) some random Tuesday morning. Her mother, recently divorced from her philandering second husband, had taken to cruising with a vengeance and had been sunning herself at sea for most of the last four months. Her sister was busy finishing a competitive medical residency in Chicago. And her best friend Josie was neck-deep in a blissful infatuation with a painter 20 years her senior, which often meant she didn’t surface for days, gorged, apparently, with incomparable decadence. Gwen did not, she calculated, regularly speak to anyone more than once every couple of days.

To take the edge off of this concern, she liked to make light of it by devising elaborate plans for her funeral. While her peers preoccupied themselves with weddings, she spent hours fantasizing about her last great party. She knew how she wanted to perform her last rites and what she wanted served at the bar. (For what it’s worth: White Russians, daiquiris and other hilarious drinks involving festive barware.)

Of course, these visions were vastly undocumented and wholly unexpressed in the company of other humans. Like so many things, Gwen thought a lot about it but never said a word.

And so the floors rolled by slowly, one dissonant ding at a time. The elevator crawled upward, moaning, drowning Gwen in her own resounding and resonant silence. She cast a glance at the lump of grocery bags at her feet and felt an urge to smash the bottle of Merlot against the elevator walls, to make a sound. But instead, she simply waited and wondered what she would say when she saw Oscar. The number eight illuminated above the doors.

Gwen knew this was it. This dinner would be the last one.

After too many martinis the night before, they lay apart between damp sheets, while rain collected in the windowsills with the weight of waterfalls. A new awareness began crashing through the walls in waves, leaving her chest heavy and flooded. A tiny cry escaped her lungs between a rumble of buses and sirens, desperate to release something deep inside: Maybe something or nothing or everything had changed. But the secret didn’t lie in whatever Oscar wasn’t. It lay in what Gwen had hoped he might be.

She got up quietly. In the dark, her bare feet padded down the wood floor as she made her way out back where the fire escape posed as a veranda, its concrete and iron transformed into something from another world, a balcony blooming impossibly with begonias in March. Her eyes searched the view for answers. Across the street, a man stood on the tennis court, bathed in its bright lights, his limbs cutting the dank air with tai chi, slow enough to watch grass grow.

Up above, Venus shined like a star and the urban rumble at the end of the alley took on the undulating roar of an ancient arena, the screams, the stampedes and the lingering echo of their aftermath.

At last, the elevator reached her floor.

When the end is clear and hovering, what’s left, still unspoken? Gwen walked back to the bed where Oscar was sleeping and paused. “I wanted you to love me,” she said.

And the doors finally opened.