The Note

THE LIBRARY  —  FICTION

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She found the note on a Monday morning, slipped under her apartment door sometime in the night. No envelope. Just a single folded page in handwriting she didn’t recognize.

I have been trying to work up the nerve to say this for six weeks. I think about you more than is probably reasonable. I don’t know what to do with that except tell you.

No name. No apartment number. Just those two sentences and the particular quality of silence that follows something that can’t be untold.

She stood in her doorway for a long time, re-reading it. Thinking about the six weeks. About whoever had spent six weeks carrying this and then finally, in the dark of a Sunday night, decided that the carrying was worse than the saying.

She thought about the neighbors she knew by face and the ones she only knew by sound — the man on the third floor who played piano badly and with great feeling, the woman above her who wore heels at midnight, the person across the hall she’d only ever seen once, holding a cup of coffee and looking at her with a kind of careful attention that she’d noticed and then immediately told herself she hadn’t.

She folded the note and put it in her coat pocket. Went to work. Came home. Stood in the hallway outside her door for a moment before going in, aware of the building around her in a way she hadn’t been before — its breathing, its weight, its small interior lives.

She didn’t write back. Not yet. But she left her door open an inch that evening, longer than she needed to. Just to see.

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EDITOR’S PICK  —  CURATED BY VESPER