The apartment cost two hundred dollars a month. Frank Delaney could afford it because he wasn't spending money on anything else. Not really. He drank, but not enough to make a problem of it. He ate, but not enough to make a habit of it. He had a job, but not enough of one to make it a career.

The window faced east. Across a narrow alley, there was another building, and in that building, on the third floor, there was a window. And in that window, there was a woman.

Frank saw her on a Tuesday. He was standing at his window with a beer, looking at nothing in particular, when he noticed her. She was sitting in a chair. She wasn't doing anything. Just sitting. Looking at her own window, maybe. Or looking out. Or looking at him. He couldn't tell.

He finished his beer. He went to the kitchen. He opened another beer. He stood at the window again. She was still there.

That night, he dreamed of a bridge.

In the dream, he was standing on an old iron bridge that crossed the Ohio Canal outside Youngstown. The bridge was rusted and narrow, with railings that had once been painted green and were now the colour of dried blood. She was standing in the middle of the bridge, looking at him. She didn't speak. She just looked at him. And he knew, in the way you know things in dreams, that she was waiting for him to say something. But he couldn't remember what.

He woke up. The beer was on the windowsill. He didn't remember putting it there.

The next day, he went to the bridge. It was a Saturday, and the town was half-asleep, the streets mostly empty except for a few cars and a man pushing a cart full of cans. Frank parked his car, got out, and walked onto the bridge. The metal groaned under his feet. The canal water was brown and slow, moving past like it had somewhere to be but no particular hurry.

He waited for two hours. She didn't come.

He went home. He opened a beer. He stood at the window. She was there.

Weeks passed. He stood at the window most nights. Sometimes she was there. Sometimes she wasn't. When she was there, she did the same things: sat in a chair, sometimes read, sometimes watched television, sometimes just sat. He never saw her leave. He never saw her arrive. She was either there or she wasn't, like a light switch someone else controlled.

He wanted to know her name. He wanted to know what she did for work, whether she had a boyfriend, whether she was happy or unhappy or somewhere in between. He wanted to know all these things the way a man wants air when he's underwater—desperately, without thinking about it, the way your body demands something your mind can't live without.

He didn't go to the bridge again. But he thought about it. Every night, standing at the window, he thought about going back. And every night, he didn't.

One night, he dreamed of her again. Same bridge. Same silence. But this time, she spoke.

"Why don't you come see me?" she said.

"I tried. At the bridge. You weren't there."

"That wasn't the bridge you were looking for."

He woke up. The room was dark. The beer was on the windowsill. He didn't remember opening it.

He went to the post office the next day. He got a water bill. A lottery ticket—he hadn't bought it, but it had arrived anyway, probably a mistake. A greeting card. His birthday had been two weeks ago. Nobody had called.

He stood at the window that night. The woman was there. She was sitting in her chair. She was looking at him. He looked back.

Something moved in his peripheral vision. He turned his head. Across the alley, in the building opposite, the third-floor window was dark.

He blinked. The window was dark.

He stood there for a long time, watching the dark window. It stayed dark. He went to the kitchen. He opened a beer. He stood at the window again. The window was still dark.

Maybe she had moved. Maybe she had gone out. Maybe she had turned off the light. These were reasonable explanations. Frank was a reasonable man. He accepted reasonable explanations.

He went to bed. He didn't sleep well.

The next night, the window was dark. The night after that, the window was dark. He told himself she was just on vacation. People went on vacation. People moved. People disappeared. It happened all the time, especially in a town like Youngstown, where people left when they could and arrived when they had to.

He didn't stand at the window much after that. He still had the beer. He still had the job, which was driving a forklift at a warehouse that processed scrap metal. He still had the apartment, which was small and quiet and faced east. But he didn't stand at the window. He told himself it was because he had better things to do. It wasn't.

Sometimes he drove past the old iron bridge. He didn't stop. He didn't. He told himself this was a choice. It wasn't.

He sat in his kitchen one evening, drinking a beer, looking at the darkness outside his window. The building across the alley was dark. The third-floor window was dark. All the windows in that building were dark. Maybe the building was empty. Maybe it had been empty for months. Maybe he had imagined the whole thing.

He didn't. He knew he hadn't. He had seen her. He had seen her sitting in that chair, in that window, on those nights. He had seen her.

But he also knew that seeing something and knowing what it means are two different things. He had seen her. He didn't know what it meant.

He turned off the kitchen light. He sat in the dark. He drank his beer. He listened to the sounds of the town outside—a car passing, a dog barking, the distant hum of a highway that led somewhere he wasn't going.

The window across the alley was dark. He turned his own window shade down.

Nothing happened. Nothing was going to happen. He sat in his kitchen, drinking his beer, looking at the dark window across the alley, and he knew, with a certainty that was neither hopeful nor hopeless but simply certain, that nothing had happened and nothing ever would.

He finished the beer. He put the bottle in the sink. He went to bed. He slept, or he didn't. In the morning, he would wake up and go to work and drive the forklift and process the scrap metal and come home and open a beer and stand at the window and look across the alley at a dark building and tell himself that nothing had happened.

And it hadn't. It never would.

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