Under My Skin. Lisa Unger

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      I tap over the limestone floors of my lobby, breezing past the day doorman, who is on the phone but offers a friendly wave. In the elevator I text Ben and tell him to cancel my appointments and calls for the afternoon, that I’ve come down with a stomach thing. It’s not ideal, but I’m addled and shaky, in no condition to talk to clients or anyone else. Inside the apartment, I close and lock the door.

      Leaning against it, I slide down and sit on the floor, the long hallway that leads to the rest of the apartment dark, lined with photographs—his, mine, us together. The only thing I’ve managed to do since moving here is hang those photographs. Sitting on the hardwood, I think tears will come, but they don’t.

      Instead I notice that one of the photographs lies on the floor, surrounded by broken glass.

      I haul myself up and walk over to it, the apartment unnaturally quiet. The thick-paned windows on the twentieth floor keep most city noise at bay. The glass crackles beneath my feet as I retrieve the picture. Me and Jack, on our honeymoon in Paris. What a cliché! he’d complained. He’d wanted to go Thailand, lie around on some isolated beach, sleep in a thatch hut. But a Paris honeymoon was my only girlhood fantasy and he complied, because he always did. He always wanted me to have the things that I wanted. I can’t even tell where we were, a selfie so close that everything behind disappeared, our faces so goofy with love that it’s almost embarrassing to see.

      I hold the shattered frame. The picture hanger is still on the wall. And the photo seems too far from its original space to just have fallen somehow.

      My breath comes heavy. I should move back slowly toward the door and run downstairs to Detective Grayson. Instead, I turn and walk toward the living room.

      It takes me a moment to notice it, but when I do my stomach bottoms out. Sitting on the low coffee table between the couches is an orchid in a pot. A fat, snow-white bloom drips heavily from a bowed stalk. There’s a single white card tucked into the thick green leaves at its base, a note in black scrawl.

       I remember you.

       Don’t you remember me?