Lukas woke before his alarm.The apartment was quiet in the way that packed apartments were quiet — not the ordinary morning quiet of a space that was lived in and waiting to be lived in again, but the particular stillness of a place that had already released the person it had been holding. The suitcases stood by the door. The kitchen surfaces were bare. The bookshelves that had spent three years holding the organized disorder of a working life were empty now, and the spaces where the books had been held the faint pale rectangles of their absence, like memories of objects rather than the objects themselves.He made coffee with the small stovetop pot he had decided not to pack because it was old and dented and New York would need its own kitchen objects rather than Amsterdam's. He stood at the counter while it heated because the chairs were in storage, and he watched the canal below the window catch the morning light — what there was of it, the cloud low and the sky doing what Amsterda

AfterThe apartment was smaller than anything he had lived in since his twenties.That had been deliberate. He had stood in three different places the relocation service showed him — all of them generous, all of them with the kind of square footage that announced a certain level of arrival — and had said no to each one without being entirely able to explain why until he was standing in this one, on the fourth floor of a building in Brooklyn that had no doorman and windows that looked out onto a street where people walked dogs and argued on phones and carried groceries with the unselfconscious purposefulness of people who actually lived somewhere rather than occupied it.This, he had said. This one.The first morning he woke before the alarm and lay still in the unfamiliar dark, locating himself. New York. Brooklyn. The fourth floor. The particular quality of silence that was not silence — the city underneath everything, always, a low continuous presence like a frequency you felt befor