Christmas came and went quietly.Ethan spent it at Carolyn's, which had been her suggestion and which he had accepted without the hesitation he might have felt six months ago, before the garden, before the mural, before the accumulation of conversations that had changed the shape of what family meant in relation to this particular set of people. Carolyn cooked with the focused competence of someone who found pleasure in the technical challenge of it rather than the occasion, and the food was very good, and they ate at the kitchen table rather than the formal dining room, which felt like a choice.Vincent came for two hours in the afternoon. Not for dinner, just the two hours, which was the right amount and which all three of them understood without discussing it, the new proximity between them still finding its natural distances, still learning how close it could be without becoming something that collapsed under its own weight.He brought a bottle of wine that was serious without bei

Spring arrived properly in the last week of March, the tentative warmth of the earlier visit replaced by something more committed, the trees in the neighborhood beginning their slow and determined return, the particular green of early leaves against the still-grey sky of a city that hadn't quite caught up with the season yet.Ethan noticed it on his walk to the Broome Street building on a Monday morning, the route he had started taking instead of driving, twenty minutes through streets that were becoming familiar in the specific way that streets became familiar when you walked them regularly, the faces and the storefronts and the particular morning rhythms of each block composing themselves into a geography he was beginning to know from the inside rather than the map.Pete's crew was three weeks from finishing. The space had completed its transformation from the gutted emptiness of February into something that was recognizably itself now, the bones and the new walls and the systems al

The Broome Street clinic opened on a Tuesday in the second week of April, which had been Selin's suggestion this time rather than Gloria's, and when Ethan asked her why Tuesday she said that Mondays carried too much accumulated anxiety and that by Tuesday people had remembered how to function and were more likely to walk through a new door, which was the kind of reasoning that sounded intuitive until you thought about it and realized it was based on years of watching how people moved through the world and what they needed from it on different days of the week.They didn't do a ceremony this time either, but they did something they hadn't done at Delancey, which was that the night before the opening Gloria brought the community walkthrough group back to the building, all of them, Carmen and Roberta and the man whose father had been to the emergency room four times and the woman who had taken three buses to a specialist and the teenage girl who translated for her grandmother and six or

The site meeting for clinic three was on a Wednesday morning, the last week of April, and Ethan arrived at the address Gloria had sent him to find that it wasn't a building.It was a lot.A cleared rectangular space between two occupied buildings on Hester Street, the kind of gap that appeared in city blocks after a demolition and then stayed, sometimes for years, sometimes for decades, the bureaucratic and financial conditions for filling it never quite aligning, the space sitting in the urban fabric like a missing tooth, present in its absence, the buildings on either side having long since adjusted their relationship to each other across the gap without acknowledging that the adjustment had happened.Gloria was already there, standing at the edge of the lot looking into it, and Clara was beside her, and Selin, and a man Ethan hadn't met who turned out to be a city planner named James Okafor who was Diane's brother and who had been working in the Departm

The architect's name was Nadia Not Patricia's daughter, not any relation that anyone could immediately identify, just the coincidence of a name that made Patricia do a brief double take when Ethan mentioned it at the next board meeting, the slight pause of a woman encountering a familiar sound in an unexpected context before her expression settled back into its usual composed attention.Nadia Osei was thirty-six and had grown up in the Bronx and had studied architecture in London and come back because, as she said in the first ten minutes of the Wednesday afternoon meeting on the Hester Street lot, she had gone away to learn how to build things and had come back to build them in the place that had made the learning feel necessary.She was tall and moved through spaces with the evaluating attention of someone who was always simultaneously in the room and designing the room, the two modes running concurrently, which meant that walking through a building with her was a different experie