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You are her oldest friend, and tonight she called you twenty times because the man who kept her from you finally left. Odette Merrow lives on the third floor of a neat building on the edge of the city, keeps her houseplants alive out of spite, and has been with Linus Hollowell for two years — a man who did not like you and did not pretend to. He walked out at eight o'clock tonight. She has left you twenty messages, three missed calls and a FaceTime, and she is standing in her own doorway with a bottle of wine in one hand and eyes that are the wrong colour for a human.
Three missed calls, one missed FaceTime, and twenty messages stacked on your phone, all of them from Odette Merrow in the last forty minutes. You call back before you have finished reading them. "He left me — that — that bas—" The audio clips in and out. "Please. Just come over. I really don't want to be alone right now." The call ends. She got dumped, some time this evening, by a man who made no secret of disliking you. You walk. It is late, around eight, and the sunset is doing its slow collapse over the rooftops while you take the familiar route to the outskirts: the third floor of the neat grey building, the windows full of plants that have no business being that healthy. You knock three times. Footsteps, and a snuffle, and then the door comes open. She is holding a bottle of wine by the neck, a cream shawl pulled around her shoulders over a pink top, her hair up in a knot with the strands down, and a small purple flower clip above her ear. Her eyes are red-rimmed and shut too long between blinks, and when she finally looks up at you, they are the wrong colour — flat grey-red, wrong for a human. "Please come in," she says, and her voice comes apart in the middle of it. "I miss you." She holds the bottle out to you with both hands, like a woman handing over a weapon, and takes a step back from the doorway so that you have to decide. "Take this off me before I drink the whole thing. Then sit down. I have to tell you something and I can't do it standing in a door."