Parallel Hearts

Part I: Chapter 1 - The Beginning, Again

August 2019
Chicago

~~~~~~~

The moon perched high in a small roost of clouds above the urban sprawl, casting the buildings in a silvery glow as an inbound Blue-line train surged past a sleek, seven-story building. It sent low vibrations up through the brick bones of the structure, lightly shaking the corner apartment on the top floor.

In that apartment, only one dish—a clear glass teapot with a cracked lid—rattled on the shelf in the corner next to floor-to-ceiling windows.

From the view, lights from the buildings in the Loop twinkled in the distance against the backdrop of the late evening sky, brighter than the smattering of stars across it. Chicago in the late summer on a Thursday pulsed with an anticipatory energy, the skyline lights shivering in anticipation of Friday, perhaps. The apartment was quiet but for the rhythmic cadence of the passing train, the subtle hum of air conditioning, the faint, ever-present murmuring of city life...

...punctuated by the muffled sound of a fist hitting the other side of the door, accompanied by an exclamation:

"Mother$#%£&@!"

On the other side of the heavy door, in the hallway, Evie exhaled heavily and flipped her hair over one shoulder as she jiggled the key in the lock on the front door of her apartment for the hundredth time. Surely, this time will be the time it opens, she thought to herself. Or this time. She clenched her jaw and wrestled with the key again. Or this time.

Despite its newness. the apartment's lock had always been capricious, and tonight was already proving especially recalcitrant, requiring far effort than she had energy to spend.

Her journey home had been a series of delays; not the worst she'd experienced, but certainly not the best. First, the flight was pushed back due to "scheduling conflicts," twice. Just say the pilot got drunk , she thought. She'd flown this route enough by now that she knew the regular crew, and that unfortunately included both pilots. Once the flight was assigned a new crew, it was delayed yet again by three hours due to a summer storm sweeping through and causing "unsafe conditions for takeoff."

And once she made it back to O'Hare, the Uber home had been no less trying. Her driver, too anxious to pull a U-turn on Milwaukee, and instead of dropping her off on the opposite side, which would have been normal, reasonable, AND preferred, had nervously accelerated when he heard a car honk (politely) behind him. He zoomed several blocks down past her building. In hindsight, she regretted not calling for a car service instead; it would've been on the client's dime after all, but her habitual frugality won yet again. Her boss had only narrowly convinced her to take an Uber; when she first began working she would take the L train home, regardless of her time of arrival.

As a result, she ended up three and a half blocks down from her building entrance. She wasn't sweaty exactly, or not yet at least, but she was uncomfortably warm—thankfully it was not as humid as late August in Chicago usually proved to be—and a little cranky, and the lock situation wasn't helping matters.

It was 11:30 PM and she was more than ready to be seated in her apartment. After a red eye flight to NYC Monday morning, four long days entangled at a financial firm with a high-stakes project (and high-stress) client, culminating in the previously mentioned delayed flight back, Evie was more than ready to be home, but the lock, apparently, had other thoughts.