Lavender could picture Cheryl’s apartment, a sudden vision in perfect clarity: high ceilings, gilded windows, art all over the walls. Everything would be vivid and intentional. A modern sofa, a refurbished oak table, trinkets from foreign countries displayed next to first-edition poetry books. The kind of alternate, moneyed life Lavender sometimes imagined for herself—a fantasy in which things had been different from the start.
