The elevator smells like leather and expensive cologne, and the particular kind of quiet that only exists when everyone in the room is pretending they're not nervous.
I'm nervous.
I press my portfolio tighter against my chest and stare at the climbing numbers and tell myself what I always tell myself: you prepared for this. You are ready for this. You want this. Three sentences. I've been saying them since I was eighteen years old, and they have never once stopped my hands from shaking.
Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Thirty-three, Hartwell & Associates occupies the top two floors of a Manhattan building that was designed to make you feel small. I looked it up last night at midnight, sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor surrounded by three empty coffee cups and a highlighter I'd chewed the cap off of founding partner James Hartwell established 1987, ranked in the top five corporate law firms in New York for eleven consecutive years, a specialist in medical malpractice, corporate litigation, and high-stakes civil cases.
I had read the same paragraph four times before I realised I wasn't absorbing it anymore. I was just reading to have something to do with my hands; I do that a lot. Fill silence with noise, fill stillness with motion, fill the empty hours with anything that isn't thinking. My therapist, the one I saw for eight months in my second year and then quietly stopped seeing because she kept asking questions I didn't have answers to, said it was a coping mechanism, a way of outrunning grief.
I told her I wasn't grieving anything. She wrote something in her notebook and didn't argue.
The doors open on thirty-four.
My reflection stares back at me from the polished steel for just a second before I step out.
Black blazer, hair pulled back into something that took me forty minutes to make look effortless, the face I have spent four years perfecting. The face that says I am fine. I am focused. I am exactly where I want to be.
I have gotten very good at that face.
The reception area is marble and money, and carefully curated abstract art in shades of grey and gold. A woman with a headset and the calm, efficient energy of someone who has survived several corporate restructurings looks up at me with an expression that communicates, politely, that she has processed approximately ten thousand interns and found none of them particularly interesting.
I decide immediately that I want her to find me interesting.
"Nora Callum," I say. "New intern."
She types something without looking at her keyboard. "Third door on the left. Mr. Hartwell will be with you at nine."
"Thank you."
I walk to the third door on the left and sit down in a chair that probably costs more than my monthly rent and open my portfolio and close it and open it again.
Stop it, I tell myself. You look unhinged.
I closed the portfolio, put it on my lap, fold my hands on top of it, and breathed. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Jade taught me that, back in our first year when I showed up to her dorm room at 2am shaking, and she sat me on her bed and talked me through it without asking a single question. That was how I knew she was going to be my person. She understood, instinctively, that sometimes what someone needs is not answers. Sometimes what someone needs is just a hand on their back and the sound of another person breathing.
I think about texting her. I made it. I'm in the chair. I haven't embarrassed myself yet.
I don't. Because if I text Jade, I will want to call her, and if I call her she will ask me how I'm really doing, and if she asks me that, I will have to actually think about the answer.
And right now, I cannot afford to think about the answer.
The answer is complicated.
The answer is: okay, Most days.
The answer is: I built something here. This city, this degree, this internship, this chair I'm sitting in I built all of it from nothing, from the wreckage of a version of myself I don't think about anymore. And I am proud of it in the way you are proud of something that cost you more than you expected to pay.
The answer is also, if I'm being honest and I rarely am, even with myself, that I am twenty-two years old and I have not let myself want anything I thought I could lose in a very long time, and some mornings that feels like wisdom and some mornings it just feels like an apartment with no photographs on the walls.
I press my thumbnail into my palm. Hard. A small, private thing.
It means: you are here. This is real. You worked for this.
I breathe.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, Manhattan spreads out in every direction, grey-gold and enormous in the early October light. From up here the yellow taxis look like toys, and the people look like punctuation marks and the whole city looks like something someone built just to prove it could be built. I have lived here for four years and I still catch myself staring at it sometimes. Still find myself thinking: this city doesn't care about you, Nora Callum, and somehow that is the most comforting thing in the world.
New York doesn't ask questions.
New York doesn't look at you like it's waiting for you to fall apart.
New York just moves, and you move with it, and eventually, moving is the only thing you remember how to do.
The door opens at exactly nine o'clock.
"Ms. Callum." James Hartwell is sixty, silver-haired, with the kind of firm handshake that belongs to a man who has never once in his adult life second-guessed a decision. He looks at me the way people always look at me when they first see me, a quick, quiet calculation. Young. Female. Trying very hard. Remains to be seen.
"Welcome to Hartwell."
"Thank you." My voice is even. Perfectly steady. The face. The voice. The posture. "I'm glad to be here."
He sits across from me and opens a folder, and I watch him scan whatever is inside it; my application, my transcript, my references, the total of everything I have worked for reduced to two pages of bullet points — and for just a moment, one unguarded moment, I want to know what he sees.
Not the transcript. Not the grades.
Me! What he sees when he looks at me.
I wonder if he sees someone whole.
I wonder that about people sometimes. Whether they can tell. Whether there is something in the way I hold myself, some hairline fracture in the face I've perfected, that gives away the fact that I am a person who was broken once and put herself back together and has been very careful ever since not to do anything that might crack the seams.
Hartwell looks up from the folder.
"Third in your class at Columbia," he says. "Constitutional law focus. Professor Whitmore speaks very highly of you." A pause. "She doesn't speak highly of many people."
"Professor Whitmore has very high standards," I say. "I try to meet them."
Something shifts in his expression. Not a smile exactly, an adjustment, a recalibration.
It remains to be seen whether it becomes something.
I file that away and keep my face very still.
He spends the next twenty minutes walking me through the structure of the firm, the expectations for interns, the cases I'll be supporting, and the hierarchy I'll be operating within. I listen. I take notes in the small leather notebook I bought specifically for this internship. I ask two questions precise, considered questions that demonstrate I have done my research without making him feel like I'm showing off.
He seems satisfied, I seem satisfied.
We are two people performing competence at each other, and we are both very good at it, and by the time we shake hands again at the end of the meeting, I feel, genuinely, that I have earned my seat at this table.
It is a good feeling.
I hold onto it as his assistant shows me to my workspace; a glass-walled office I'll be sharing with two other interns who haven't arrived yet, a desk with a new legal pad and a pen, and a login card for the firm's case management system. I set my portfolio down. I take off my blazer and hang it on the back of the chair. I sat down, logged in, and looked at the list of active cases I've been assigned to support.
Medical malpractice, Corporate litigation, and at the top of the list, flagged as priority, a case involving a hospital called Mercy General.
I clicked on it without thinking.
I read the opening summary.
I closed it again.
I sat for a moment with my hands in my lap and the October light coming through the glass and the hum of the city thirty-four floors below.
It's a common name, I tell myself. There are probably dozens of hospitals in this city. It doesn't mean anything.
I press my thumbnail into my palm. It means you are here, this is real. It means you are fine.
I opened the case file again and started reading. I am a professional, and I am exactly where I want to be, absolutely, completely, entirely fine.
The door to the intern office opens, and my two new colleagues introduce themselves. I smiled, shook their hands, warm, present, and everything I'm supposed to be.
And in the locked room at the back of my mind, behind every door I have ever shut and bolted and walked away from, something stirs again.
"Ethan"
I closed my eyes for one second, then opened them, smiled, and got back to work.