Blackout

Nine days of heat. One dead power grid. One man downstairs she has only ever spoken to on paper.

Gia Romano is thirty-three, a cellist with an audition on Saturday that could finally change her life, and she has spent the whole summer practicing at midnight on the top floor of a Brooklyn brownstone with the windows thrown open. Long dark waves, olive skin, red lips, curves she stopped apologizing for years ago, and a habit of playing in the thin red satin slip she sleeps in when the city turns into an oven.

Elias Kovač is the stonemason restoring the front of the house. Thirty-seven, six foot three, thick dark hair, a close dark beard, and a sun-browned, stone-hauling body that has been on the scaffold outside her window every morning since June. They have exchanged maybe forty words out loud. They have exchanged a hundred notes under each other's doors.

Then the lights go out across half of New York, and he knocks.

Now the roof is lined with candles, the moon is enormous over the harbor, Midtown glitters across the water, the ice is melting fast, and the scaffold comes down Monday. Every neighbor on Larch Street knows exactly where the two of them went. And every roof in Carroll Gardens has a view.

She has waited all summer for him to knock. He has waited all summer for her to ask. Tonight, in the dark, neither one of them is going to wait anymore.