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home to a Russian couple who used to give Sweeney bottles of homemade wine at Christmastime; a Bulgarian poet who used to ask her out at three-month intervals, as though she might have forgotten she’d already said no; and an assortment of students whose lives Sweeney tracked by the romantic partners who came in and out of the building, the cars with out-of-state license plates bearing parents and grandparents at graduation time, the nods hello when they recognized Sweeney on the street or on the T.
    It wasn’t that the new people weren’t nice. In fact, Sweeney had had a pleasant conversation with them a couple of weeks before, during which the wife had promised to invite Sweeney and Ian over for dinner. But Sweeney hadn’t felt like investing much time in the relationship since she knew she wouldn’t be on Russell Street much longer. Her landlord had told her he was selling the building. She’d sold some of her father’s paintings the previous winter, and the proceedshad swelled her bank account beyond any hope she’d ever had for it. She had thought briefly about buying the dilapidated triple-decker, but it was much more than she needed and she didn’t really want to go into the rental business. Her landlord had said he was hoping to sell by the end of the year, but she’d avoided thinking about it too much.
    And she’d avoided telling Ian about the conversation. When he’d first arrived in Boston, he’d taken a room at a hotel for the first few weeks, but it hadn’t been long before he’d moved into Sweeney’s apartment. She had found the whole idea of it somehow amusing: Urbane, English Ian, living in her shabby apartment with its noisy pipes and creaking floorboards. He claimed not to mind, but it had been only a month or two before he’d started dropping hints about the lack of closet space and bugging her about looking for a bigger place. Sweeney had chosen avoidance, changing the subject and trying just to go on as they were, ignoring the fact that Ian had planned to be in Boston for six months and he was now coming up on the eighth. He flew to Paris once a month to see his daughter, but Sweeney knew it bothered him being so far away.
    As she climbed the stairs to her apartment, however, she felt a little wave of pleasure at the thought that he was there, waiting for her. She smelled something delicious as she opened the door and was greeted by the sight of her boyfriend—for lack of a better word—lighting a candle at her already-set dining room table.
    “Hey,” he said. “Steaks are almost done.”
    “Steaks? Mmmm.” She dropped her bag in her office, stopped in the bathroom to splash cold water on her face, and went through to the kitchen, where Ian now had his head stuck out the window, checking the steaks on Sweeney’s fire escape hibachi. She could smell them cooking, could smell something tangy and salty, probably his famous teriyaki-ginger marinade. He ducked back in and she hugged him from behind. “I could get used to this.”
    As soon as she’d said it, she wished she hadn’t. She couldn’t seethe expression on his face, but his voice was amused as it said, “That’s the point.”
    She pulled away and found two wineglasses, then filled them from the bottle of red on the table. “The General around?”
    Ian took his glass. “He made an appearance when he smelled the steaks, but when he realized I wasn’t going to give him any, he returned to his nightly perambulations.”
    “His nightly perambulations?”
    “There’s something about that animal that has me using words like ‘perambulations’.”
    Sweeney smiled. Ian, who had grown up with dogs, didn’t much like cats, but he’d been very understanding about the General. The cat had been rude after Ian moved in, carrying his socks into the bathroom and dropping them in puddles of water from the shower, and leaving mouse entrails in his perfectly polished shoes. Sweeney had tried to convince Ian that the mouse parts