On the ninth night of the lockdown, Nina carried her wine out to the balcony because the flat had begun to feel like a held breath, and found that she was not the only one. Across the airshaft — close enough to throw a coin, far enough that the rules said it might as well be another country — a man stood on his own balcony in the dark, and lifted his glass to her as though they had agreed to meet.
"Same time tomorrow?" he called, when the bottle was done and the city had gone quiet under its curfew. He said it like a joke. She said yes like one too.
But she came back the next night, and so did he. Across six feet of forbidden air they traded the small currency of two suspended lives — what they were reading, what they were pretending to cook, the names of the planes that no longer crossed the sky. She learned that he was a music teacher with no students, that he hummed when he thought she couldn't hear. He learned that she laughed before she finished her own sentences. Three weeks in, on a night thick with jasmine and sirens, he went quiet and then said, careful as a man stepping onto ice, that he didn't know her surname, her floor, or her phone number — and that he was suddenly afraid of the day the doors would open and the country between them would close.
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