Chapter 7: The Berlin Winter, Two Years Later
The rain in Berlin had a way of making the neon bleed. Dasha watched it from the taxi window, streaks of red and blue dissolving on the glass like watercolour paints. The gallery opening had been a success—her project, a digital archive of East German protest posters, had secured another year of funding. Colleagues had clinked glasses of warm Sekt against hers, their congratulations sincere. For two hours, she had been exactly who she wanted to be: Dasha Waldorf, archivist, grant-writer, a woman with a purpose that fit neatly in her hands.
Her apartment greeted her with a soft, silent chill. She’d forgotten to turn the heat up. Shucking off her damp coat, she padded to the kitchen, poured a generous glass of a sharp Silvaner, and flicked on her laptop. The blue light was harsh in the dark room. Work emails first. Then personal. A newsletter from a film preservation society. A reminder from her dentist. And then, one with a subject line that stopped her breath.
From: marc.usher@waldorfagency.com
Subject: Hey—long time!
Marc. A junior agent from her father’s office. Nice guy. A gossiper.
Her thumb hovered over the trackpad. She took a long gulp of wine. Don’t open it. Delete it. But curiosity was a gnarled, tenacious root. She clicked.
Hey Dasha! Hope Berlin is treating you well. Saw your name on that documentary feed — congrats, seriously cool stuff. We all miss you around here. Crazy times, as always. Speaking of crazy, heard some news that kinda blew my mind. You’ll never believe it — Matt Bomer and Linda Cole called it quits. Like, months ago, apparently. Totally quiet, no drama, just… done. Wild, right? After all that time. Anyway, hope you’re well. Let me know if you’re ever in LA!
The words did not blur. They sat on the screen, precise and brutal. Months ago. Totally quiet. Just… done.
She felt nothing at first. A hollow, ringing silence, as if she were a bell that had been struck but made no sound. Then, a slow, cold seepage began in her chest, a feeling not unlike the moment the taxi had driven away, leaving her standing alone in the drizzle.
She deleted the email. Emptied the trash folder for good measure. The action was clean, final. She carried her wine to the window, leaning her forehead against the cool glass. The city stretched out below, a grid of unwavering lights, indifferent to the tiny circuits of hope and misery flickering inside its buildings.
So. He was free.
The thought arrived not as a liberation, but as a complication. An abandoned equation someone had left on a chalkboard for her to solve. For two years, she had structured her heart around a simple, unchanging fact: he was with someone else. That fact had been the foundation of her moving on. It was solid. It was real. It had allowed her to turn the kiss outside this very building into a relic, a foolish, beautiful mistake fossilised in past tense.
Now the fact was obsolete. The foundation shifted.
Her phone rang, buzzing against the oak desk. Simon. Their weekly call, right on time.
She considered letting it go to voicemail, but that would invite more questions later. She swiped to answer, forcing lightness into her voice. “Hey, Dad.”
“Dash! How was the thing? The art thing?”
“The gallery thing was good. Funding’s secure.”
“That’s my girl.” She could hear the clink of ice in a glass, the faint chatter of a television in the background. His LA evening. “Always had a good head for the boring stuff.”
“Thanks,” she said dryly. “The ‘boring stuff’ pays for my thrilling Berlin existence of spreadsheets and radiators that don’t work.”
He chuckled. “Speaking of thrilling, I ran into Connie Billington today. Remember her? She was asking after you. Said her son Oliver is moving to Berlin for some tech start-up. I said I’d pass his number along. Nice kid.”
Dasha closed her eyes. “Please don’t set me up with Oliver Billington. I remember him. He tried to auction his signed baseball cap for charity in the tenth grade and cried when no one bid.”
“He’s matured!”
“I’m sure he has. I’m also very busy. And very happy alone.”
A pause. A sip. “You’re too young to be happy alone, sweetheart. You should be…” He trailed off, searching.
“Out causing beautiful chaos?” she offered.
“Something like that.” Another pause. This one was heavier, loaded. “I saw Matt last week.”
The name, spoken aloud, was a physical jerk on the line. Dasha’s grip tightened on the phone. She said nothing.
“He came by the office. Looked good. Tired. We had a drink. He asked about you.”
“Did he.” The words were flat.
“Yeah. He seemed… I don’t know. Subdued. He and Linda, you know…”
“I heard.” She cut him off, sharper than she intended. “Marc Usher felt the need to broadcast it.”
“Ah. Well. It’s true. A shame. They seemed solid.” Simon, for all his Hollywood acuity, was a romantic at heart about other people’s marriages. “He’s taking some time off. Going to his place in Montana, I think. To clear his head.”
A cabin in Montana. She pictured it instantly, because he’d described it to her once, years ago, on one of those late calls. The silence there, he’d said, was so complete it got inside your bones. She’d imagined him there, often, during the Linda years. Now he’d be there alone. With that silence.
“Good for him,” she said, and the words tasted like ash.
Simon sensed the wall. He changed the subject, talking about a client’s lawsuit, a new restaurant he’d tried. Dasha offered monosyllabic replies, her mind a thousand miles away, in a mountain silence she had no right to imagine.
When they hung up, the apartment felt vast and charged. The news was no longer just text on a screen; it was a live thing in the room with her, breathing. He’s free. He asked about you.
She poured the last of the wine down the sink. She washed the glass meticulously, placing it upside down on the rack. She went through her nightly ritual—cream on her face, teeth brushed, the meticulous folding of clothes over a chair. Each movement was a bolt on a door.
In bed, in the dark, she lay perfectly still. The city’s nocturnal murmur was a distant sea. She thought about Montana. She thought about the cold snap of his kiss, the warmth of it, the devastating regret in his voice immediately after. A huge mistake.
Maybe it still was. Maybe his freedom changed nothing except the geography of his loneliness. Maybe he was just another man newly single, reaching back towards a familiar touchstone, a voice from before the fall.
But underneath the cool analysis, a darker, more visceral current pulled. It was the memory of his hands on her face. Not as a ghost from the past, but as a possibility. A present, physical fact. A fact that was, for the first time, legally, technically, permissible.
She turned onto her side, pulling the duvet tight under her chin. She would not call. She would not text. She would not let this news rewrite her. Berlin was her truth now, this quiet, ordered life her own. The girl who waited for a man’s attention was someone she had evicted, years ago.
Yet as she finally drifted into a fitful sleep, her last conscious thought was a line she hadn’t allowed herself in two years, stark and unbidden: He is alone now. And so are you.