He finished the novel on a Tuesday morning in July, in the library on 114th Street, at his desk by the window, in the particular way that things end when they have been a long time coming: without announcement, without ceremony, just the last sentence, and then the blank space after it, and the quiet knowledge that the thing is done.
He sat with the quiet knowledge for a few minutes. Then he emailed the manuscript to his agent, a pragmatic and encouraging woman named Lena Cho who had been waiting for it for four months with patience that had, he suspected, been difficult to maintain.
He walked home through the July heat. The city was doing what it did in July — generating its particular summer energy, the tourists and the heat and the water ice carts and the kids on stoops and the tourists photographing things that New Yorkers walked past without seeing. He walked through it with the specific lightness of someone who has put down a thing they have been carrying for three years.
Mara was at the folding table when he got home, writing notation in the margin of the piano piece's score. She heard him come in and looked up, and she saw something in his face, because she always did.
'Done?' she said.
'Done,' he said.
She put down her pencil and came to him and put her arms around him and held him with the particular quality of holding that is about the thing being honored rather than the person comforting, and he stood in the middle of the small apartment and felt the weight of three years leaving through the soles of his feet.
'What does it feel like?' she said into his shoulder.
'Like something opened,' he said. 'Or like the thing that was keeping it closed is gone.' He paused. 'Like fog lifting, maybe.'
She pulled back and looked at him. 'You know fog doesn't lift,' she said.
'I know,' he said. 'You learn to move through it.'
She smiled. She went back to her piano piece. He sat down at his desk and opened a new document and wrote, at the top of the blank page, a single sentence that he did not yet know was the beginning of the next thing. This was how it always started. This was how it would always start.