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A novel by Danielle Marsh

TheThirdApartment

She found the journal behind the radiator on her third night. It ends, without explanation, on an ordinary Tuesday.

The premise

Every apartment holds what the last tenant left behind.

Nora tells herself this lease is the last one. Twelve months, high ceilings, a plant she doesn’t know how to kill. Then she finds a stranger’s journal behind the radiator — entries that simply stop — and starts pulling at a thread she can’t put down.

From Chapter III

What She Found
Behind the Radiator

The lamp on the floor cast the shadow at just the right angle.

It was a journal. Standard composition-book size, the cover dark green, the spiral binding slightly sprung as though it had been opened and closed a thousand times. No name on the cover. No identifying marks. Just a small sticker on the back, a yellow star that had been there long enough to yellow further at its edges.

She shouldn’t have opened it. She knew this in the same remote way you know things that are about to be overridden: a distant ping from the ethics module while the hands do what they’re going to do regardless.

March 4. The ficus is dying. I’ve been overwatering it. This seems like a metaphor.

The first entry. She checked the date at the top — a year and four months ago. Before she’d moved in; before the building had listed the apartment. During someone else’s tenancy.

A woman had lived here, had thought here, had been alive in these exact rooms — and had then, simply, stopped writing.

I read it in one sitting on a Sunday and then sat with the blank last pages for a long time. It gets the specific loneliness of a new apartment exactly right.

Maren OkaforAdvance reader

Contents

Eight chapters, one unfinished story

From move-in day to the Tuesday the journal stops.

  1. I

    Move-In Day

    The last lease, she tells herself. High ceilings, a plant she didn’t choose, and the particular silence of a place that isn’t hers yet.

  2. II

    The Plant

    A ficus the previous tenant left behind — and the slow, comic dread of trying not to kill it.

  3. III

    What She Found Behind the Radiator

    Three weeks in, at three in the morning, the radiator speaks. In its shadow: a dark green journal that doesn’t belong to her.

  4. IV

    Clara

    A name in the third entry, written in third person, as if its author were learning to watch herself from a slight distance.

  5. V

    The Building Super Has an Opinion About Everything

    Every building has one. Nora’s knows more than he says and says more than he knows.

  6. VI

    What the Neighbours Remember

    The lives a hallway holds. What people recall about a tenant after she’s gone, and how little of it agrees.

  7. VII

    The Second-to-Last Entry

    A normal night, a real plan for the weekend, written by someone with every intention of keeping it.

  8. VIII

    Tuesday

    Where the journal ends. Not mid-word, not dramatically. Just a complete entry — and then the blank rest of the notebook.

A note from the author

The third apartment is always the significant one.

I’ve moved eight times. The first apartment is shock. The second is overcorrection. The third is where you stop flinching and start paying attention. Nora is not me — she’s braver in some ways, worse at plants, more methodical in her grief.

But she moves in the way I always have: certain this is the one that will finally take, and equally certain she’s tempting something by thinking so. This is a book about the residue people leave in rooms, and what it means to read a stranger’s unfinished life and need, badly, to know how it ends.

Danielle Marsh

The Third Apartment — cover

She almost put it in the recycling. She almost did several things that would have made this a much shorter story.

Move in. Find the journal. Read until your feet get cold.

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