My name is Lin You, twenty-six, and I flew to New York alone to work as an assistant at a gallery in Chelsea. Rent was terrifying, so in the end I took a room on the garden floor of an old brownstone on the Upper East Side. The landlord was named Vance, and only on the day I signed the lease did I learn that two brothers lived in that house.
The older one, Julian, was a partner at a hedge fund, sharp-suited, his eyes as cold as the Wall Street wind in January. Sliding the lease across to me, all he said was: "The rules are on page two. The penalty clauses on page three." The younger brother, Leo, was his opposite. He came down with a guitar, grinning as he carried my bags. "Do not mind my brother," he said. "He runs warmer toward contracts than toward people."
That night, unpacking on the garden floor, I heard a piano upstairs. It was Julian playing. A man so cold, and the music impossibly tender. At the other end of the hall, Leo leaned in and handed me a mug of hot cocoa. "Welcome to New York." Caught between the two brothers, I did not yet know that all winter long, the two of them would take turns undoing my heartbeat.