Or at least, this is how I imagine it at night, after the Lyric has gone dark and the last of the audience has filtered out onto Broadway and the alley has gone quiet again. Grounds for Coffee still glowing on the corner. The wet pavement catching the light from the string lights overhead. The kind of street that feels like it’s keeping a secret.
I used an AI image generator to bring this to life, because Opera Alley as it exists in the novel is a composite, a feeling as much as a place, built from the Theatre District I know and the story I needed to tell. This image came closer than I expected to what lives in my head when I write Evie standing at her window, or Declan coming in from his morning run, or the two of them walking back along the alley in the April light.
This is the street they live on. I hope you can feel why I keep going back to it.
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