Chapter 2

Julia

Abby and I were at a party at Jake Fletcher’s apartment on the night of the opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics. The flat-screen TV in the living room showed a massive stadium filled with glittering lights. Jake shared this apartment, at the top of a high-rise building in the financial district, with three of his friends from Dartmouth.

“Holy shit. Look at that view,” Abby said. The Statue of Liberty was visible in the distance, through the window. “How much do you think they’re paying?”

“A couple thousand each.” The wraparound terrace, the sunken living room: Jake and his roommates may have been pulling down banker salaries, but this was above and beyond. “Right? At least. I’m sure they’re getting help from their parents.”

“You think any of them are single?”

I grimaced. “Ugh. Don’t even joke.”

“Hello? You’ve seen my shit-hole apartment, right? It might be worth it.”

She turned, expecting a laugh, but instead she saw me scanning the room again, frowning at my phone. She waved her hand in front of me. “Earth to Julia?”

“He’s two hours late. He hasn’t even texted.”

“Oh, don’t be such a mope. Come with me.” She grabbed my hand. Abby always knew how to turn things around. She was the youngest of five, and the Darwinian pressures of a crowded childhood had made her resourceful. She was like the stone soup of friends. Give her twenty bucks and a room and you’ll get a great party.

“Hold this,” she said, handing me her cup. We found an empty corner on the terrace, forty stories above the street. A constellation of cigarettes moved through the night air. Music thumped from the built-in speakers.

“Where’d you get that?” I asked as she lit the end of the joint.

“Here. We’re splitting this.”

“I haven’t smoked since graduation.”

“That’s no way to live,” she said in a choked voice, holding the smoke in her lungs. Then she exhaled. “See? This party is awesome.”

We’d smoked half the joint when I saw Jake Fletcher across the terrace. I waved him over.

“Hey, Jake,” I said. “This is my friend Abby. My roommate from college.”

Abby held up the joint, but he shook his head. “I wish. They drug-test us at work.”

“Where do you work?” Abby said.

“Lehman.”

“Oh, well, sorry about that,” she said. “Great party, by the way.”

Abby got even friendlier when she was high. She and Jake started talking. My attention slipped loose, which didn’t take much to happen these days. There was a pause in the music, and the next song that played was one of the big hits from the previous summer, a song I’d heard a million times on campus in the past year. I leaned out over the railing. We were at the edge of the island, where the East River curves into the harbor. The shorter, darker skyline of Brooklyn sat across the water like another city.

I could close my eyes, and the sounds of the party weren’t so different from those in college, but I wasn’t tricking myself. The feeling in the air had changed. There was a whole world out there, beyond wherever we were gathered. It didn’t matter whether it was a cramped walk-up or a tar rooftop or a weedy backyard strung with lights. How you spent your time was suddenly up to you. There were other options. Infinite, terrifying options opening up like a crevasse and no one to tell you which way to go. I think everyone was wondering, through the haze of weed and beer pong and tequila shots, whether this—right here, right now—was in fact what they were supposed to be doing. I suspected I wasn’t alone in detecting a desperation in the muggy air, people laughing too loudly, drinking beer that hadn’t been chilled long enough.

My reverie was interrupted by the sound of my name. I turned and saw Evan pushing through the crowd. Evan, who was more than two hours late, his tie in a straggly knot and dark circles under his eyes.

“Nice of you to join us,” I said, more sharply than I’d intended.

“I’m sorry, Jules. I got held up at work. There’s this big new project, and—”

“It’s fine.” My cup was empty, and that suddenly seemed like the most pressing thing. I pointed at the kitchen. “Let’s go get a drink.”

  

We took a cab home that night, up the FDR. The old Crown Vic groaned as the driver hunched over the wheel, his foot pressed down hard, swerving between lanes and urging the car to go faster. The meter ticked higher, and I felt a prick of guilt for taking a cab instead of the subway. I leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the window and saw the Pepsi-Cola sign glimmering up ahead like a lighthouse. I’d been unfairly terse with Evan all night. We both knew what he was signing up for when he took the job at Spire. I turned back toward him, intending to apologize and to ask him about the new project he’d mentioned. But his eyes were closed. He was already asleep.

*  *  *

I guess I’m having trouble knowing where to begin. It’s true, that summer was when the feeling descended. Those hot, humid New York City days and nights when I was nervy and jumpy all the time, a constant thrum underneath ordinary movements, a startled sensation like taking one too many steps up the stairs in the dark. It seemed obvious enough, the source of it. I had just graduated. I was trying to become an adult, trying to navigate the real world. Trying to find an answer to the question of what came next. Who wouldn’t be made anxious by that? The problem existed in the present tense. But sometimes I wonder whether I got it all wrong. I wonder how far back it really goes.

*  *  *

Junior year of college, Christmas break. I was home earlier than everyone else because I had a light exam schedule that semester. My parents were out, and I was wandering around the house with nothing to do. I pulled out an old hardcover copy of The Wapshot Chronicle from one of the bookshelves in the living room. A frail, yellowed photograph slipped from the pages. It was a picture of my mother as a young woman, wearing a loose paisley dress, her long hair parted down the middle. She was sitting on a flight of steps with a group of girls flashing peace signs at the camera. On the back of the photograph, in her delicate handwriting, was the inscription: REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS RALLY, WELLESLEY COLLEGE, 1975.

I shivered. Her hair, her smile: it was like looking at a picture of myself dressed up as a tourist from another era. I closed the book, put it back on the shelf. Then I took the book out again, removed the picture, and put it in my pocket. I kept thinking about it, all through that week, that month. How different my mother looked back then. She was the exact same age in that photograph—a junior in college—as I was in that moment. She never spoke about college. When she occasionally talked about the past, the stories always began in law school, never further back than that. Law school was where she and my father met. Both of them graduated near the top of their class and took jobs at high-powered firms before my mother left to raise me and my sister. I don’t think she ever stopped comparing herself to my father, who is a senior partner and a widely admired attorney. She excels in other ways instead: charity boards, meetings and lunches, a perfectly slender physique. Her energy is always channeled to productive ends. But maybe that wasn’t how she originally intended her life to turn out. Maybe there was another trajectory, one she’d been careful not to reveal to us.

But how would I know that? She doesn’t complain or wax nostalgic. She doesn’t tolerate moping—not in herself and certainly not in us. She was too busy shaping us into the best versions of ourselves. That was her job, and she was good at it. I turned out right. I fit smoothly into the world around me. My teachers liked me. I fell into a comfortable position within the social hierarchy: near the top of the pyramid, but not so high as to wind up a target of scheming usurpers. I never had a problem getting a date. I checked every box there was to check: friends, boys, sports, school.

It’s only now I see the red flags along the way. Cracks in the armor. I remember a writing assignment in English class, the year before I left for boarding school. Our class filed outside, notebooks in hand, and sat down on the grassy hill behind the gym. Our teacher told us to describe the scene around us in any way we wanted—to be creative, to free-associate. I never liked English as a subject. I never got what was so great about it. Still, I was surprised to find a bright red C on my essay and a note from the teacher asking me to come see him. He inquired, eyes full of concern, whether I’d understood the purpose of this assignment. I’d always done okay in his class before, even though I hated it. I could string together insightful statements about Hamlet, Lord of the Flies, you name it. But somehow, I couldn’t manage such an open-ended task. I struggled to fill those two pages. I had described the sights, the sounds, the smells. What else was I supposed to do? My stomach roiled with humiliation. What else did he want me to say?

But that was just one essay. One bad grade evened out by many good ones. The next year, I went away to boarding school, and I had never been happier. I started dating Rob. I played volleyball in the fall and lacrosse in the spring. I snuck cigarettes in the woods on Friday nights and sipped spiked hot chocolate at football games on Saturday mornings. I got straight As. Rob was recruited to play soccer at Harvard, and I was going to Yale. We agreed to try long distance, although I think both of us knew it wouldn’t last. And it didn’t matter, because on the very first day of school, I met Evan.

*  *  *

Three weeks after I found that photograph of my mother, I left for a semester abroad. She had been the one to persuade me to go. I’d lamented the idea of leaving, of missing Evan, of missing Abby and my other friends. “Don’t be silly,” my mother said. “They’ll be there when you get back.” She framed it as a decision to be made for practical reasons. When else would I get the chance to live in Paris? Why wouldn’t I take advantage of this opportunity? She was right, of course, but I had different reasons for going. Sophomore year had been a difficult one, a bad year capped by a particularly bad incident. I needed a change. I sent in my application the first week of the new school year.

That January, I flew to Paris on a red-eye and took a bleary taxi ride to a crooked street in the 11th arrondissement. That old picture of my mother at Wellesley came with me in my suitcase, and I tacked it to the wall above my narrow bed in my homestay. My host was young and gamine, with bad teeth and great hair. She was a costume designer for the national theater. She hosted students in her spare bedroom to make extra money, she explained, so that she could spend her summers traveling with her boyfriend. Her hours ran long and late, and I rarely saw her, but the apartment always smelled like her—strong coffee and clove cigarettes.

Except during our weekly Skype dates, I didn’t think about Evan much. I was too consumed by what was in front of me: the bottles of wine on the banks of the Seine, the afternoons in the Luxembourg Gardens, the yeasty scent of the bakeries when we rambled home from the clubs at dawn. I sank into it, like a deep bath, and I felt myself letting go of something for the first time. Evan and I planned that he would meet me in Paris after the semester ended. But when that day arrived, on the Metro ride to the airport, I felt sweaty and nervous. What if, these past months, I had changed—or he had changed—so much that we wouldn’t have anything to say to each other? I scanned the crowds at baggage claim, anxious not to miss him; he didn’t have a phone that worked in Europe. We’d spent time apart before, the previous two summers, when he’d gone back to Canada and I’d gone back to Boston. But this stretch was different. I’d learned to live in another country. He’d learned to live without me. Suddenly our plan—traveling through Europe for two months before senior year—struck me as foolish. What if he arrived and everything was all wrong? What if it was over?

Then I spotted him, towering above the rest of the crowd, in a ball cap and T-shirt. He saw me and smiled. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be wrapped in his arms, to feel the vibration of his laughter in his chest. Things did feel different. Evan felt like an old friend, an old lover, one whose reappearance in my life was sweeter for giving me a link between past and present. I was known; I was remembered, even far from home.

  

We flew back to Boston in August, pausing for a night, and then we got on a plane to British Columbia. It was my first time out there, my first time meeting his parents after more than two years of dating. His hometown was tiny, like a grain of sand on the map. That first night, in Evan’s childhood bedroom beneath the slanted rafters, in the modest house tucked among the tall pine trees, I realized that I had never experienced so much quiet in my life.

“Have fun, kids!” His mother saluted us with her thermos as his parents drove to work the next morning. She leaned through the window as they backed out of the driveway. “Oh, and Julia, my bike’s out back if you want to borrow it.”

We rode through town that first day, Evan pointing out the landmarks of his childhood: the high school, his first girlfriend’s house, the hockey rink where he’d spent so many hours practicing. Weeks, months, years of practice. Someone called his name as we were pedaling away from the rink. “Peck? Is that you?”

“Coach Wheeler?” Evan called back. The two of them hugged, the coach clapping him hard on the back. “Julia, this is my old coach, Mr. Wheeler. Coach, this is my girlfriend, Julia Edwards.”

“Where are you from, Julia?” He knew right away I wasn’t a local.

“Boston,” I said. “Evan and I go to college together.”

“How is it out there? Been meaning to ask your folks how your season was. He was the best player I ever had.” He winked at me. “No one ever worked as hard as Evan Peck. I knew this guy would go places.”

Evan beamed from the praise. They talked for a long time, catching up on Evan’s college career, on how close Yale had come to winning the championship that year. His coach asked whether he knew what he was going to do after graduation. “You going to try and play in the minors, maybe?” he said. “Or you could go over to Europe. You’re good enough for it.” Evan shrugged, his smile slackening, the light dimmed. I couldn’t read the expression on his face.

The next day, we biked over to the river to meet up with some of his friends. Most of them had stayed put, working construction or other odd jobs in town, still living in the houses they grew up in. They brought along beer and a waterproof boom box, and we went tubing down the river. It felt like something out of a movie. We floated with our inner tubes lashed together, our toes trailing in the cold water, the beer light and fizzy on our tongues. Evan traced circles on the back of my hand. He tilted his head back to look at the summer sky, a bright blue banner framed by the soft green fringe of the pine trees. “God, I love it here,” he said.

“Why did you ever want to leave?” I asked, with genuine curiosity. He seemed so happy, so comfortable.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it never seemed like enough.”

His mother picked us up downriver, and we strapped our bikes to the roof rack of the car. Evan offered me the front seat, but I shook my head and slid into the back. His mother turned around. “What did you think?”

“I loved it,” I said, and I meant it. We were silent for the rest of the ride home. I could see where Evan had inherited his tranquillity, the ease he could find in just about any setting. I imagined car rides from years before, his mother shuttling him to early morning practices, the two of them silently content in the other’s presence. The landscape out here had a way of shutting your mind off. We were all tired and happy, warm from the sun, hungry for dinner, and that was all that mattered.

The two weeks went quickly. His parents hosted a barbecue the night before we left. Nights there were cold, and by the time the burgers were sizzling on the grill, everyone had donned sweaters and sweatshirts. I borrowed an old crewneck emblazoned with Evan’s high school mascot. “Look at that,” his dad said, pointing at the sweatshirt with a pair of tongs when I approached the grill. “Julia, you could be a local. You fit right in.” Evan’s mother leaned over and said, “He means that as a compliment, hon.”

The next morning, on the bus that would take us back to the Vancouver airport, I waved good-bye to his parents through the window with a dull ache behind my eyes. How was it possible to be homesick for a place that I couldn’t call home, a place I’d only known for a handful of days? The previous two weeks had felt like an escape, different in aesthetic but not so different in essence from the way I’d felt in Paris. I realized, at that moment, that I had no idea what I wanted. There was so much out there. The bus shuddered and heaved into motion, and I blinked back a few tears. I was going to be okay. I had Evan, no matter what happened.

  

By senior year, my commitments had dwindled. Club sports, volunteering, writing for the magazine: the extracurriculars I had taken up with such diligent dedication as an underclassman were finally finished. I was working on my thesis, about Turner’s influence on Monet, and Monet’s London paintings. Other than that and a few seminars that met once a week, I took it easy—everyone did. Abby and I went out almost every night; someone was always throwing a party. The nights we didn’t, we smoked pot and ordered Chinese and watched bad TV. Things didn’t matter so much. The hurdles had been cleared, and we’d earned our break.

One night during the fall of senior year, I was sitting on the futon in our common room when Evan let himself in. He slept in my room almost every night.

“Hey,” I said, muting the TV. Then I looked up. “Hey. Whoa. What’s with the suit?”

He tugged at the cuff. It was short on him. “I borrowed it from one of the guys on the team.”

“Yeah, but why are you wearing it?”

“Oh. I went to a recruiting session. Didn’t I tell you?”

I had become vaguely aware of it a few weeks earlier—the flyers and e-mails from the finance and consulting recruiters. They made it easy, hosting happy hours and on-campus interviews, promising an automatic solution. I hadn’t pegged Evan for this path, and maybe that’s why it caught me so off guard. I thought I knew him too well to ever be surprised. That night, when he showed up in his borrowed suit, I didn’t say anything more. This phase would pass. I couldn’t imagine him actually going through with it.

But a month later, he told me he’d gotten called back for several interviews. We had just had sex, and we were spooned together in bed. He mentioned it in the same tone he might remark about the weather, but beneath that was evidence of a certain pride. Validation at being selected to interview. The thrill of success, even if it wasn’t permanent yet.

“That’s, um, great.” I hoped I sounded normal.

“Jules, I’m really excited. I think this might be what I’m meant to do.”

“When’s the interview?”

“And you know the best part?” He hadn’t heard my question, or didn’t care. “A job like this could get me the visa I’d need to stay after graduation. Wouldn’t that be great? To know that I could stay and not have to worry about it?”

In January, he had an interview with Spire Management, the famous hedge fund in New York. Even I had heard of Spire. Evan kept insisting it was a long shot, it was too competitive. People killed for jobs at Spire. But he got the offer in March. Suddenly he had an answer to that question everyone was asking: What are you doing next? Evan, working in finance in New York City. I don’t know what I’d imagined for him, exactly, but it wasn’t this. Evan, who was so old-fashioned in his decency, who was so patient and kind. Maybe he’d be a teacher, or a hockey coach in some small town. Or he’d start a company, or he’d go to grad school—but this? It almost gave me whiplash, but I seemed to be alone in this reaction. Evan was happy. Our friends were happy for him. I was the only one who struggled to adjust to this new idea of him.

  

“Julia,” Abby said a few days later. We were sitting around watching reruns of reality TV. “You know what? We should throw a party. For Evan. Tonight.”

“Don’t you have that essay due?”

A long bleep obscured a string of cursing from the real housewife on screen. Abby shrugged. “The class is pass-fail.”

“Okay. I’m in,” I said. “What else do we have to do tonight?”

But as we lugged cheap booze back from the liquor store, a nasty voice in my head, dormant for so long, started to resurface. What are you doing, Julia? What do you want? Why don’t you make up your mind? I had made absolutely no plans for the future, and that seemed okay, as long as I wasn’t alone. But as I looked around the party, I realized that I was the only person left. The only one without a job. Abby was going to be a teacher. Evan’s roommate Arthur was working for the Obama campaign. And Evan had secured one of the most competitive jobs in finance. Only then did I see it clearly: everyone was figuring it out. Everyone except me. I had no passion, no plan, nothing that made me stand out from the crowd. I had absolutely no idea what kind of job I was supposed to get.

Later that night, at the party, I overheard Evan talking to a friend of ours, Patrick, a tall guy from Connecticut who rowed crew. The guy Abby had slept with, freshman year, expressly to give me and Evan the room. Patrick still pined after Abby, but she had long ago moved on. She never kept a guy longer than a few weeks.

“You followed the news about Bear over spring break?” Patrick asked.

“Yeah,” Evan said.

I was standing several feet away, but they didn’t notice me.

“That was nuts. Feel bad for all those guys who got their offers rescinded.”

“I know. Jesus. What a mess.”

“Close call, too. My dad works at a hedge fund, and he was jumpy as hell. You know I was interviewing with Bear back in the fall? I’m so glad I didn’t go with them. Shit. Can you imagine?”

“Seriously. You’re going to Goldman, right?”

“Yup. By the way, congrats, man. You must be stoked about Spire.”

Evan’s eyes suddenly lit with anticipation. “So stoked.”

That expression on his face: a huge, satisfied grin. He didn’t know I could see it from where I stood. He had big plans for the future. He was going places. The system had deemed him exceptional. Why shouldn’t he feel a little cocky? When he told me about the offer earlier that week, he had insisted it was just a job like any other. “The main thing,” he said, “is that now I’ll be able to stay. Isn’t that great?” He didn’t want me to feel bad. And I didn’t. I didn’t really care. It hadn’t sunk in that there was something I had forgotten to do.

But when I saw that expression on his face, talking with Patrick about their jobs and the money and the city and the future, I realized that the way he was looking at me was different from the way I was looking at myself. Evan saw someone who wasn’t keeping up. Someone he had to tiptoe around. I felt a shift that night, when I overheard their conversation. It was also the first time I was aware that Evan had concealed something from me, that he had been anything less than totally honest.

A week later, he asked me to move in with him.

*  *  *

We didn’t bring much with us when we moved to New York: clothes, books, lamps, my futon and coffee table. It all fit into a handful of boxes and suitcases. We unpacked everything that first day. I even managed to hang our meager art—a few prints I’d gotten in Paris, my favorite Rothko poster from MoMA—strategically covering up the cracks and stains that showed through the landlord’s cheap paint job.

“Wow,” Evan said, grinning as he surveyed our tiny apartment, our new home. “This is awesome. I can’t believe we’re unpacked.”

He went into the bathroom to brush his teeth before bed, and a sob caught in my throat. The only thing that had kept me from losing it that day was the relentless distraction of unpacking. I caught a glimpse of myself in a window turned mirrorlike by the darkness. This was where I was: in a shitty fourth-floor walk-up in the shitty part of the Upper East Side. Tired, sweaty, dirty, and what was the point? Why was I even here? I didn’t have a job. I didn’t even have prospects. Evan and I would both wake up in the morning with nothing to do, with a day to spend however we wanted. Evan could enjoy it because it was sanctioned, an acceptable length of idle time before his job started. But this freedom, for me, came with a different weight. With the knowledge that every moment I wasted was another moment I wasn’t looking for a job. My breath grew fast and short. What was I doing?

Evan emerged from the bathroom, wiping away the remains of toothpaste. He saw me frozen in place. “Jules?” he said. “Jules, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, but the tears had started spilling over. “I’m…”

Evan led me to the futon, where we would sleep that night; we’d chosen the cheapest possible delivery option, and our mattress wasn’t going to arrive for another week. “Hey,” he said, rubbing my back. “Julia. Hey. What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” I said, tears flowing, trying to choke back the waves I felt rising through my chest. “It’s just—I don’t know—I’m tired, that’s all.”

We sat in silence for a long time. That’s one thing I’d always loved about Evan. He knew when it was enough just to be there; when nothing had to be said or asked. Several minutes later, my pulse slowed down, my breathing steadied. I felt like such an idiot. What was I crying about? If I didn’t have a job, that was my own fault, and it wouldn’t help to sit there and whine about it.

“Well,” I said, finally. “I bet you’re regretting this, huh? Asking me to move in. You’re stuck sharing a lease with some blubbering crazy person.”

I thought Evan might smile or laugh. The call-and-response of our relationship. But his eyes were sad. It was a pity I’d never seen from him before.

“Julia,” he said quietly. “Don’t say that. Don’t even think that, okay?”

Later, I got up to brush my teeth in our closet-size bathroom. Evan had kept an extra toothbrush in my room for years, but when I lined mine up against his that night, it felt different. A permanent version of what we’d only been pretending to do before.

*  *  *

By late June, three weeks into my joblessness, my mother was ready to intervene.

“Julia,” she said, already sounding harried and annoyed, even though she was the one who called me. “I only have a few minutes—we have to make this flight—but listen, sweetheart. I’m calling about the job situation. There has to be something more you can do. I can’t bear the thought of you just sitting in that apartment all day.”

Which was pretty much what I’d been doing that summer afternoon. I’d been feeling okay about the day up to that point—I’d already sent out applications for assistant openings at a small museum, a PR firm, and a publishing house—but my mother’s words punctured any feeling of progress. I was standing directly in front of our newly installed air conditioner, enjoying the luxury of the cold, and I reached out to turn the air up a notch, in a gesture that felt like spite. My mother, father, and sister were all flying to Nantucket that day. This was the first summer I wasn’t invited on the family vacation. My mother thought my finding a job ought to take priority.

“Mom,” I said with a sigh. “I get it.”

“Have you thought any more about what we discussed last week?”

“You mean taking the LSATs?”

“I’m not saying you have to go to law school, Julia. It’s just not such a terrible idea to have that in your back pocket.”

“Mom. I’m trying, okay? Trying isn’t the problem.” That was true, but it was an aimless kind of trying. I had applied for all sorts of jobs, anything that seemed remotely likely, but there was no unifying theme. The HR departments could probably sense the dispassion in my cover letters. That feeling had set in, and I couldn’t shake it: What was wrong with me?

My mother called back the next day, the roar of the Atlantic in the background. She told me that she had spoken with Mrs. Fletcher, a friend from Boston. The Fletcher Foundation was looking for an assistant, and I should send my résumé right away. “I don’t think it pays much, but Julia, you should take this job if it’s offered to you. I mean it. You really need to get going.”

The next day, I was in the office of Laurie Silver, the president of the Fletcher Foundation. “So you’re friends with the Fletchers?” she asked, peering at me over her glasses. She was small and birdlike, dressed in black, with silver jewelry that jangled and clanked every time she moved. “Yes, that’s right,” I said. “My mother and Mrs. Fletcher are involved in some of the same charities in Boston. And my father is one of Mr. Fletcher’s attorneys.” Laurie nodded, scribbling a note in the margin of my résumé. I had also entangled myself, briefly, with their son Jake Fletcher the summer before freshman year of college, but that wasn’t a topic for discussion. The Fletchers were extremely wealthy—he made a fortune in venture capital, and she came from an aristocratic southern family—and their foundation provided grants to artists, museums, and other worthy recipients.

“Well, Julia,” Laurie said. “You’ve come along at a good time. I’m in need of an assistant rather urgently. It’s paperwork and record keeping, running errands, basically pitching in wherever you’re needed. Does that sound okay by you?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then I’d like to offer you the job. We’d need you to start next week. The salary is twenty-five thousand dollars, plus health insurance.”

I nodded vigorously. “Thank you, Laurie. Yes. I’d be thrilled. Thank you.”

She stood up and shook my hand. “You can find your way out okay?”

It was the lunch hour, and the office was abandoned. I wound up looping the perimeter of the floor before eventually finding my way back to the elevator. I was dizzy with relief. Someone was willing to pay me for my time! No matter how paltry the money, no matter how humble the work might be—this was exactly what I needed. Balance had been restored between me and everyone I knew.

  

On my first day at the Fletcher Foundation, I found a list awaiting me, sitting in the middle of my new desk. The list, from Laurie’s former assistant, outlined in neurotically perfect handwriting all the tasks I would have to, in her words, “learn how to perform immediately.” By the end of the first day, I had them down pat. I wondered whether my predecessor was just not very smart. Maybe she had been fired, based on how challenging she seemed to find these tasks.

On my second day, I had an early morning e-mail from Laurie asking me to brew the coffee when I arrived. There was a small kitchenette with a sink and a microwave and an old drip machine. It seemed easy enough. When Laurie arrived twenty minutes later, I delivered a mug of coffee to her desk with two Splendas, as requested. She was on the phone. A minute later, she called for me to come in.

“Julia, thank you for the coffee, but I’m afraid—well…you didn’t use soap on the machine, did you?”

I had to think about that one for a minute. Soap? “Oh—oh, I’m sorry, Laurie. I washed out the basket in the sink and I used the sponge on it. Maybe the sponge had soap on it. I thought I should clean out the basket, and—”

Laurie sighed. “Yes, you’re right, you should clean it, but don’t use soap on it. Just use very hot water to rinse it, then dry it off with paper towels. You see, it makes the coffee taste like soap. I can’t drink this. Why don’t you ask Eleanor to show you what I mean? And if you wouldn’t mind making a new batch.” She slid the mug across the desk.

I rinsed the basket several times with near-scalding water. I wasn’t going to ask Eleanor for help. I had met Eleanor the day before, and she scared me. She was the foundation’s one-woman publicity department. She had red hair and a porcelain complexion and dressed like a Vogue editor. She had started five years earlier as Laurie’s assistant. I was sure she didn’t have the time to help me with coffee brewing. Meanwhile, I began to reevaluate my feelings about my predecessor. Maybe she hadn’t been fired. Maybe she had gotten fed up and quit.

Eleanor walked past the kitchen as I was very, very carefully drying out the filter basket. She stopped and stared at me from her towering stilettos.

“Oh, no. Let me guess. You used soap on the machine.”

I laughed nervously. “Yeah.”

“Don’t worry. It’s just one of her pet peeves. How’s it going otherwise?”

“It’s good. I think I’m getting the hang of—”

“Good,” she said, then glanced at her watch, which was large and gold and glinted in the light. “I have to get on a call, but why don’t we have lunch sometime? We should get to know each other. Next week, okay? Let’s say next Friday at twelve thirty.”

“Sure—yeah—yeah, twelve thirty is great,” I stammered.

“See you then,” she said.

That week and the next passed uneventfully. I kept minutes at the meetings: the fall deadline for grant applications was September 15; plans were on track for the gala in November. I answered Laurie’s phone, filed her paperwork, made polite small talk while I waited to use the copy machine. On Friday morning, at the end of my second week of work, the phone rang. “Julia, it’s Eleanor.” Her voice crackled from a bad connection. “I’m off-site this morning, so I’ll meet you at the restaurant, okay?”

The maître d’ sat me outside. Eleanor arrived ten minutes late. She tossed her long red hair over her shoulder and dropped her bag onto the seat next to her. She kept her sunglasses on. I wondered how she managed to afford all of it, the watch and the bag and finely made clothing. Surely the foundation didn’t pay her that much. She waved to get the waiter’s attention. “Iced tea, please. Julia?”

“I’m okay with water.”

“And an ashtray, too. Thanks.”

She pulled out a pack of Camel Lights and a silver Zippo. “So,” she said, leaning back in her chair, directing a stream of smoke from the side of her mouth. “Laurie tells me you’re friends with Henry and Dot.”

“I guess so. Really it’s more my parents. They’re friends with the Fletchers.”

“Close friends?”

“Kind of. My dad is one of Henry Fletcher’s lawyers. They go way back. My mom is involved in some of the same organizations as Dot. You’ve met the Fletchers, too?”

She smiled, like she knew something I didn’t. “Oh, of course. Henry and I do a lot of work together. I do all the publicity—which I guess you know by now—so I’m really the gatekeeper when people want to talk to Henry. We’re very close. And they are quite involved in the event planning. This gala might drive me mad, actually. Henry is as sweet as they come, but Dot can be a total control freak.” Eleanor ashed her cigarette. “She’s so stubborn. I swear, everything I suggest, she wants to do the opposite of. I don’t know what it is about her. You know what I mean?”

So this was why she had asked me to lunch. Even behind her sunglasses, I could see the hunger for gossip. Truth be told, I didn’t really know much about the Fletchers. Not at that point, at least. I’d said hello to them at parties for years, but that was it. They were rich, that was the main thing to know. I mumbled some assent, and Eleanor’s gleam faded to indifference, as fast as a scudding cloud. She glanced at her watch, calculating how much longer she’d have to endure with me.

We passed the time with empty back-and-forth. She perked up when I mentioned that Evan worked at Spire. “Oh, they’re great. Their CEO, David Kleinman, he bought a table at our gala last year. Those guys are legendary.” She laughed. “So I guess you’re doing well for yourself, then.”

After our plates had been cleared and we were awaiting the check—she kept looking over her shoulder to hurry the waiter—someone called her name from down the sidewalk. She pushed back her sunglasses, and she smiled for the first time.

I turned in my seat. Then I went cold, despite the sunshine. I turned back, and reached for my water to erase the dryness in my throat, my hand shaking. The person waving at her was Adam McCard.

Eleanor kissed him on the cheek. He turned to introduce himself to me just as I was standing up and trying in vain to smooth the wrinkles from my dress. Before I could remind him who I was, his mouth fell open.

“Julia Edwards!” he shouted.

He remembered me. Of course he did. He laughed, then hugged me. “I can’t believe it! It’s been—how long? Two years?”

“Something like that.” I smiled. Then I exhaled. My nerves were already fading. I felt shy, empty of anything to say, but a little part of me felt an old comfort return. Adam could always make me feel like I belonged, which in those tricky months after graduation was the most important and elusive feeling of all.

I saw Eleanor watching us—watching me—with unconcealed disdain.

“How do you two know each other?” she said.

“Wow. I can’t get over it.” He shook his head. “El, Julia and I went to college together. We both wrote for the same magazine on campus. Shit, we go way back. Wait—how do you guys know each other?”

“We work together,” Eleanor said. “Julia’s an assistant at the Fletcher Foundation.” She pronounced the word assistant with a distancing sneer.

“Man. This is crazy.” Adam looked at his watch. “Shoot, I’m actually late for something. Jules, I’m so glad I ran into you. I didn’t even know you were in New York. I’ll give you a call, okay? Eleanor, beautiful, you look as amazing as ever.” He walked backwards down the sidewalk, waving before he continued on his way.

“Well,” Eleanor said, donning her sunglasses again and reaching for the check, which had arrived at last. “You just know everyone, don’t you?”