Chapter 7
Still, she was doing a good job of ignoring it.
Between reviewing Theo’s production documents and responding to her father’s barrage of texts demanding an update on three boxes missing from his move, she barely had a moment to unpack her own things, let alone acknowledge her ex living just a few floors above.
Thankfully, Cricket was in her final week of rehearsals, so Anne had the entire apartment to herself, and she could finally get around to making the windowless bedroom her own.
She hung her mounted print of Ada Lovelace above the bed and alphabetized her favorite books along the top of the dresser—A History of Pi by Petr Beckmann lined up ahead of a book by Edward Tufte about visualizing data, which sat ahead of Hawking’s A Brief History of Time—then fixed the dresser’s bottom drawer and printed out labels for its contents.
Of course, cleaning and organizing her room had slowly transitioned to cleaning the bathroom, which had spiraled into giving the kitchen a complete scrub-down, organizing the cabinets and pantry, filing the mail piled on the dining table, and systematically re-alphabetizing Cricket’s bookshelf full of movie scripts.
Four hours later, Anne collapsed onto her bed with a groan.
She was exhausted and smelled vaguely like disinfectant, but she didn’t care. She was officially moved in.
There hadn’t been many triumphs over the past few weeks, so she took a moment to admire her work.
The cobwebs that had clung to the corners were gone and the fairy lights were neatly coiled up in the hallway closet.
There were now shelves mounted above the dresser, each featuring color-coded bins labeled with their contents.
She even found space for a small nightstand where she placed her coveted tower of Post-its and a vanilla soy candle. She’d call that a win.
And a win deserved a celebration, didn’t it? Or at least some takeout.
She placed an order for dumplings and orange chicken from her favorite Chinese restaurant on Fifth Street, then took a quick shower.
Once she was dried off and feeling vaguely more human, she slid on a pair of black leggings and a sweater and pulled her still-wet hair into a ponytail.
Then she grabbed her laptop and sat on her newly washed duvet to watch an episode of Gilmore Girls while she unpacked a nearby box labeled MISC.
It was mostly books and pens, things that had been in her nightstand upstairs, so she simply started filling its drawers with it now.
It was mindless work, and she was only half paying attention when her hands lifted out a small plastic storage box.
Her heart faltered. For a moment, she could only stare at it while Lorelei Gilmore ranted somewhere nearby. She should just stash it in the back of her bottom drawer. Better yet, put it back into the cardboard packing box and forget it forever. But instead, she slowly removed the lid.
Dozens and dozens of paper triangles sat waiting inside.
Some were from lined notebook paper, others from blue stationery, a cacophony of random yellows and whites and creams. And all of them were from Freddie Wentworth.
Each and every note he had ever written to her.
In her more masochistic moments, she would read them, but as the years went by, the pain somehow compounded so she couldn’t even unfold one.
But she could never get rid of them, either.
Her phone began to buzz, startling her back to reality. She quickly closed the box and shoved it in the bottom drawer of her nightstand before looking to see her mother’s name on the screen.
“Hi, Mom,” she answered.
“Hello, darling!” Bianca Russell’s voice sang through the line. “You sound awful.”
Anne smiled, leaning back against the wall. “That’s because I’m exhausted.”
“How’s the new apartment? Please tell me it has a doorman. You need a doorman.”
Anne rolled her eyes, but only because she was safe from her mother seeing her do so.
Bianca Russell had been born into privilege and a trust fund, so the idea that life could be curtailed by a lack of funds or job prospects was entirely foreign.
Still, Anne couldn’t entirely hold her at fault—she had always been careful to avoid telling her mother how much she was doing for her father, and how little he was paying her for it.
She always thought it was a means of saving them both from embarrassment, but now it only seemed to feed into further untruths, like the one where Bianca assumed that Anne could somehow afford a palatial loft apartment downtown.
“Actually, I’m still in the Uppercross, just staying with a friend.”
A pause. “Like, a roommate?”
“Just until I find a job. No one is going to approve me for an apartment until I have a steady income.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. I can just transfer you some money so you—”
“No, Mom,” Anne replied, suddenly feeling like she was fifteen years old again.
They had been over this numerous times over the years, and no matter how many times Anne reiterated that she was uncomfortable with taking handouts, her mother never failed to offer it.
“I don’t need money. I’ll be fine once the show comes back. ”
“But who knows how long that will take,” her mother replied.
Then she hummed to herself, the way she always did when she was pretending to just come up with an opinion that had actually been marinating in her head for ages.
“Listen, I know you think you didn’t enjoy finance, but I’m sure that’s only because you jumped right in after Columbia.
You were burned out! If you went back now, you would feel differently. ”
Anne closed her eyes and let her head fall forward. She had always assumed that at some point, her mother would stop sharing unsolicited advice, but that moment never seemed to come.
“To be honest, Mom, I’m feeling a little burned-out now.”
“Then you should come stay with me in Paris,” her mother said. “The food is amazing, and the men are gorgeous.”
Anne wanted to laugh. The only thing that could make her feel more pathetic right now was going to see the City of Love for the first time with her mother. “How are things with Francois?” she asked, deftly diverting the conversation to safer topics.
For the next few minutes, she listened patiently to tales of her mother’s latest conquest, her subpar dinner the night before, and her continual health scares with her dogs, who had a habit of eating objects off the sidewalk that inevitably almost killed them.
It was all so predictable that Anne let her mind wander and was almost surprised when her mother asked: “So, who moved into the old apartment?”
A pit yawned open in Anne’s stomach. She had been hoping to avoid this topic.
“I’m sorry?” she asked, as if she hadn’t heard the question.
“Your father’s apartment. If you’re still in the building, I’m sure you’ve gotten a look at them. Is it a New Yorker or some rich European who’s never there?”
“No, not European,” Anne replied, trying to feign innocence. “You know him, actually.”
“I do?”
“I went to NYU with him. Freddie Wentworth?”
Anne wasn’t sure why her voice went up like a question. Her mother knew exactly who he was.
Silence filled the line, a signature Bianca Russell move, as if she had been caught off guard and was reassessing her next move.
“Freddie Wentworth?”
Anne took a deep breath to keep her frustration from bleeding into her tone. “You know Freddie Wentworth, Mom.”
Bianca tutted. “I wouldn’t say I know him. I only met him once. Remember?”
Anne’s frustration deflated quickly, replaced by a decade-old embarrassment. How could she forget?
Bianca Russell’s only encounter with Freddie had been a mistake, but one that wasn’t entirely Anne’s fault.
While she had actively worked to ensure that Freddie never met her father—she still cringed with embarrassment even contemplating how Walt would behave during such an encounter—she never really had the same worry with regards to Bianca.
It was only that her mother was so rarely in the city.
After her parents separated when Anne was in fifth grade, her mother began to travel the world rather than settle permanently in the city.
By the time Anne was in high school, Bianca barely spent more than a few weeks in New York throughout the year.
Anne still talked to her mother regularly, though, and in college, many of those conversations had been about Freddie.
She told Bianca everything about his dreams for his nonprofit and yet-to-be-defined career, and about his lack of concrete plans to make it happen.
And to her mother’s credit, she never prodded too much, even though she shared her opinions freely.
As a woman who collected relationships like other women collect shoes, Bianca was only too happy to use her experience to steer her daughter’s love life.
“Put yourself first, Anne. You have too much going for you to follow a man around the world while he figures himself out,” her mother would say whenever Anne told her about Freddie’s plans to travel after college.
“Your future is in New York, and if he loves you, he’ll stay and figure it out.
I know you love him, but you have to be selfish. ”
That had been Bianca Russell’s mantra since her divorce: Be selfish. Put yourself first. And as much as Anne would love to try, the idea felt diametrically opposed to every instinct she had.
But the thought still never left her head, either.
And instead of trying to reconcile it, she just relied on the fact that those two worlds would never meet.
After all, Bianca only ever spent time in the city over Christmas, and even then, it was usually spent at expensive lunches uptown.
The probability of a chance encounter with Freddie, one where she might share her uncensored thoughts with him, was negligible.