Chapter 24
Elena
I know who she is. My brain, which is currently operating at approximately forty percent of its usual processing speed, is handling this information in stages.
Stage one: recognition.
Stage two: understanding of what she is seeing, which is me, in Patrick’s shirt, with bare feet, with hair that is a complete account of the last eighteen hours, standing in the doorway of her son’s house on a Sunday morning, as high as I can be.
Stage three: a complete failure to produce a normal response.
“Good morning,” I say, in a British accent.
I don’t know where it comes from. My brain, in its infinite panicked wisdom, has apparently decided that the appropriate response to this situation is to be elegant; its reference point for elegance is British.
So here we are. I sound like I am presenting a nature documentary.
I sound like I went to school somewhere with a crest on the blazer.
Patrick’s mother blinks.
“I’m—please, come in,” I say, still British, stepping back and gesturing at the apartment with the gracious sweep of someone who has hosted many such Sunday morning visits. “Can I get you something? Tea?”
Patrick appears behind me, wearing nothing but his boxers.
I can feel him before I see him, the specific quality of his stillness.
I turn, his face is doing something I have never seen it do before, which is the absolute maximum effort of a man trying very hard not to laugh while simultaneously managing an emergency.
“Mom,” he says. “This isn’t a good time.”
“I can see that,” she says, in a tone that contains an entire paragraph.
She looks at me. I look at her. I am still, inexplicably, holding the door open as if she is going to come in, sit on the opinionated couch, have tea…which she is obviously not going to do.
“It was lovely to…” I start.
“Elena,” Patrick says gently.
“Right.” I step back. He moves past me to the door, says something to his mother in a low voice.
A brief exchange follows that I can’t fully follow because most of my available processing power is occupied by the ongoing question of why I suddenly have a British accent.
After approximately ninety seconds he closes the door and turns around.
He looks at me.
I look at him.
“I don’t know where the accent came from,” I say, in my normal voice.
He puts his hand over his mouth.
“I just… it came out,” I say.
His shoulders are shaking.
“Don’t,” I say.
He laughs, really laughs, all at once, no restraint left.
I repeat, can I get you some tea in the accent, and that does it. We both lose it until we can barely stand.
We sleep until two.
I know it’s two because Patrick’s alarm goes off, which I did not know he set. My stomach is making its feelings known too. He reaches over and turns it off with the practiced efficiency of a man who has been doing this for years.
“Your mother,” I say, into the pillow.
“Is fine,” he says.
“She is absolutely not fine.”
“She’ll call. I’ll explain.”
“What will you explain?”
A pause. “That I’m originally from Colorado,” I say into the pillow. “But offering tea in British English is one of my specialties.”
He laughs, a real laugh, then finally says, “You’re right. This is going to be a tough one.”
Then he pulls me into a hug, and I feel safe—almost like I don’t need to worry about anything at all. It’s a nice feeling I wish I had more often.
I wonder if he feels this too, or if this kind of relief is reserved for people who grew up in foster care.
I’m sure it’s the foster care thing.
There is an Italian place two blocks from his house: red checkered tablecloths, a simple menu, the specific smell of garlic—old wood—marking decades of permanence.
We get a corner table. I order carbonara; he orders something with fish.
We eat like two people who have been craving pasta since birth.
Halfway through, I look up. He’s looking at me.
“What,” I say.
“Nothing.” He looks back at his plate.
“You were doing the thing.”
“What thing.”
“The thing where you look at me like you’re cataloguing something.”
“I wasn’t cataloguing.”
“What were you doing.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “I was thinking that this is the first time I’ve done this. Gone to lunch. Like this.”
“You’ve been to lunch before.”
“Not like this.” He picks up his fork. “With someone I wanted to be at lunch with.”
I look at my carbonara. Something in my chest does the warm complicated thing it’s been doing since yesterday morning—the one I’ve been trying to keep in its lane. I have not been doing a good job of it. I am aware of this.
“I have to go home,” I say, after a while.
“I know.”
“And Erick comes home tonight.”
“At six.”
“So.” I look at him. “This was a good day.”
“Yes,” he says. “It was.”
We finish lunch. We stand on the sidewalk in the April afternoon, he kisses me once, unhurried, his hand on my jaw, in full view of the street. I don’t think about it until afterward, until I’m in the cab heading back to Nadia’s: he didn’t look around first. He just did it.
That small thing does more damage than everything else.
Nadia is on the couch with a cup of tea, a spreadsheet open on her laptop, the expression of a woman determined to get a full account of the last twenty-four hours, prepared to wait as long as it takes.
I sit down across from her. Tell her everything.
Not everything. Most things. Enough.
She listens without interrupting, not her natural state, which means she is taking this seriously. When I finish, she closes the laptop.
“His mother,” she says.
“In the accent, yes.”
“You did a British accent.”
“I don’t know why.”
She looks at the ceiling. “Elena.”
“I know.”
“You had a perfectly functional arrangement. Simple. Clean. Nobody’s feelings getting involved.”
“I know.”
“Now you’re having Sunday lunch with the man, meeting his mother in his shirt, telling each other you’re—” She stops. “He said he loves you.”
“He said it first.”
“When?”
“We were both pretty high, actually.”
“That’s not the point.”
“I think that’s slightly the point.”
“The point,” Nadia says, with the patience of someone who has been making this argument for many years, “is that you left Colorado to do something with your life that didn’t depend on a man.
You were going to build something. And now you’re…
” She stops. “I can already see where this goes. I can see him saying the words when he’s sober, I can see you believing them, and I can see you on my couch again when he changes his mind. That’s why I said keep it light.”
I don’t open my mouth. I don’t know what to say because I don’t know what happens next. And I’m as terrified as I want to be happy.
“I’m not going back to Colorado,” I say, finally.
“I know you’re not. That’s worse.”
“How is that worse?”
“Because if this falls apart, you won’t have anywhere to go.
You left Colorado for a reason. You can’t go backwards.
So when he decides this was a mistake, or his mother convinces him you’re not right for Erick, or he just wakes up one morning and doesn’t feel it anymore, you’re still here. Still stuck.”
I think about Patrick’s apartment. The opinionated couch. His hand on my back.
“What if he doesn’t change his mind,” I say.
Nadia closes her eyes. “Elena.”
“What if this is actually—”
“Then you build your entire life around someone else’s grief. Around his kid. Around his family. And you never find out who you would have been if you hadn’t.”
The words hit different when it’s about that. Not about heartbreak. About disappearing into someone else’s life so completely that there’s no version of you left that belongs to you.
I sit with that longer than I want to. Ryan left me to live his life, and I told myself I learned the lesson. Don’t build your future on promises made in bed, in kitchens, in borrowed apartments. Don’t make yourself optional in your own story.
Patrick could do the same. Maybe not cruelly. Maybe not on purpose. But people leave anyway, even when they don’t mean to. And every time I let myself drift toward someone else’s gravity, what I actually want slides to second place.
I think about what Patrick said, about control. About how hard I hold the wheel. He wasn’t wrong. Letting go with him felt good, easy in a way I don’t trust.
But right now I need my control back.
Monday morning, I stand at the office window and look out at the skyline like it’s a dare.
This is New York. This is where I wanted to be. Glass and steel and impossible ambition, all of it bright enough to make your chest hurt. It’s extraordinary.
It’s also exhausting.
I imagine a fall, not literal, just the kind where you slip one inch at a time and don’t notice until you’re somewhere you never meant to land. A life that looks beautiful from far away and feels wrong from the inside.
Behind me, I hear his footsteps before I turn.
Patrick slides in close, wraps his arms around my waist, and presses a kiss to my shoulder.
“Morning, gorgeous,” he says.
My resolve dissolves on contact.
I lean back into him because this is real too: the warmth, the steadiness, the happiness I feel with him that arrives fast and uncomplicated and dangerous.
And still, under it, the other pull remains, the person I want to become when no one is holding me, the life I came here to build with my own hands.
I stand there between those two versions of myself, not choosing. Not yet.
The rest of the week at the office is not uneventful.
On Tuesday there is a hotel, late in the afternoon. We’re there until seven. I come back to Nadia’s smelling like expensive hotel soap, wearing a smile I have to consciously dial back before she sees it.
On Wednesday he brings me a cookie. Just leaves it on my desk while I’m on a call, a chocolate chip thing from the place on 52nd street, with a Post-it that says nothing, just a small square of yellow paper with no words on it. I keep the Post-it. I don’t examine why.
On Thursday he finds a reason to come through the reception area twice.
The second time, he stops at my desk, asks about the Henley correspondence.
We talk about it for four minutes. When he goes back to his office, I sit very still, thinking: we are doing this.
We are officially doing this. It is a thing.
He hasn’t asked what I’m doing this weekend. I haven’t asked what he’s doing this weekend. The weekend is not yet on the table. I don’t push, he has Erick, a rhythm to maintain, and I won’t be the person who disrupts it before I understand it. That’s not nothing. That’s me knowing my lane.
I am happy about the not-asking. Mostly. There is a small part of me that would like to be asked, but that part can wait. It knows how to wait.
On Friday afternoon I look at my phone and there is an email from the Okonkwo Theatre Company and my stomach drops completely through the floor.
I stare at the notification for a long time without opening it.
I want this too much. That’s the problem. I want it so badly that opening this email feels dangerous, like standing at the edge of something I might not survive falling from. If it’s a yes, everything changes. If it’s a no, I don’t know what I do with that.