29. Jessica
Jessica
The first morning I woke up in New York, I reached across the bed for him.
My hand slid across the sheet — cold, flat, empty. My fingers found the edge of the mattress. No warmth. No arm. No chest rising and falling. The absence sent me upright. My heart hammering. My hand still on the cold sheet.
I made my coffee strong and black, the way I'd taught myself to make it in this kitchen ten years ago and the way I'd been making it for the seven mornings I had been back in this apartment, and the mug was white and chipped at the handle, but it wasn't the one I wanted in my hand.
The one I wanted was on a counter in Copper Creek in an apartment I'd walked away from.
I carried the coffee to the window and stood there in the grey of a Manhattan morning that wasn't weather grey but concrete grey.
The crack in the ceiling above the bed was the same crack that had been there ten years ago.
The view across the avenue was the same view.
Bobbie had given the keys back the day I landed and had hugged me hard at the door and had told me to drink water and call him and had left me in the apartment that had been mine before Texas and was apparently mine again, although nothing in it was meeting my eye the way it used to.
My hands were cold on the mug. My chest was a small cold space behind my ribs that wasn't filling with anything the coffee was supposed to fill it with. I took another sip. It tasted like nothing.
God. What am I doing?
The thought arrived the way thoughts do when they have been waiting outside the door for a week and have decided this morning is the morning they're coming in.
I let it sit in the room with me. I didn't put the mug down.
I didn't turn away from the window. I didn't pick up the phone and book a flight back to Austin.
I let the question sit there beside me at the glass, and I took another sip of coffee that tasted like nothing, and I made myself look at the grey city the way you look at a thing you have chosen.
I had earned this.
I had earned the corner office with the title on the door.
Earned the meeting at nine, and the team that was waiting for me at the office two blocks from this window.
I had earned the seat on this island for this season of my life, and I had told a man in Copper Creek I would take it, and a man in Copper Creek had told me to go and had meant every word.
I drained the mug. I rinsed it. I set it upside down on the rack. I went to get dressed.
The Whitfield Gala was three weeks of eighteen-hour days.
Vendors, venues, sponsors, timelines. My hands on a clipboard.
My voice on a radio. My brain running logistics at a speed that left no room for anything else, and that was the point — no room.
I filled every hour. I worked until my eyes couldn't focus, and then I worked another hour.
I fell into bed at midnight and was up at five, and every gear fit and every lever worked, and I couldn't breathe.
The event was flawless. Standing ovation. Three industry publications named it the production of the quarter. My director shook my hand and said, "This is why we needed you back." People I'd never met said my name in hallways. My inbox filled. My phone buzzed.
I stood backstage after the final keynote, and the applause was still echoing. My hands were still, my face was composed, but my chest was hollow.
The wrap party was on a rooftop. Because of course it was.
Heels that cost more than a month's rent in Copper Creek.
Hair done. Dress right. Makeup flawless.
Someone handed me champagne. It tasted like nothing.
A man I didn't know shook my hand — "Incredible event.
You're extremely talented." The smile. "Thank you.
" My cheeks ached. My jaw tight. My hands were steady while my stomach churned.
I crossed the rooftop. Stood at the railing. Manhattan below — the lights, the noise, the skyline sharp against a bruised-peach sky. No stars. The metal cold under my palms. The wind in my hair.
Everything was too loud and too bright, and all of it had his name on it. My knuckles went white on the railing. My eyes burned. My body wanted dirt under my feet, and silence, and Hunter’s hand on the small of my back.
The apartment was wrong.
I stood in the kitchen at two in the morning. The sirens were back. The upstairs jazz was back. I could hear it all now — every note, every bass line, every siren cutting through the walls.
I sat on the kitchen floor. My back against the cabinet. My knees pulled up.
My eyes were burning. My chest caving in. I'd broken my own heart, and I had no one to blame for it but myself.
Bobbie's door opened. His footsteps in the hallway — bare feet on hardwood. He came around the corner in his boxer shorts and a t-shirt, his hair flat on one side, his eyes half-closed. He didn't turn the light on. He didn't say a word.
He sat down beside me on the kitchen floor. His back against the cabinet. His shoulder against mine.
I put my head on his shoulder. His arm came around me.
I cried. Quietly at first — my breath hitching, my eyes leaking, the tears running down my cheeks and soaking into his t-shirt.
Then harder. The sobs pressing up through my chest and shaking my shoulders, and Bobbie's arm tightened, and he pressed his cheek against the top of my head and held me while I fell apart on the kitchen floor.
None of it fit anymore. None of it. I'd outgrown this floor.
I'd outgrown this city. I'd outgrown the woman who thought this was enough.
Bobbie held me. He smelled like his fancy moisturizer and sleep. His arm warm. His shoulder steady. He let me cry until the crying ran out, and my breathing went slow and then still.
We sat on the floor for another hour. My head on his shoulder. Both of us quiet.
I tried. For a full week after the wrap party.
Monday and Tuesday I performed. Meetings.
Client calls. My voice smooth and sharp.
My colleagues nodding. The whiteboard filling.
My body in a chair with my skin prickling and the walls too close.
I walked through a Midtown venue measuring ceiling heights while my brain played fairy lights in oaks and a long table under a wedding tree.
Wednesday. The subway at six AM. Bodies pressed close. A man shifted behind me, and his arm brushed my back. I jolted — the flinch, still there — and I gripped the pole and pressed my forehead against my knuckles and breathed through my nose until the train stopped.
Thursday, I walked past the corner where Bobbie had found me crying the night of the Harrington gala two years ago, and my feet stopped of their own accord at the curb the way feet stop when they have recognized something the rest of you has not yet caught up to.
The memory I was waiting for didn't come. The Harrington gala didn't come.
What came instead was Hunter's workshop on the last afternoon, his hands wiping the rag clean, his voice saying go take it, his eyes the color of the creek bed in the afternoon.
I stood at the curb for a full minute in a coat I didn't need and shoes that pinched, and I walked the rest of the way home without registering a single block of it.
I sat in my shower fully clothed at ten in the morning with the water running over my head and my dress soaked through and the water warm enough on my skin and not warm enough anywhere else.
My body knew exactly what it wanted, and Manhattan tap water at ten in the morning wasn't going to be a substitute for any part of that.
Friday, I was in a meeting in SoHo, an architect spreading renderings across a long table — a rooftop space for a fall benefit, string lights running between steel beams in a clean grid above the floor — and my vision blurred at the third sheet.
The string lights blurred into fairy lights.
The steel beams blurred into the oaks above the table at the Blackwood ranch.
My eyes went wet before I could stop them, and I excused myself and walked through the gallery to the bathroom at the back with my hand over my mouth and the rendering of the rooftop still in my head.
I locked the door. I pressed my back against the tile. I slid down to the floor.
My knees pulled up. My face in my hands. The sobs came hard. My whole body shaking. A colleague knocked. "Jessica? Are you okay?" I pressed my hand over my mouth. Held my breath.
Twenty minutes on that floor. Mascara on my palms. Fluorescent light buzzing.
My breathing slowed against the tile. My body went still in the way a body goes still when it has finally heard a thing it has been refusing to hear.
Saturday, I didn't get out of bed until noon. Bobbie let himself in with the spare key and brought toast and sat on the edge of the mattress and rubbed my back in long, slow circles without speaking, the way he had been doing since we were twenty-two, and he stayed there until I fell back asleep.
Sunday, I stood at the apartment window with my hand pressed flat against the cold glass and the city moving in its grey rectangles below me, and I looked down at the streets I had walked for ten years, and I waited to feel something about any of them. I didn't.
I quit on a Tuesday.
I sat down across from my director at nine in the morning in the office I had been climbing toward for the entire decade, and I made my voice as even as I could make it. "I'm resigning. Effective immediately."
His face went blank. "Jessica — "
"The calendar is built. The vendors are locked. Someone can step in." My voice was steady. My shoulders were back. "I need to go home."
"Home to Texas?"
I nodded once. There was no room for discussion. ”Home to Texas."