chapter four
One Sunday morning, Laurie came home to Lakmé. If she thought it strange to hear the Léo Delibes opera from behind Mal’s door, there weren’t words for the terror she found in the tub: dark rivulets of red everywhere. She thought Mal had cut herself and tried to bleed out.
She ran to Mal’s bedroom and threw open the door, only to find her roommate standing half-naked in the center of her room amidst a pile of clothes. Mal wore plain black underwear and a sports bra that flattened her chest. Her hands were on her hips, and she turned to Laurie, a contemplative look on her face.
“Oh, hello. You’re home earlier than usual.”
Laurie skipped past the fact that Mal evidently knew she wasn’t spending the nights at home and asked what the hell happened to the bathroom.
“I was going to clean it up. I tried to dye my hair.” Mal undid a knot and her curls fell over her shoulders. “It was an utter failure. I think I need to get it done professionally.”
Her laptop was now playing the Flower Duet, when Lakmé and her servant Mallika wander off to gather flowers by a river. Did Mal know that it was this duet that had first allowed Laurie to understand that women stirred her in a way that men never could?
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Mal said.
“Since when do you listen to opera?”
“I don’t. I was just feeling nostalgic. I fell in love with the Flower Duet in college.” Mal eyed her carefully and added, “I studied it in the class where I first saw you.”
Nope. Not going there. “I’ll let you get back to… whatever you were doing.”
“You could stay. Help me pick out an outfit for the holiday party.”
“Well, you’ve got to start with better underwear. You can’t wear formal wear over an athletic bra.”
Mal made a face. “I don’t suppose you’ve any time today to help me shop?”
Actually, Laurie couldn’t think of anything better than not having the attention on herself for a while. Sophia had been texting constantly, planning their hair and makeup for the party—“It’s NARS or nothing”—as if the boys weren’t going to show up in T-shirts and sneakers.
Who are we dressing for?
They headed to the Nordstrom on Market Street to get Mal fully outfitted, where the lingerie ladies gave what Laurie had recently come to understand was their standard lecture to women who’d never been fitted for a bra (most women).They left her with a range of DD bras and a lecture on the long-term consequences of LuluLemon.
“You’d think I slapped their children,” Mal muttered.
“Amazing how many people you can offend without even trying. Imagine if you were trying,” Laurie said. She hadn’t meant anything by it, but maybe it sounded like an accusation.
“I didn’t mean—”
“I think you just proved your own point,” Mal said, smiling.
That was it? No drama?
They moved on to the formal wear section. Being on this side of the equation was far better, although it was all Laurie could do to keep from laughing at Mal’s truly awful taste. First it was a strapless orange number that squashed her breasts, then a shiny golden babydoll outfit that made her look like a drag queen.
“What do you think of this?”
Laurie grimaced.
“No?” Mal asked. “But it’s red. Everyone’s supposed to be able to wear red.”
“It’s wearing you.”
“Savage. And they say I’m the bossy one.”
Mal grinned and went back into the changing room without waiting for her reply.
Laurie’s stomach tugged in sympathy. They did call Mal the bossy one. To a team that had never had a guiding hand, even the slightest management was the height of oppression. Maybe they just found it galling that Mal was younger than most of her subordinates. Laurie had even had to find time for some of them to complain to Vic about her. But Vic, for all his flaws, knew when Mal was right. It was how he treated Mal that showed Laurie how little he respected her.
The mouse, again, at the periphery of her vision. She’d once pointed out to Sophia that vermilion was in the orange family, warmer than crimson, which came from the carmine family. Sophia had moved onto the next topic as if Laurie hadn’t spoken at all.
“I hate this,” Mal said, breaking her out of her reverie.
“What if I picked something out for you?”
“Would you?”
She found Mal a few things to try on, hoping she’d see what Laurie saw. Mal was a force of nature, so only natural or jewel tones would suit. No patent leather, no artifice. Autumn colors would set off her dark skin without turning her into something she wasn’t.
She waited outside the changing room to give Mal some privacy. To fill in the silence, she asked, “Who are you going with, anyway?”
“You, of course,” Mal said. “I assume you have your ticket, since you’re the one who gave me mine.”
“I have an errand to run first, so I might be a little late. Aren’t you bringing a date?” She hadn’t told Mal, or anyone, that she wasn’t planning on going. Sophia’s office party was on the same night, and Vic would have a jealous fit if he knew she was choosing to party with the Darlings over his Unicorn. Besides, as long as she put in a quick appearance for Vic, she didn’t think anyone else at work would notice she wasn’t there the whole time.
“A date?” Mal said. “No. Wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea.”
“What idea?”
Mal opened the door, and Laurie’s mouth went dry. The halter of the forest-green dress hung so low that the inches of cleavage made it impossible to look away from Mal’s chest. Her dark, brown arms were toned, and between them and her too-long legs, her peerless skin seemed to go on without limit.
“That they have a shot at something long-term,” Mal said. “I don’t want to lead anyone on.”
Damn her to hell.
· · ·
The Darling held their 2007 holiday party on the San Francisco pier, after converting a collection of interconnected warehouses into a “world-tour.” One World was the theme, celebrating the globalization that had made them the stock market favorite they were, and so waitresses wore saris in one room and kimonos in another, while Sophia and Laurie stepped out of a limo to be greeted by a half-naked satyr covered in bronze body-paint and artificial grapes.
In the Middle East room—“Well, what else would you call it? It’s time people got over their nationalist bullshit, don’t you think?”—belly dancers performed for an awestruck audience, while servers brought them cinnamon-dappled hot wine. Laurie trailed behind Sophia as she whirled through room after room of simplified, stereotyped geopolitics, glad that nobody paid any attention to her in the slipstream.
Eventually, she left to find the bathroom and took her place in a long, growing line.
“Fifty bucks on cousin,” said the woman in front to her friend, nodding at a statuesque woman in a miniskirt and six-inch heels a few feet away.
“I’m not taking that bet. The C cup says cousin, but the ass is all escort. That butt is at least three thousand bucks.”
The women laughed and turned to Laurie.
“What’s your bet?” one of them said.
“My… bet?”
“We saw a dozen Craigslist ads for dates to this party last night alone. Around midnight the going rate was five thousand an hour.”
“Just to be a date, mind you,” the other clarified. “Strictly no sex.”
Her shock must have shown, because the first woman said, “Didn’t you know?”
Laurie shook her head.
“I’m Alyssa.”
“And I’m Brandi.”
“Laurie.”
“So, you’re Sophia’s girlfriend,” said Brandi. “We saw you enter through Greece.”
“She doesn’t like that word, remember?” Alyssa said. “Partner, S.O., something gender-neutral. Less heteronormative.”
They shared a laugh.
“Are you friends of hers?” Laurie asked.
The women looked at each other, as if silently debating something.
“Sophia doesn’t have female friends,” Alyssa said. “And the only male ones she has are her exes.”
Laurie shook her head. Sophia wasn’t just a party animal; she was the party.
“Listen, kid,” Brandi said, “Sophia has the attention span of a butterfly. And she’s too smart and too damn rich to tie up her assets in a marriage that could ruin her financially. So if you want to enjoy this as long as you can, stay pretty but not too pretty.”
“And save up for the day she gets bored,” Alyssa added.
The women turned away and the line for the bathroom inched forward.
Maybe she should have left the line and waited over at one of the other bathrooms. But Laurie couldn’t move. Their words festered. She’d been at the party for almost two hours but Sophia had yet to introduce her as a girlfriend. She wracked her memory for any other time in the last several weeks when Sophia had introduced her to anyone.
This is Laurie.
You have to meet Laurie.
Laurie, Pablo. You both love Neko Case.
No, she didn’t need to worry. After all, she hadn’t introduced Sophia to anyone either. Besides, what was it Mal had said? That it meant something to be invited to a holiday party.
I don’t want to lead anyone on .
What was she even doing? She and Sophia couldn’t marry. What if Sophia got tired of her when she was forty, or fifty, when she couldn’t work the same punishing hours, and her looks couldn’t find her a husband with health insurance?
Laurie glared at her reflection in the mirror. She was wearing too much makeup, like a child going through her mother’s things. No wonder Alyssa and Brandi hadn’t taken her seriously.
“Are you okay?”
“I can’t…” She clutched the edge of the sink.
Alyssa’s hand came to rest on her back. “Bran, help me get this corset off her. It’s too tight. She can’t breathe.”
In the mirror, she could see a crowd collecting behind her. She wanted to cry, to tell them not to take off the corset, that she’d get herself under control. She just needed them to stop staring .
Alyssa and Brandi pulled her into the large accessible stall and locked it behind them. That was better. Fewer people. Still, here she was, hyperventilating among strangers like a child lost at a supermarket.
The dress came off first, leaving her in just her corset and heels. As soon as the top laces came off, she drew in a large, gulping breath and started to cry. “Please, a tissue. I don’t want to stain it.”
It wasn’t as if Sophia would say anything, but she couldn’t bear the thought of getting wet mascara on the corset.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I feel like an idiot.”
Brandi squatted down so their eyes were level. “I’m guessing Sophia’s your first real girlfriend.”
“I’ve dated people before.”
“There’s a big difference between dating people and being in a relationship,” Brandi said, her arms folded.
“And women hit different,” Alyssa said. “I don’t know why, but it’s the truth. Maybe you think the only way someone really gets inside you is physically so you’re not expecting it when they flay you to the bone. Or maybe you expect more, because you think someone who has a car of their own should be a better driver.”
Brandi tried to pull her into a hug, but Laurie resisted. “I’ll ruin your dress.”
“Shut up.”
Brandi yanked her into a warm hug, where, embarrassed and exhausted beyond endurance, she started sobbing. “I’m so sorry. I’m ruining your party.”
“Eh, it’s not really a party until someone’s vomiting or crying,” Brandi said.
Eventually Laurie pulled her phone out of her purse. She’d promised to meet Sophia in the Italy room nearly half an hour ago.
There were no missed calls or messages.
“A butterfly,” Brandi said, putting her arm around Alyssa’s waist. “Take it from us. You want the kind of woman who’ll watch bad soap operas with you, not the one who wants to star in them herself.”
“Everyone thinks they’re the main character these days,” Alyssa grumbled, shaking her head sadly.
Laurie let them retie the corset, although not as tightly as before—“you have nice enough tits without giving yourself a mammogram”—and slid into the white satin gown, noticing for the first time how her own hips were much wider than Sophia’s, even as Alyssa said, “She won’t get bored of you. She’ll hate you for being prettier first.”
She meant to argue, but they were already on their way out. Laurie went over to the Italy room, where Styrofoam blocks were set up to look like Roman ruins. A bright blue pool in the middle spit out bubbles and steam. Around the pool, men took off their silk suits and jumped in, while bored staff in togas handed towels to the few shrieking women who seemed to have jumped in, cocktail dress and all.
Sophia sat at the top of a makeshift wall, a heeled foot dangling precariously over the pool. She leaned back against a fake Doric column, her eyes half-closed. The thin strap of her dress had come loose on one side, falling to the arm that held a wine-glass. She held court, with several men sitting around her and hanging on her every word.
“Laurie!” Sophia cried out. “Come here. I was just telling the guys about you.”
Laurie took her place at her side, glad of the way Sophia’s arm made its way around her waist, possessive and affectionate.
Girlfriend. Partner. Significant other.
The words passed through her mind as she considered introducing herself next time instead of waiting for Sophia to do it.
“Okay, I take it back,” one of the guys said. “Now that I see her, she’s nothing like I imagined.”
“Oh? What did you imagine?” Laurie asked. “What’s Sophia been saying about me?”
“Nothing that isn’t true,” Sophia said. “You’re a great dancer, you work ridiculous hours for criminally low pay, and you always know the right thing to say to everyone.”
“And that you’re an artist,” the guy said, something lewd and eager in his gaze that made Laurie’s hair stand on end. “She said you’ve painted a few nudes of her.”
It was one thing to be accounted for as a girlfriend, a partner, a significant other. An equal. Yes, there was the implication of sex in that relationship, but there was something that didn’t quite sit right about the idea that Sophia was telling these strangers, men, about something Laurie considered more intimate than sex. She had slept with a few people. She’d only ever painted Sophia.
“Someday when I’m old and gray those paintings will be worth millions,” Sophia said.
“You’re not going to sell them!” she said, suddenly frightened. She wasn’t really an artist. It would be humiliating to have her art critiqued by professionals, who would see every amateur stroke.
Ignoring her, Sophia leaned over to whisper to the guy, placing an arm on his shoulder for support. The strap of her dress fell aside, so the guy had a full view of her chest as she said, “I’m just lucky she doesn’t know her own worth. If she ever actually put her artistic talents out there, she’d be a millionaire and she wouldn’t have any more use for me!”
Laurie bit her lip hard. Sophia’s vision of her scraped hard against the edges of memories she’d never shared with anyone, images that crowded into her mind now, unasked for and insistent—being packed into a car in the middle of the night to drive to another state, her mother crying with relief the day they found out her father had finally died. There was a particular kind of furious hurt that came from loving someone who didn’t just refuse to be loved but took pleasure in punishing those who dared challenge their cynical worldview by loving them at all.
“I love you, Sophia Melnyk,” she said, pulling her close. “Not just when you’re dressing me up like a doll or when you’re taking me to fancy clubs and parties. I love how you know all the lyrics to every Decemberists song, and how even the fanciest sushi doesn’t make you as happy as a McDonald’s burger, and I’ll still love you when you have wrinkles and gray pubes. Okay?”
It could have been a moment. Maybe if they’d been alone. If they’d been older.
Instead, Sophia pulled away. “You’re so cute,” she said. And then she pushed Laurie into the water.
When she rose to the surface, there was laughter everywhere. The white satin gown was sodden through, the bone of the corset now visible to all. Trembling, Laurie made her way to the edge of the pool and climbed out of the water, aware of all the eyes on her body. A staff member with a stiff expression handed her a towel.
Without looking back, ignoring Sophia’s half-hearted apologies, she picked up her coat from the coatcheck and got in a waiting taxi.
“Going home already?” the driver said, giving her a pitying glance in the rearview mirror.
She looked out of the window so he’d stop speaking to her. It was a tactic she’d learned from the techies who did it to her. They passed the curved triangles of the Bay Bridge, lit up like arcs of hope and despair. She’d come to this city over that bridge, taken the bus from Emeryville after three days on the California Zephyr because she couldn’t afford to fly. Eaten an apple and a bag of potato chips every day, rationing out the latter so it would turn into dinner.
She’d taken this exact route then, her heart expanding a couple of sizes at the sight of the rainbow flags in the Castro. She’d fallen in love hard, despite having only enough money to afford a couch covered in cat hair. That year, she danced in the street on Halloween to Eurythmics, happy to belt out that sweet dreams were made exactly of this. Stumbled home one night at 3 AM and met Telopa, an artist who insisted on sketching her. He lit up when she recognized he was painting in the Mannerist style, and asked her, “Why isn’t life always like this? Just filled with random acts of artistic kindness?”
She was nearly home, but she wasn’t going to let her night end like this. This was her city. Her mind sought out the dress she’d originally wanted to wear. She’d got it for thirty dollars at the thrift store near Cam’s house. That district—Pacific Heights, or more colloquially, Specific Whites—always had the best hand-me-downs. She’d tried it on during her post-Cam house cleaning, when she and Mal were still finding their way around each other.
“One of the benefits of having a woman roommate is I can now bother you with that age-old question: do you think this dress makes my ass look big?” she’d said wryly, not expecting an answer.
Mal leaned against the doorway, her head to the side, assessing. “Yes, but that’s a feature not a bug, isn’t it?”
“Out,” Laurie had said, too shocked to do anything but laugh. “Why am I even asking you?”
The cab stopped. It wasn’t even nine o’ clock. If she hurried, she could still change her outfit and make it to the Unicorn party.
· · ·
As soon as she entered the restaurant she’d booked out for the Unicorn’s party, Laurie felt better. Theirs was a more restrained extravagance, a pre-IPO tightrope where frugality would shake investor confidence but frivolity would frighten them more. No satyrs, no belly dancers. Instead these executives drank Mo?t Chandon straight out of the bottle, while their engineers made faces at the foie gras but valiantly ate it anyway.
She found Mal making conversation with the crowd of men who always hovered around her like fruit flies, and walked over. Were those—yes, they really were gold-buckled cowboy boots on her feet. A stark, but not entirely awful, contrast to the lovely green dress, and reassuringly stable after all those escorts in pencil heels at the Darling party.
“Only you would wear a cocktail dress with boots,” Laurie said.
Mal smiled widely, and the circle of people expanded to let her in. “Laurie! I wasn’t going to last four hours in heels.” She dusted off the ruffles on the dress. “Besides, I looked a bit too much like foliage.”
A ripple of laughter went through the crowd.
As if drawn in by the sound, Vic came up to them, throwing an arm around Laurie and the man beside her, draping himself over them both like a tablecloth. The arm around her held the neck of a champagne bottle. “Laurie! You’re finally here. Now it’s a party. Why are you always empty-handed? It’s criminal is what it is.” He looked around at the men. “Why the hell are you just standing there? Where are your manners? Get these girls something to drink!”
“It’s all right, Vic,” she said, but the men had already dispersed, scrambling to obey.
“It’s not,” Vic said, slurring his words. “I heard about you and Cam. It’s awful. You know you can talk to me about anything. I’m a good listener.”
Laurie stiffened. “What did you hear?”
“Only what Will told me. That Cam didn’t want to get married. Such a child. You need an older man. Someone who’s ready to settle down.”
“Or an older woman,” Mal said casually, keeping those intense, piercing eyes on her.
She knew? How did she know?And how dare she out Laurie like this, in front of Vic?
“If you swing that way,” Vic said, laughing. “This is San Francisco, after all.” He turned to Laurie. “Well, if Mal’s bowing out of the race, that just leaves you with better pickings, doesn’t it?”
He thought Mal preferred women?Relief took the edge off Laurie’s anger, but her skin still felt stretched thin, as if sizzling with static electricity.
Some of the men had returned, with glasses of champagne for them both and more drinks for themselves. Laurie was about to say something when a look on Mal’s face stopped her. She turned to follow her gaze and saw the back of a photographer who was wandering around.
“Who’s that?” Laurie asked.
“Press,” Vic said, beaming. “I sent out a few invites. Techcrunch, Valleywag, Wired… nothing too big. Hang on, I’ll bring him over here.”
“No, wait—” she said, but he was gone. She turned to look at Mal, who seemed at an uncharacteristic loss, her posture loose and gaping, completely open to the room. Laurie had never seen her anything less than perfectly contained. It was unnerving. “Mal?”
She didn’t seem to hear.
Vic came back, maneuvering to have one arm around Laurie and the other around Mal this time. Who didn’t protest. Didn’t even move. And the photographer’s eyes fell on her and stayed there.
Oh. Oh .
Laurie’s stomach lurched. If that was how Cam had looked at Will, how blind she’d been not to see it before! The camera flashed.
“Well, I suppose I’d better wander around,” Mal said, and walked off before anyone else could speak.
“I’m Laurie,” she said to the photographer.
“Kas.” He shook her hand. His grip was graceful and strong. Thick, jet-black hair framed his fair face. He had deep laugh lines around his eyes, and when he smiled at her it was with a strange intensity, as if there was no one else in the room.
“Laurie, don’t bother the man while he’s working,” Vic said, annoyed at being ignored.
“Of course,” she said, and walked away to get some distance. To find Mal and ask her questions, so many questions.
Who is he? What happened between you two?
Mal was talking with someone about whether the iPhone, which had just come out that year, would change the Unicorn’s strategy towards prioritizing mobile applications, her expression once again calm and focused, as if the last five minutes simply hadn’t happened.
Maybe talking about technology pulled her together her the way focusing on other people’s problems helped Laurie collect herself. Wondering about whatever had or hadn’t happened between Mal and Kas certainly kept her mind off Sophia (who hadn’t texted her). The work of tracking the invisible hurts and needs of others gave her a gyroscopic kind of stability—one that would wear off if she stopped moving.
“Who would’ve thought a college dropout could make the invention of the year?”
“On the contrary,” Mal said, “it takes an innovative mind to veer off the beaten track. Someone who can drop out of college when everyone around them warns them it’ll kill their career has exactly the kind of courage it takes to build something new.”
The man she was speaking to scoffed. “Are you saying everyone here is inherently a sheep just because they stayed the course?”
“We’re certainly more risk-averse,” Mal said amicably. “We have student loans to repay.”
“Jobs dropped out of Reed . They’re not even in the top twenty. He was risking more by staying on, paying them for an education that wouldn’t even get him in the door today.”
Laurie swallowed down her nausea. What would they think of her if they knew that she cried with joy when she was accepted into Carleton, but couldn’t afford to go? She’d only applied because they didn’t charge an application fee.
“You’re assuming everyone’s goal is to join a tech company and climb the corporate ladder,” said a deep voice behind her. Laurie turned to see Kas, the photographer. “What if all you wanted to do was write books, or travel the world, or raise a family?”
The men started laughing, as if he’d said something hilarious. Kas didn’t react. His dark eyes fell on Mal, as if challenging her to a duel.
“You can’t raise a family on a writer’s salary,” someone said, “but you can always write a book from your island home in Bali if you had a tech salary.”
“Yes,” Kas said, without looking away from Mal, “I suppose that’s the logical thing to do.”
Mal flinched at the word logical , as if it were a curse. She drew herself up. “I suppose you have to know what you want out of life,” she said. “Be really sure .”
In all the times Laurie had heard that word, she’d never made it sound like this. As if it contained venom. Mal tossed back the last of her champagne and held up the empty glass as her parting salvo.
Laurie went after her.
“You ready to go home?” Mal asked, with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.
“If you are.”
They grabbed their coats and left, waving to Vic rather than prolonging their exit. They headed towards Mission Street to catch a cab, ignoring the catcalls from the homeless men along the way.
Laurie decided to play Mal’s game, making assumptions for her to rebut or verify. “So why did you and Kas break up?”
Mal’s lips twitched with amusement. “To break up, you’d have to have been a couple. We never were.”
“Why not?”
“I suppose we both got cold feet. You never know if you truly want something until you have it within arm’s reach.” She flagged down a cab and got inside.
“I’ve only ever heard the opposite,” Laurie said, following her in. “That you have to lose it to know.”
Even breaking up with Cam hadn’t hurt as much as turning down her college acceptance.
“We’d have had to fight our families to be together,” Mal said. “He’s a Pakistani, and a Muslim. He wanted kids, and I didn’t. At least one of us would have had to give up on our more—” She rolled her eyes—“ artistic ambitions, if we were to survive financially.”
“So what he said, about writing books, traveling the world… those were your dreams?”
“A long time ago.” She closed her eyes and leaned back.
Laurie’s throat closed up. Why, when Mal had closed the door so firmly on her own dreams, did it hurt her as if she’d done the same? All this time, she’d thought Mal thrived in tech because she was different . To know they shared artistic ambitions only highlighted her own compromises.
She thought of the summer her family had spent camping in national parks, when four people living out of a car had grown untenable. At night, they’d set up tent and eat beans cooked on a stove fashioned out of Coke cans. While her brothers slept, she’d practice Bach on the keyboard piano that so desperately needed new batteries it sounded like a strangled cat.
“You have to wonder if it’s a blessing or a curse,” Mom said, “these so-called gifts we have. If you had to spend your life in a dark cave with only a slit through which you saw the stars, would you be grateful for that sliver of heaven? Or would you resent being offered a taste of something you could never have?”
It was the first time she’d said we , as if musical talent was a shared secret, an inheritance Laurie might grow into one day.
“Grateful,” she said, immediately.
Mom sighed. But she taught Laurie first to read music, then to hear it. Every morning, her brothers drove the car into town to find a Home Depot or Lowe’s to wait for work. People paid them to carry things, to install new toilet seats or curtain rods, or to put sod down in the lawn. Meanwhile, Laurie practiced on the keyboard, but also learned to hear the squirrels bounding inside of Paganini, to see Debussy as light scattered by the rain around her, and to feel the crystalline precision of Liszt in the summer sky.
“I wanted to be an artist,” she said suddenly, as they made their way out of the taxi and Mal opened the front door. “I couldn’t afford college, so I pretended to be a student so I could audit classes at Cornell.”
She waited, pulse pounding, for the words she’d heard before. So you cut in front of people who paid to come here? People who earned their place?
But Mal only smiled. “Well, looks like we have another Steve Jobs right here.”
“You don’t think less of me?”
“Why should I?” Mal gave her a warm look. “You knew what you wanted and went after it the only way you could. That took guts.”
Laurie stared at her, stupefied. Mal was supposed to remind her that her dreams were impossible, that she ought to shut them down as she had hers. Furious tears sprang to her eyes.
Mal’s phone beeped with an incoming text message. She glanced at it, then showed it to Laurie. It was from Kas.
Nice to see you after all this time. Want to get coffee and catch up?
“Maybe I’ll get a chance to do the same,” Mal said.