Chapter 21
Elena
I have rearranged the throw pillow four times.
Nadia is at a flower market in Sunset Park.
She won’t be back until late. Her apartment is the kind of small that makes waiting feel architecturally significant, especially when you’re waiting alone in it.
I have also made and discarded two versions of a casual outfit.
I am wearing the third version, which is jeans and a white shirt that says I wasn’t trying so convincingly that it required forty minutes to achieve.
My phone is in my hand. Then on the table.
Then in my hand again. I am pacing in a way that suggests I am doing something else, moving between the window and the kitchen with the deliberate purposefulness of someone who is absolutely not nervous about anything.
At eight-fifteen, my phone buzzes.
(Patrick): I’m outside
Two words. No punctuation. My stomach does something that is either excitement or panic and I can’t separate them. I grab my jacket and take the stairs two at a time, which is reckless given the state of Nadia’s stairwell, and push through the front door. He’s there, double-parked, window down.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.”
I get in. The car smells like leather and the specific silence of someone who has been not-talking to me for three days and has apparently decided that showing up outside my building at eight in the morning is a reasonable alternative to, I don’t know, a single word of explanation.
My hands are in my lap. I am being very still. This is taking considerable effort.
Four blocks pass.
“So,” I say. “Did you come all the way here so you could keep not talking to me? Because I could have stayed in bed for that.”
He doesn’t answer right away. He’s looking at the road. His jaw is set in that way he has, the one that means there is a significant amount happening behind it.
“Where are we going?” I try.
“My place. I need to put the car away.” A beat. “Then bagels.”
“Bagels.”
“You eat them three times a week at your desk.”
I stare at him. “You’ve been counting?”
“At least three. Sometimes four.”
I don’t know what to do with that. I look out the window. He has been not speaking to me for seventy-two hours and he knows exactly how often I eat bagels. These two facts are sitting in the car with us and neither of us is going to mention it and I am going to lose my mind.
“You know,” I say, “most people, when they’re angry about something, say the thing they’re angry about.”
“I’m aware.”
“That’s not a denial.”
“No,” he says. “It’s not.”
Another four blocks of silence. I turn back to the window.
The city is doing its Saturday thing, unhurried, indifferent to the fact that I am sitting next to a man who showed up at my door looking gorgeous and furious and has apparently decided the best response to three days of silence is to just show up and say nothing louder.
If he’s this angry, he should have stayed home.
The brownstone takes up more of the block than I expected. There’s a garage to the side, wide enough for several cars, that looks like it used to be something else before he converted it. He pulls in and kills the engine.
Okay. So. He is angry and he has brought me to his home and I am now inside a garage and I am doing a very calm, very rational assessment of the situation, which includes: the garage door is still open behind us, the street is right there, I have functioning legs, and Patrick Aldera has never done anything that would justify the fact that my brain is currently running every possible exit route like I’m casing a building.
He’s not going to do anything. I know that.
I also know that I walked into this car voluntarily and I could have said no and I didn’t, which probably says something about me that I’d rather not examine right now.
“So,” I say. “Is this a kidnapping situation or are we actually getting bagels.”
“Bagels,” he says. He gets out of the car.
Okay then.
We walk out onto the street. The April morning is cool and bright and entirely too cheerful for the amount of tension I’m carrying.
He leads us three blocks to a place on the corner with a line out the door.
There’s something warm coming from inside, yeast and heat and the particular comfort of a place that has been doing the same thing for decades. I feel my shoulders drop half an inch.
We stand in the line. We don’t speak. But it’s different now, out here in the open, with other people’s Saturday mornings moving around us. The fury in the car has nowhere to live out here. It doesn’t disappear, but it loosens.
When we get to the counter I order everything, toasted, cream cheese. Because I have been mortified for three days and I deserve it.
He orders plain with butter and I look at him.
“Plain,” I say, when we’re outside, holding our bags. “With butter.”
“What’s wrong with plain?”
“Nothing. It’s just very you.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning you could have everything and you chose plain.”
He looks at me. Something moves behind his eyes. He takes a bite without answering and I have the feeling I’ve said something accidentally true, the kind of true that lands somewhere he wasn’t expecting.
“Can I?” I say, nodding at his.
He hands it over without a word. I take a bite of his plain with butter and hand it back, and he takes a bite of mine, and that’s it, that’s all it is, but something in my chest does something about it anyway.
We eat walking. He’s not at fourteen words anymore. He’s at zero, but it’s a different zero now, less sealed, more like he’s holding something he’s trying to figure out how to put down.
“Where were you driving from?” I ask finally. “You said two hours.”
He finishes his bagel. Folds the wrapper with the precise calm of a man who controls everything he can reach. “I was heading to the Hamptons.”
“You turned around.”
“I did.”
“Halfway there.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He’s quiet. We cross a street and he puts his hand briefly on my back, navigating, and removes it. “I didn’t want to go there. I wanted to be here.”
I look at him. “Here as in New York, or here as in walking next to me specifically.”
He doesn’t answer. Which is, I’m learning, an answer.
“Fine,” I say. “But I want it on record that you drove two hours toward the Hamptons and turned around to walk in silence next to me, which means either I’m significantly better than the Hamptons or the Hamptons are significantly worse than advertised.”
I look at him. He’s staring straight ahead, jaw still set, but something has shifted at the corner of his mouth. I file it away and keep walking.
“Fine,” I say again. “Don’t talk. But if you’re not going to I’m going to ramble, because I’ve only ever lived in Colorado and New York and this park right now is so aggressively alive I can’t not comment on it.
” I gesture at the general greenness of everything.
“In Colorado spring is tentative. The snow is still on the mountains through May, the thaw slow, like the season has to ask permission first. This is nothing like that. This is the city deciding it’s alive and daring anyone to argue with it. ”
“You miss Colorado?” he asks.
“Sometimes. Mostly I miss the quiet. New York never shuts up.”
The corner of his mouth tilts up.
We walk without a particular destination, which is not how I walk, and I’m not sure I like it. I walk with routes and purpose and if I can know the exact thing I’m going to find then it’s even better.
And then he finally starts talking. That’s the thing I was not prepared for. He tells me about Erick’s theory that T-Rexes were probably friendly if you got to know them. He tells me about the route he takes when he wants to think and the different one he takes when he wants to stop.
“Those are different routes?”
“Completely different.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Thinking route goes along the reservoir. Straight line. Repetitive. Nothing to look at. Your mind wanders because there’s nowhere else for it to go.
” He pauses. “Not-thinking route goes through the Ramble. Too many turns. You have to watch where you’re going. Your brain shuts up because it’s busy.”
“The Ramble route would actually terrify me.”
“Why?”
“Because I like to know where I’m going.” I look at him. “Speaking of which, do you actually have a plan?”
“There’s no plan.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
“Trust me. I’ve lived here my whole life. We won’t get lost.” A beat. “Relax. Enjoy the view.”
I look at him sideways. He says it like it’s simple. Like *trust me is a thing you can just hand someone in a park on a Saturday.
“Fine,” I say. “But if I end up in the Ramble with no exit strategy that’s on you.”
He doesn’t answer. He just starts walking. I follow.
I like watching him be a person. A full one, unhurried, not the version he runs at the office. I think he knows I like it. I think he’s trying.
Then, casually, like he’s been holding it in his mouth this whole time and just now decided to let it out: “Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask.”
“Where were you Wednesday?”
I stop walking.
He doesn’t. He takes two more steps and turns around and looks at me, hands in his jacket pockets, patient.
“Why?” I say.
“Because you said you couldn’t have dinner and you didn’t say why and I’ve been thinking about it since.”
That’s more honest than I expected. I could deflect. I could joke. I could give him the partial truth and keep the rest, which is what I’ve been doing since the day he hired me. But he drove two hours to turn around and I want to tell him the truth.
“I was at an audition,” I say.
He blinks. That’s all. One blink.
“That’s what Wednesday was. An audition. Off-off-Broadway, a Chekhov adaptation, the director is someone I’ve been trying to get in front of for two years.” I shove my hands in my jacket pockets. “I should have told you. I didn’t tell you because I was afraid you’d fire me.”
“Fire you.”
“The job description didn’t include a secret acting career.”
“The job description didn’t include most of what you actually do.” He tilts his head. “You thought I’d fire you for having an audition?”
“I don’t know what you’d do. I don’t know you that well.”
That lands. I watch it land. Something shifts in his expression, not hurt exactly, but the recognition of something true that he hadn’t considered. We’ve been sleeping together for weeks and I just told him I don’t know him that well and neither of us can argue with it.
“Fair,” he says, quietly.
“I’m not saying it to be mean.”
“I know. You’re right.” He looks at the path, then back at me. “Did it go well? The audition?”
“I think so. I don’t know yet.”
“What’s the part?”
“Masha. Three Sisters. She’s…” I search for the short version. “Trapped between the life she has and the life she wanted.”
He’s quiet. Then: “I’ve read it.”
“You’ve read Chekhov?”
“I like reading, I read a lot.” He says it simply, and I file it away as another thing I didn’t know about this man I’ve been naked with but have never eaten breakfast with until today. “You’re getting fired, by the way.”
I stare at him.
“The inbox,” he says. “It’s beyond help.”
I laugh.
“I should have told you,” I say again.
“Yeah. You should have.”
No it’s fine. No gracious dismissal. Just the truth, plain, the same way he eats his bagels. I find I prefer it to kindness. Kindness I can dismiss. Honesty I have to sit with.
When we come out the other side of the park the streets snap back into grid and I breathe easier. I let him lead anyway. That part feels like a choice now instead of a surrender.
That’s when I see it—a little shop on the corner, almost easy to miss. The window is elegant, dark wood, small glass jars on pale shelves, the kind of place that looks like an upscale apothecary. “Oh that’s pretty,” I say. “Let’s go in.” And I walk in before he can answer.
The inside smells like lavender and something earthier I can’t name. A woman behind the counter smiles at us with the warmth of someone who genuinely loves her job. The shelves are full of minimal labels. Words like Ease and Unwind and Relax.
“Welcome,” she says. “First time in?”
“Yes,” I say, looking around. “What is all this?”
Patrick makes a sound that is almost a laugh.
I look at him. He’s watching me with an expression somewhere between amused and waiting.
“What?” I say.
“Elena.” He says it slowly. “Do you know what kind of shop this is?”
I look at the shelves again. The jars. The elegant little packages. The word *microdose* on a card next to a small glass bottle.
“Oh,” I say.
“Oh,” he agrees.