Insignificant Others

1

“I ’ m going to need you to open a little wider, please,” the dental hygienist says as she scrapes my teeth with what looks

like a miniature version of Captain Hook’s prosthetic arm. I can’t decide if being annoyed is her default, or if my annoyance

is contagious. Probably the latter.

Why my twenty-three-year-old assistant, Samantha, scheduled a dentist appointment today is beyond me, but I’m here, and I obediently open my mouth wider when told—while holding my phone over my head to read the

latest stream of work texts. Earnings are next week, and we’re scrambling.

“How many times a day do you floss?” the hygienist asks, her tone suspicious and prosecutorial.

“Two,” I lie.

“Hmm,” she says, unconvinced. “Well, your gums tell a different story.”

I ignore the gum police. My boss, Christina, is calling, and I can’t not take her call.

“ Heffow? ” I mumble. The hygienist’s hand is still in my mouth.

“Lena?”

“ Fime fat fe fentist. ”

“What the hell are you doing at the dentist — today ?” As difficult as Christina can be, honestly, I’m impressed. She speaks Dentist .

I should explain to her that this is my assistant’s fault—the one who spends more time on TikTok than managing my calendar—but I don’t. Besides, I can tell by her exasperated tone that our CEO is on the warpath. “Let me guess, Phil’s pushing back on the talking points?” I ask when my mouth is momentarily unoccupied.

“To put it lightly,” she says with an exaggerated sigh. “But, yes, he has questions. Lots of them. When will you be back at

your desk?”

“Soon,” I say, glancing at my watch before declining the fluoride treatment. The hygienist looks critically wounded, but I

don’t have time to play the dental shame game. I have a fire to put out at work, a hair appointment to get to, and a dinner

reservation tonight—a very important one.

An hour later, I find Samantha in my office, back turned, lingering over my desk. She’s holding the framed photo of Kevin

and me, a selfie we snapped last year on a hike to Alamere Falls, the only waterfall on the West Coast that spills out into

the Pacific Ocean. It was beautiful, yes, but hiking isn’t my forte—far from it. In fact, I can think of an exhaustive list

of things I’d rather do than trudge through muddy hills, out of breath—things like cleaning my toilet. But, for Kevin, I hike.

He loves it, and I must admit, the tender moment we shared that day on the bluff overlooking the sea, well, it was worth all

the huffing and puffing. He reached for my hand, looked into my eyes, and told me he thought we were “meant to be.” That was

one year into our relationship, and everything was going according to plan. It still is.

I clear my throat, realizing Samantha hasn’t heard me come in.

“Oh,” she says, looking up, startled. “I thought you were at the... dentist. I was just... dusting.” She smiles nervously,

the corners of her mouth turned upward like the Cheshire cat’s.

“You’re really lucky, you know,” she continues fawningly—a little too fawningly. “Kevin’s a catch.” She sets the frame back

on my desk.

“Yep,” I say, repositioning it back in place before sliding into my chair and opening my email. “He is.” It’s no secret that Samantha has a thing for my boyfriend. I mean, I see the way she lights up when he calls or stops by the office. I don’t feel threatened, though. Samantha isn’t his type. She dresses her three cats in infant onesies and refers to them as her “children.”

“I noticed the dinner reservation on your calendar for tonight,” Samantha says, lingering. “Le Rêve—fancy.” She pauses, eyes

wide. “Do you think he’s going to... propose?”

My cheeks burn. What’s wrong with this generation and their lack of boundaries? Of course Kevin’s going to propose, but I

don’t need to discuss this with Samantha. We’ve been dating for two years and have checked all the boxes. He brought me home

to Nashville to meet his family last Christmas, and tomorrow we’re flying to Seattle to visit my aunt Rosie on Bainbridge

Island. We’ve discussed the future, too—travel, the house we’d envisioned in Sausalito, with a little garden, just paces from

the shore. But it was that stroll through Tiffany a few months ago that was the culminating moment. I casually pointed to

an engagement ring that caught my eye, and he smiled knowingly, then asked the sales associate for her card. Yes, it’s all

going according to plan. And tonight? The crescendo.

“Are you sure?” my best friend, Frankie, asked me the other night over FaceTime. She was wearing a mud mask and lounging on

the sofa in her New York apartment while we shared a glass of wine three thousand miles apart. It’s not that she doesn’t like

Kevin. She adores him, of course. Everyone does—especially my assistant. I nodded my reply to Frankie that evening, but avoided

eye contact as I took a long sip of wine. “Hey,” she continued. “Sorry. I just want to be sure that... you’re sure.”

Sure . Of course I am. In business, my instincts are honed sharper than a double-beveled Japanese knife. I can schmooze the boards

of Fortune 500 companies and lead CEOs through corporate minefields like a Pied Piper. I’m decisive, focused, and tough as

nails. And love? In my dating life, I’ve applied the same techniques: assessing pros and strategically analyzing flaws. Like

the most ruthless judge on American Idol , I have zero qualms about giving someone the X. Why waste time with someone who isn’t right?

But then came Kevin. His “résumé”? Impeccable. Also, he looks great in a suit, knows how to change a tire, and his apartment

is spotless. Hired.

“I’ll tell you how I was sure,” Frankie said, smiling nostalgically as she recounted the night she met her husband, Christian. “It was like he

was the missing puzzle piece I’d been searching for my whole life.” She paused, staring at me through the screen. “Are you

sure you feel that way about Kevin?”

Frankie spoke with such certainty, such knowing, I’ll admit her words tugged at my heart: Is Kevin my missing puzzle piece? Then my sensibilities took over. He’s successful, kind, ridiculously handsome. Duh!

“Of course I feel that way about Kevin,” I exclaimed, a little miffed. “Now, can you stop giving me anxiety, and can we start

talking about what I’m going to wear to Le Rêve?”

Yes, tonight will be the beginning of the rest of our lives—if I can just get through the rest of this workday. I square my

shoulders, then open an email from Christina about our CEO’s objections to the talking points I prepared earlier. I know the

drill—an endless hamster wheel of chest-puffing, appeasing, placating, repeat—and I already know the outcome: Change everything,

then change it back. I’ve got this.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Samantha says, still lingering in the doorway. “You got a few calls while you were out: Jen in accounting,

Nick from BlackRock, oh, and—”

“No time,” I interject. “I’ve got to deal with Phil’s drama, before I leave for my appointment.”

Samantha eyes me with that pinched expression she makes when the copier breaks, or when accounting asks her to send in the

expense report early. “You mean your hair appointment , right?”

I ignore the tinge of judgment in her voice. “Please get the door on your way out, okay?”

I arrive at the salon out of breath and greet my longtime stylist, Kristen, with a hug. She scrolls through her phone, proudly showing me the latest photos of her eight-month-old baby daughter, with a pink floral headband adorning her bald scalp.

“Aww, she’s so cute,” I exclaim, my expression animated, but forced. Is it just me, or do all babies look the same? Like aliens.

I slide into Kristen’s chair just as Frankie FaceTimes again. “Hey,” I say with a sigh.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, her eyes narrowing.

“Work’s been crazy,” I explain. “It’s been one fire drill after the next. I swear, one of these days this job is going to

be the death of me.”

“But not today,” Frankie replies with an encouraging smile.

I grin, relieved to be out of the office, but also still going over today’s play-by-play. “I’m not going to lie,” I continue.

“I am really jazzed about the tweaks I made to our CEO’s call notes for tomorrow. I think I found a more holistic way to diagnose

our stockholder issues; you know, drive value to create bottom-line operational efficiency.”

Frankie rolls her eyes. “Uh, Lena, English, please?”

“Sorry,” I say, laughing, aware of how my corporate lingo makes her cringe. Frankie (Francesca) and I met our freshman year

of college when we were paired together as roommates at NYU. Similar enough to connect about the important things in life

and different enough keep each other laughing, we bonded over a thousand divergent things: our dislike of cafeteria food and

the boy-crazy girls on our floor, our preference for multicolored vs. white Christmas lights, the smell of freshly sharpened

pencils, Anne Lamott books, the Strokes, and Zooey Deschanel.

“Anyway, I’m at the hair salon,” I continue, smiling at Kristen in the mirror. “I thought I’d go all-out for tonight.”

“Just promise me,” Frankie says jokingly, “no bangs.”

I laugh to myself, remembering that night in college when we decided to cut each other’s bangs. I can still picture Frankie, panic-stricken and sobbing as she stood in front of the mirror in our little bathroom after I lopped off a giant chunk of her hair. “I mean,” I reply, laughing so hard my sides hurt, “it was ... kind of cute.”

“On you ,” she scoffs. “I looked like a poodle, Lena. You should have told me that curly-haired girls can’t pull off Zooey bangs!”

“I was eighteen,” I counter, still laughing. “What did I know?”

After she and I spent several years as post-college roommates in Brooklyn, I got a job offer in San Francisco, while she stayed

behind finishing the final semester of her MBA. Despite being at the top of her class at NYU, she passed up lucrative opportunities

in Manhattan and instead accepted a position running a nonprofit in Greenpoint serving underprivileged youth. That’s Frankie.

When Kristen takes me over to the sink to shampoo my hair, our call ends abruptly, in only the way best friends can.

“Why don’t we give you some loose curls,” Kristen suggests when I’m scrubbed and deep-conditioned. “Something feminine, romantic.”

“Curls?” I hesitate. “I don’t know. Do you think that might be... too much?”

Kristen shakes her head. “I’m not going to let you walk out of here looking like Shirley Temple—I promise.”

What’s wrong with curls? I imagine Frankie saying, running her hand through her bouncy dark ringlets, which perfectly match her spirited personality.

I eye my limp, stick-straight, medium-blond hair, remembering a comment Kevin made a few months ago before I left for a haircut.

My blunt cut has always been my trademark look, but he’d suggested I change things up a bit, maybe choose a “softer style.”

“All right, let’s go with soft curls,” I finally say, biting the bullet. “But nothing too overdone. I don’t think I can pull off Frankie’s iconic look.”

She is iconic, in every sense of the word. Smart, funny, down-to-earth—beautiful but not in a showy sort of way. Her mom’s a Montessori

preschool teacher from Sicily; her dad, a banker from Ohio; but Frankie is uniquely herself. With olive skin and piercing

hazel eyes, and those curls, she’s beautiful, but effortlessly so—the type of woman who has no clue when people are eyeing

her from across the room.

While I’m certainly not iconic , I am slim; my eyes are mossy green, which I’m told is rare; and I do have great calves, and I like to think that makes up

for my shortcomings in the hair department.

“Let me work my magic,” Kristen says, wielding her curling iron this way and that—spritzing and scrunching and tousling my

lifeless mane until it looks, well... kind of amazing.

“There,” she finally says, taking a step back as she smiles at me in the mirror, pleased. “Lena, you look stunning .”

I swallow hard, taking in my reflection. While I’ve always been fairly disciplined about my appearance—a touch of makeup,

never overdone, a daily three-mile run to keep my 25-pound frame in check, tasteful work attire—this is a whole new softer me. Kevin will like it, I know. But do I? I feel a lump rising in my throat.

“Hey,” Kristen says, sensing my unease. “What’s that face for?”

I bite the edge of my lip.

“It’s normal to be a little anxious,” she promises. “I was a nervous wreck before I got engaged.” She pauses for a long beat.

“Is something else going on?”

“I’m fine,” I say quickly, squaring my shoulders. “Like you said, it’s just nerves.”

My heart beats loudly in my chest as I step out of the cab and gaze at the restaurant ahead. With two Michelin stars, Le Rêve

(“The Dream” in French) has a six-month waiting list, a cult following among foodies, and, as evidenced by the smug look on

the hostess’s face, an unmistakable air of pretentiousness.

I look around the lobby for Kevin, but when I don’t see him, I check my phone and find his latest text:

Sorry, crazy day.

Running late.

Get our table for us, and I’ll be there in 5–20.

I tell myself not to be annoyed. Kevin works in commercial real estate; his job is just as hectic as mine, perhaps even more

so, and today he agreed last-minute to chaperone his six-year-old nephew’s field trip.

“Ma’am, your table’s ready,” Smug Hostess says as I attempt to shake off my disappointment.

I follow a man in starched whites to the center of the dining room. At the table, alone, I feel like I’ve been thrust into

a gigantic fishbowl as nearby diners look over. Fortunately, the approaching waiter’s smile calms my nerves—also the glass

of champagne he offers. I take a big sip.

“Good evening,” he says, one hand placed formally behind his back. “While you’re waiting on your guest, may I ask if we’re

celebrating anything special tonight?”

I down a little more champagne, then crack a smile. “Well,” I begin, lowering my voice to a whisper. My black-sequin dress

is chafing my underarms, so I sit up straighter. “Just between you and me, I think my boyfriend might propose tonight.”

“Oh, how wonderful!” the waiter exclaims. “I’ll let the violinists know.”

As if on cue, the musicians descend—hovering around my table like a mini-symphony for... one. I smile awkwardly and nod

a few times, then turn back to my phone. Fortunately, they get the hint and meander to another table.

Twenty-five minutes and two champagnes later, Kevin finally arrives, looking just as handsome as always. “Hey,” he says with a sigh as he slides into his chair, declining the waiter’s offer of champagne with a dismissive wave. “Bourbon. Double—on the rocks.”

“Hi,” I say, wondering if he likes my hair.

“Sorry I’m late,” he says, rubbing his forehead. “Max refused to leave until we saw the tigers, and then I hit rush-hour traffic.”

I smile. “Uncle of the Year.”

“As long as it’s once a year,” Kevin replies with a laugh. “I don’t know how my brother and sister-in-law do it. Kids are freaking exhausting.”

I nod in agreement, reaching for his hand, but he picks up his phone instead. “Hold on, I’ve got to tie up one last work thing.”

“Oh,” I say, leaning back in my chair, just as the eager violinists reappear. “Okay.”

I watch him as he types, wondering if the ring is in his pants pocket or the inside of his coat. I tell myself that we’ll

laugh about this someday. We’ll tell the story at dinner parties, recounting how he showed up late; that I was overdressed

and he, underdressed. Everyone will smile and—

“What’s up with the violinists?” Kevin asks, casting an annoyed glance at the hovering musicians.

“Um,” I begin as the waiter returns with Kevin’s bourbon. “I don’t know. Don’t you think it’s kind of... nice?”

He rubs his temples, then continues jabbing his phone screen. “Not when you have a splitting headache.”

Our waiter takes the hint and discreetly sends the musicians to another table, while I fish through my purse for a pack of

Advil, with no luck.

Finally, Kevin sets down his phone and clears his throat. “Sorry about that.” He straightens his cutlery, then glasses—water

and bourbon—in parallel lines before patting the lapel of his jacket proudly. “So. I have a surprise for you.”

I lean in expectantly, eyes wide.

“I know we’ve talked about this for a while,” he begins, “and that the circumstances weren’t right last year, but...”

I smile, my heart beating faster as Kevin slips his hand inside his jacket.

“But I think that it’s our time now .”

I reach for his hand. “ Yes , it is,” I say, beaming, eyes welling up with tears as he pulls out... an envelope.

“Coldplay,” he says, fanning two concert tickets in the air as my heart sinks. “You know how I wanted to go last year, but

you had the flu? Well, they’re coming back in May, and I decided to go all-out: VIP entrance, backstage access, front-row

seats—hell, we might even meet Chris Martin!”

Coldplay? I don’t even really like Coldplay. I mean, “Fix You” is an okay song, but... Coldplay ?

“Kevin,” I begin, searching his face as my confusion builds to anger. “What the... hell?”

“Wait, what?” he says, a little stunned. “You’re not happy? Lena, do you realize how hard it was to lock down these tickets?

I thought you’d be... a little more excited.”

A tear trickles down my cheek and I’m vaguely aware of the violin trio creeping toward our table again. Vivaldi has never

sounded so vile.

“Babe,” Kevin mutters. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong ?” I reply, shaking my head. “Kevin, I thought you were going to...” I pause, looking away.

“Oh,” he replies after a long beat, my words sinking in as he lowers his head. “Lena, I...”

“Please, Kevin,” I mutter, embarrassed, eyes downcast. “Just don’t.”

“You know I care about you,” he says, pandering. “And I know we’ve been talking about... things , but...” He stops again, rubbing his forehead as if this conversation has upgraded his tension headache to a full-fledged

migraine. “Listen, I need to be honest with you. I don’t know if I’m ready to take such a giant leap. I mean, are you?”

“Giant... leap ?” I reply, wondering if the room is spinning or if it’s just the champagne.

He scratches his head. “I know we have fun together, but do you think we’re really... compatible ?”

I shake my head. “After two years, you’re seriously asking me that?”

“Lena,” he continues, shaking his head, “you don’t even like hiking.”

“Hiking? Are you kidding me?” I grip the edge of the table. “This isn’t about hiking! Kevin, we’ve talked about the future,

we—” I take a deep breath. “That day at Tiffany, I showed you the ring I liked. I thought we were on the same page—that you

wanted to move forward. I mean, you got the salesgirl’s card!”

Kevin looks like a suspect under police interrogation, one who’s about to plead the Fifth. He closes his eyes, then opens

them again. “Listen,” he says, pausing as he runs his hands through his hair. “Lena, you’re accomplished, funny, beautiful...

special.”

Why does it feel like he’s reading my obituary aloud?

“But just because you’ve been with someone for two years,” he continues, “well... it doesn’t automatically mean you should

be together... forever.”

“Right,” I say, equal parts heartbroken and furious. “Then tell me. What does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” he says, furrowing his brow. “I look around at our friends and colleagues, and it just feels sort of like

a factory, like people, well, are all on this conveyor belt chugging along, and that when they reach that time in life when

society expects them to get married, they feel obligated to do it. It’s like the next step of the assembly line. It doesn’t

even matter if it’s true love, a soul connection—whatever you want to call it. They just settle for the person next to them

on the conveyor belt.” He pauses, tugging at the collar of his shirt. “I don’t want to do that.”

“Wow,” I say, dumfounded. “So that’s what you think of me? Just a passing human on a... conveyor belt?”

“No, Lena,” he says, face softening. “Sometimes I worry that’s how you see... me.”

I gape at him. Honestly, I don’t know what to say, and all this right before we were supposed to fly to Seattle tomorrow.

I’d envisioned the moment we’d announce our engagement to my aunt Rosie, my late mother’s older sister who raised me after

she passed. I must have turned the scene over in my mind a hundred times, imagining the expression of joy on her face when

I showed her the ring, how Kevin would be smiling lovingly in his puffer vest with his arm tucked around my waist.

I feel silly and foolish and nineteen shades of embarrassed when the waiter catches my eye from a nearby table and flashes

an expression of pity. He knows.

“Kevin,” I finally say, tears stinging my eyes. “This isn’t a conveyor belt. It’s real life. I thought you wanted to move

forward. I thought... wrong.”

“I’m sorry, Lena,” he says, reaching his hand across the table, but I don’t take it. It feels like the entire restaurant is

watching as I sling my purse over my shoulder and rise to my feet, the chair beneath me screeching against the hardwood floor.

Wobbling in my heels, I adjust the hem of my dress as I eye the exit. I already know I’ll forever despise sequins—and Vivaldi.

“Goodbye, Kevin,” I finally say.

I watch his mouth open and close, his lips forming words—a sentence or two, or three—but I can’t make any of it out. All I

can hear is the pounding in my chest and the nauseating sound of Baroque music. Kevin reaches for my arm, but I lurch forward,

extricating myself from his grip as I bolt for the door.