Chapter 2
The month goes by like this: Eve thinks about music.
Her manager gets in touch with a new producer, someone who’s been doing promising work with the label that put out PRELAPSARIAN and ostensibly wants to put out Eve’s sophomore album.
The producer is no-nonsense—a sixtysomething man who wants to get in, make the music, and get out again, with no diversions for friendship along the way.
Eve keeps her head down in the studio and follows instructions.
At the label’s request, she begins teasing songs on her long-dormant social media.
Some fans are excited. Many seem to have vanished in the wind.
Eve didn’t have that many to begin with, and it’s been a long four years of nothing.
Whenever she’s not working on the album, Eve applies to another soulless tech copywriting job.
AI has rendered them scarce. She applies to other jobs, jobs for which she is wholly unqualified, and imagines what her life would look like if she really did have a passion for data analytics.
She tries to be out of the apartment as much as possible, so she writes in the library and has lunch with her parents, who do not offer use of her childhood bedroom.
Julian and Gigi introduce Eve to Our Lady of Perpetual Breakfast, and Eve decides she has never loved a dining establishment so thoroughly.
A Catholic school! Turned diner! You can eat right there in the confessional booth.
It is perpetually cacophonous: the clanging AC, the clatter of silverware echoing off the ceilings, the weird whistling of wind coming from who knows where.
Eve has never consumed so much drip coffee.
There is much that feels magic to Eve about her friendship with Shannon, but the thing she treasures most is that Shannon makes her a better person.
Shannon prods at Eve’s assumptions about the way the world works and gets her to interrogate what she takes for granted.
Eve grew up around a mostly silent dinner table, but with Shannon, she feels as if they could talk forever and never run out of things to say.
Eve gets home after one of these ice cream evenings with Shannon to find Julian in the kitchen making dinner and Gigi doing yoga in the living room.
“Danny?” Gigi says, then looks up from her downward dog. “Oh, hey. He just left. I thought you were him.”
“I can’t believe we still haven’t overlapped,” Eve says. She goes to the kitchen.
“Danny?” Julian says. He turns. “Oh.”
“Just me.”
“You just missed him again. He has a date.”
Eve hoists herself on the counter. “Like an app date? By which I mean, obviously, a date wherein you eat only appetizers.”
“That was so stupid. That’s such a Danny joke.”
“I did not remember that Danny had such a refined sense of humor. It’s someone he met on your app, though, right?”
Julian nods. “You should get on Pathos. It’s been long enough post-Fletcher, yeah?”
“I mean, it hasn’t been that long, but I also feel like we were spiritually broken up for the last two or so years.”
“So get on Pathos.”
“Are you trying to make me a guinea pig?”
“Well, I can’t use it. I’m engaged to a literal goddess and I really don’t want to cross her.”
From the other room, Gigi says, “Figurative.”
“Come on,” Julian says. “It’s better than all the other dating apps. We’ll tell you all the ways you’re actually compatible with people.”
“I don’t want an app to tell me how to feel. I want to tell myself how I feel.”
“Because you’ve done such a good job of that in the past?”
Primly, Eve says, “We should all endeavor to be lifelong learners.”
VULNERABILITY: Eve is embarrassed how many people have told her, “Well, obviously you and Fletcher were never going to work.” Obvious to whom? And for how long? And what does this indicate about Eve’s ability to choose her next partner?