Chapter 2
Two years ago
An Answer: Danny
The snow comes early that year. Four days before Christmas, down it wafts in glittery flurries, icing the fire escapes and dusting the trees.
Danny waits for Kyra just outside her subway stop, up in the cold and the slush with the Christmas music leaking out the nearby coffee shop every time the door pushes open. He exhales, and his breath fogs.
“Hey, cutie,” Kyra says.
He looks down—he is not particularly tall but Kyra is tiny—and smiles at her. There she is, like magic. She is wearing earmuffs, and there is a snowflake quickly melting on the tip of her nose. Danny leans to kiss her, and she tilts her chin up.
“Where are we going?” she asks.
“Sheep Meadow?” Danny says. “Look at the snow?”
“You’re so Montana.”
“Everyone likes snow in Central Park.”
“Still. So Montana. When we’re there, are you going to start doing cowboy things?”
“Hey,” Danny says, “I’ll have you know I come from a line of crunchy woodsy Montanans. Entirely distinct from cowboy Montanans.”
“Are we going to cook a moose on the range?”
“Moose hunting is restricted by permit. But if you’re lucky, we might cook tofu in the air fryer.”
Kyra slips her mittened hand into Danny’s gloved one, and they start crunching through the frost. It’s that perfect, brief glow you only get in the first hours after a New York snow—when all that is white has not yet become gray and slushy.
They cross a street populated by slow-moving carriages, horses clip-clopping on the pavement, and pedicabs playing carols.
The open spaces between sidewalks are full of children on sleds and dogs in plaid jackets.
Kyra hums contentedly. They have, at this point, been together for three years.
Three years exactly. They met at a Christmas party when she spilled an entire bottle of peppermint schnapps on Danny’s shirt.
She tried to help him clean it. They ended up kissing in the building’s basement laundry, where someone had hung mistletoe.
At this point, they have told and retold this story so much it has the polished choreography of a stand-up routine.
In this age of app dating, how precious is this?
A real-life clumsy meet-cute. They always conclude with her saying, “He smelled like a drunken elf for a week.” And him saying, “Totally worth it.”
For the first time, they have elected to spend the holidays together.
They will go to Bozeman for Christmas, and then to Kyra’s parents’ in Philadelphia for New Year’s.
When they made these plans in September, Danny felt consumed by the trepidatious butterflies he thought were the exclusive purview of a relationship’s beginning.
He felt, again, like he was on a roller coaster.
But now, the question is not “will they won’t they?
” but “forever or just for now?” Forever, he thinks.
That’s what it means, doesn’t it, that Kyra wants to spend Christmas in Montana?
In October, he and Julian went ring shopping.
Julian brought along his new girlfriend, Gigi, to weigh in.
And now there is a diamond in a red velvet box in Danny’s pocket.
Kyra is saying something, and Danny’s having a hard time paying attention. His stomach keeps swooping. He laughs, and it sounds canned—a studio audience laugh.
They stop at a tree, bare bark all dusted with snow, and Kyra puts her hands in her pockets and grins up at the branches.
This, this! This is what Danny loves about her.
She is so infinitely astounded by the world.
He has dated people before, and this is not the first time he’s been in love, but he feels a certainty in this moment that those loves were a cheap facsimile of the real thing.
An elderly couple walking their elderly dogs plod slowly past. They smile at Danny and Kyra, and Kyra smiles back, and Danny shifts his weight from foot to foot. Finally, they move along, and there’s a sudden moment of privacy, and Danny takes a breath.
“Kyra,” he says.
“Danny.”
“Meeting you, three years ago, was the best thing that ever happened to me. You make me a better person. I love you, but I also admire you, and I appreciate you, and I’m just so grateful you’re in my life.”
Kyra has gone very still. Her head is tilted slightly to the side. The elderly couple with the dogs is circling back around. Why are they coming back? Danny puts his hands, which are numb, in his pockets and feels the shape of the box.
“I want to be with you forever,” he says. “That’s all I want. I had no idea a person could feel as much love as I feel for you. I think it’s the kind of thing that only happens if you’re lucky. Once in a lifetime.”
“Danny,” she says quietly.
He begins to lower his knee.
“Danny, please stop.”
He straightens.
“I don’t—” Kyra looks over her shoulder, like someone might be coming to her rescue. The elderly couple is now watching one of their dogs take a shit in the snow. “This isn’t what I want.”
“Oh,” Danny says. Slowly, slowly, he takes his hands out of his pockets. “Like . . . now? Or . . . ?”
“We’re way too young.”
“Are we? Okay. I just—sorry.” Sorry? What kind of person apologizes for having their heart broken? Danny, that’s who.
“I have so much that I still want to do,” Kyra says. “I have to live in Paris!”
Kyra has never before mentioned Paris. “Okay,” Danny says. “Okay, sure, let’s move to Paris.”
“No,” she says, with more conviction now. “No, and I want to get an MBA, I want to run a marathon! Oh my god, I’ve never even done anal!”
The elderly couple looks up, then at each other, then back at Danny and Kyra.
“Do you want to do anal?”
“I don’t know!” Kyra says. “I can’t get married to someone who’s too afraid to ever try anything new.”
“You don’t want to marry me because I have never suggested we do anal.”
“Could you stop saying that word?”
“Okay,” Danny says. “Sure. I would love to stop saying anal in the park.”
Now Kyra is laughing, which means that Danny is also laughing. His eyes are watering, but he’s also laughing. It’s just so cold out.
She touches her mittens to her cheeks. She’s crying, too. Danny’s instinct is to reach out for her, but he knows that he should not. That he will never comfort her again.
“I’m so, so sorry,” she says. “But no. I can’t be with you forever. I do love you. But I just think you’re—we’re. We’re missing something.”
“Nice save,” Danny says.
“I just mean for me, there’s—look. Danny. You will be perfect for someone. I know that. I’m sure of that. But I think for me, if we’re together, I’ll just always wonder if there’s more out there.”
“How long have you been wondering that?”
“I guess the whole time,” she says.
“What were we missing? What’s the more you need?”
“Danny.”
“It’ll help if I know, right?”
“You’re just so—close. All the time. I feel like I don’t have any room to breathe. I’m always worried I’ll do something wrong and hurt your feelings. I just need someone who pays less attention.”
They have had a version of this conversation before.
The subtext is that Danny is anxious, but he doesn’t know how not to be.
He went to therapy for two years, back when everyone was going to therapy for two years, but he felt like it only made him more anxious—anxious to share every tiny revelation to prove that he was becoming more than he had once been.
“But maybe I didn’t really realize how strongly I felt it until you said what you said.
About this love being the kind of thing you only find once in a lifetime.
I think, for me, this just doesn’t feel like—the happily-ever-after.
The magic thing. And I bet it doesn’t really feel like that for you, either. ”
“How do you know?” Danny says.
“I guess I don’t,” Kyra says. “I guess you never really know what another person is feeling.”
“I guess not,” Danny says.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
Carefully, cautiously, Kyra rises to her toes and kisses Danny’s cheek. Then she turns to go. She walks quickly away from him through the park. He watches her go. His skin is numb where she kissed it.
There are logistics to be untangled here. Plane tickets, a lease. Custody of Ticket to Ride and the fiddlehead fern named Sebastian. Friends one will keep, or the other. Changing of emergency contacts. The slow unpicking of two lives very nearly braided together forever.
Danny senses there is a lesson to be learned here.
Something about wariness, something about treading carefully, something about not getting your hopes too high.
He does not yet know how this will feel in one, two, thirty days’ time, but right now he is in the eye of the hurricane, and there, he has the clarity to make a single wish: Let it be a lesson he does not learn.