Chapter 3
Around the same time Eve’s Great Malaise goes away—though she doesn’t know it’s the end yet—she meets, for the first time, Danny Aagaard.
In his first months of college, he does what’s expected of eldest sons—which is to say, he completely disappears.
She prowls his social media as girls from his dorm tag him in pictures and videos.
There he is at a soccer game; in a low-effort Halloween costume; drinking from a red cup.
She wonders who these girls are. If one is a girlfriend.
If she will be Eve’s friend—someone to give Eve dating tips and eyeliner recommendations.
Eve hears the front door open and she starts to sit, then lies back down again; she doesn’t want to look too eager to see he-of-the-unanswered-quintuple-text. She hears their voices before she sees them.
“Julian! Sweetheart, welcome home. And—oh.”
“Hi, Mrs. Olsen. Thank you so much for having me.”
“Of course, I just—”
“Mom, Danny. Danny, Mom. Danny’s my roommate.”
“Oh. Yes. Of course. Right, Danny, right, thank you for the flowers, that’s so thoughtful.”
“I guess I should’ve told you he was coming.”
“That might have been nice.”
“Oh—I’m so sorry. I can—”
“Don’t be silly. Come in. Make yourself at home.”
Danny steps into the living room behind Julian, and for the first time, Eve sees him.
He stands in the hall framed by the big window, which is just barely ajar, with the cold autumn air swirling behind him and the branches of the honey locust tree out front tapping against the glass.
He’s wearing a flannel and has one hand in his back pocket.
He looks like the kind of young adult they’d cast as a fifteen-year-old in a movie for child labor reasons—too wholesome to be a real adult but too handsome to be a genuine teenager.
He looks like the guy who won homecoming king but assumed there had been a mistake.
This is not someone with the courage or antiestablishment instinct for trends.
His haircut is generic. His eyes are hazel.
He doesn’t look like he could withstand a football tackle but would fare well at a fun run.
Some years later, Shannon tells Eve she has very specific taste.
“Your type is just an exquisitely nonthreatening man,” Shannon says.
“I like a guy who looks like he was a kid detective. Is that such a weird type?”
“Yes,” Shannon says. “But all men are a weird type.”
The truth is, though, that Eve doesn’t think of herself as a person with a type on the day Danny walks through her front door. It is possible that her type is made right then.
When he first sees her, ten years before they start dating, he smiles generously and says, “Eve?”