Chapter 13
“You work at a coffee shop?” Sara asks, her voice loud. For some reason, she always yells her side of the phone conversation when she’s using her hands-free headset, as if the Bluetooth affects volume. “Like, making coffee?”
“Yes,” I reply, though my voice is muffled. After getting home from Strange Brew and calling to relay the entire story to her, I had fallen face-first onto my pink-and-white gingham duvet.
“But you don’t like coffee.”
“I know,” I say, turning over to stare up at my ceiling.
“And you told me you worked in sales.”
“Maybe I’m with corporate?” I offer.
Sara snorts. “Why did you lie to me? Were you embarrassed or something?”
I wince. Technically, it wasn’t a lie. And knowing how Sara would have critiqued my choice to quit Probus only to take a job as a barista, I can understand why past me might have bent the truth a little.
But pointing that out right now wouldn’t accomplish much, other than make her defensive, so I offer the only other explanation I’ve come up with.
“Maybe I’m having a midlife crisis.”
She scoffs. “You’re thirty-one, not fifty. And don’t worry, Probus will have you back in a heartbeat. You could even call the office here and line up a job before you move back.”
I glower at the ceiling. Even though Sara and I worked together for five years, I don’t think she ever really appreciated that I never wanted the same things from it that she did.
While I was happy just to have a job with benefits, something to pay the bills while I took care of my grandmother, Sara had long-term goals that set her up for a lifelong career.
I always admired that, but I also never wanted it, no matter how much she told me I should.
“I’m not sure Probus is the answer here,” I reply.
“Oh, come on. You didn’t hate it.”
She’s right, I didn’t hate it. But I hadn’t loved it, either. It was just a means to an end, a temporary stopgap to stay afloat until the bills abated, until my grandmother was stable. Until I saved enough and could finally start living the life I had always dreamed about.
The only problem was that the bills never went away. My savings account was always stagnant. And my grandmother, who had promised me magic and signs and a mystical, cosmic plan, died, leaving me with no plan at all.
That’s why I had been so eager to come to Boston with Matt.
It might not have been perfect, but at least it was something, an opportunity for change that I desperately needed.
Maybe even the sign from the universe that I had been waiting for.
But if that were true, why did it end up imploding my entire life?
“No, I didn’t hate it,” I reply, pushing myself to sit at the edge of my bed. “I’m just not moving back to LA right now.”
“Why not? What’s so great about Boston?”
I try to ignore how the comment stokes my frustration. She means well, I know she does, but right now I don’t need her advice. I need her support.
“Sara—”
“Tell me you’ll at least think about it.”
“Fine.” I sigh. “I’ll think about it. Now can we talk about something else?”
“Sure,” she says. I can hear the smile in her voice. “Have you had any more morning meetups with a certain hot guy that I should know about?”
I know she means Matt, but Ben’s face flashes in my brain before I can stop it. The slope of his shoulders when he leans against a doorframe. The sound of his voice, low and rough, especially when he first wakes up…
I quickly push him away, back to the corner of my brain. I have enough problems without daydreaming about my neighbor, who also happens to have a girlfriend.
“Let’s talk about you,” I say, standing up and leaving a Marnie-size imprint across my duvet.
“Do not bring up the promotion. Or babies,” she warns. “I’m not jinxing anything.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, smiling. “I’m talking in the most general terms about how you as a human being are doing.”
“I am good. As a human,” she replies carefully. “Hopefully I will be better in a couple of weeks. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Then that’s all I need to know. As a fellow human being.”
She laughs and so do I, and for a minute the three thousand miles between us don’t feel so big.
“So what’s next in that box of yours?” she asks.
I walk out to the living room, where the shoebox full of mementos sits on the sofa. The list is still taped to the top, except I’ve crossed out the Brattle Book Shop and Strange Brew.
“Next is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum,” I say.
“Oh, that sounds fancy.”
“It might be. I have no idea.”
“Here, let me look it up.” I can hear her typing away on her keyboard and then she hums to herself. “Oh yeah. Very fancy. Kind of romantic, too. Matt has good taste.”
I ignore the comment. “How far away is it?”
“Let me see… from you it looks like it’s about three miles, but there’s traffic, so a cab would take a while.”
I also have no idea if I can pay for it, since I haven’t found a bank yet, I think.
“What are the other options?”
“You could take the subway?” she says. “It’s on the green line. Whatever that means. There’s like four different ones.”
“Four?” I ask, panic tripping my pulse.
“Wait. Maybe five. There’s one that splits off or something? I don’t know what this map is telling me.”
I groan and let myself collapse onto the sofa.
“What are you going to do?” Sara asks.
A moment passes, then I turn my head up enough to look at my front door. “I could ask my neighbor.”
“Your neighbor?”
“He helped me find the grocery store the day I got home from the hospital, and the bookstore the other day.”
“Perfect. Ask him.”
“Actually, that might be a bad idea.”
“Why?”
Because I’ve seen him in sweatpants that were quite frankly obscene, and the image keeps popping up in my mind at very inopportune moments.
“Because after the bookstore we ran into his girlfriend outside our building, and she didn’t look very happy to see the two of us together.”
“He’s got a girlfriend?” Sara almost sounds relieved. “That’s great! Now you don’t have to worry that you’re leading him on.”
I roll my eyes. “Right. But I don’t want her to get the wrong idea, either.”
“Oh please. What is there to be jealous about? He’s helping you revisit places you went on dates with your ex-boyfriend.”
Is that what I’m doing? I’ve been so focused on getting my memories back, I’d almost forgotten about Sara’s suggestion that they all lead back to Matt.
To be honest, I’d barely thought about him at all.
But if I’d learned anything over the past few days, it’s that I can’t trust my brain to tell me what’s real right now. All I can do is follow the plan.
“Maybe,” I say.
“I’m just saying, if he offered to help, you should take him up on it,” Sara replies.
“Even if he’s distractingly hot?” I ask with a wince.
She laughs. “Especially if he’s hot.”