I suck in a sharp breath. “Oooh, I should—” I make a vague gesture.
“Say no more.” In one fluid motion, Mark Winterson grabs both of our plastic baskets and stands up. “We’ll have to do this again sometime, though.”
I hurry to the elevator before I can say something embarrassing and ruin this moment.
Did that really just happen?
After the doors close behind me, I jump up and down and scream silently into my hands.
Chapter
6
That night, I’m sitting alone in my too-quiet, empty house, buzzing from that lunch and trying not to think about whatever’s been happening in Slack, when Greg texts me:
you had lunch with the new executive? what did he want?
Suddenly I’m so irritated.Bold of you to escalate to texting! And it’s after polite messaging hours!
I scroll up to the last texts he sent me—the ones right after Mom died that I never answered, and farther up, it’s just one or two terse messages a year for birthdays and holidays, back and forth.
Seriously, who does Greg think he is?
If he wanted to have a say in my life—if he wanted the kind of relationship where he could text me after nine p.m.—maybe he shouldn’t have kissed me senior year,twice,and then ditched me for a new group of friends.
And sure, I should be over it by now, but that’s not the point!
I’m not going to write back. I won’t dignify this with an answer.
But I still spend the next several hours ruminating on all the things I wish I could say.
This house felt small when I was growing up, but after my New York apartment, it feels palatial, uncomfortably empty.
You’re so spoiled,Mom would always say.You’re not a real adult.
I was just starting to feel like one, almost. Sure, I was living in a shoebox with three roommates, but I paid rent and hauled my laundry to the laundromat and rode the train back and forth to my grown-up job. I made my student loan payments and stared at that huge amount of the principal once a month, feeling like it was a rock I’d never push all the way uphill.
But then,bam,I’m back in my childhood bedroom, with the mortgage paid off by Mom’s life insurance so I don’t even have that grown-up worry. With the guilt-soaked luxury of an in-unit washer-dryer and all the memories of Mom that everything laundry-related brings back—her instructions for sorting clothes properly, her strong opinions about fabric softener brands, all the nights when she’d fold clothes while we watched TV. And Mom’s dream job basically fell into my lap, so I should probably try harder to be happy about it.
Now it’s two a.m., and I’m staring at the ceiling, rehearsing all the ways I wish I could tell Greg off.
Think about something else. Think about something nice.
My mind goes back to the cafeteria, sun streaming through the big windows and Mark Winterson giving me his full attention. But I start replaying every weird thing I said, and the stress winds me up.
Think about something else! Something…less exciting. More soothing.
I try to picture a field of flowers.
Flowers.
Sampaguita.
Greg’s old Acura.
Dodgeball.
It would be hard for one person to know all of those things, together. Even, say, if someone trained an LLM by feeding it Mom’s Slack messages—I shudder at the thought—there’s no way she ever mentioned the dodgeball story to anyone at work. Mom was very image-conscious when it came to me. She only ever wanted to show the outside world the best, most braggable version.
