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“I’m sorry. That sucks,” I say, trying to play it cool. I don’t want her to know how excited I am that she’s opening up to me again.
Not yet, not until I know what prompted the ghosting in the first place.
“Yeah, it does. But not as much as these stupid panties.” She smiles. “I’ll be right back.” She collects her suitcase from the back of my scooter, extends the handle, and rolls it across the gleaming floor toward the ladies’ room near gate 53D.
I watch her go, hoping this is the start of a Christmas Eve neither of us will ever forget.
Chapter Three
Dipsy
“No.” I point a stern finger at my flushed face in the reflection. “You are not going to fall in love with this man. Not in ten days or ten hours, let alone ten flipping minutes.”
But that’s the problem.
That’s why I had to cut off contact after that one amazing night in September.
There’s just something about Bear… He’s gorgeous, obviously, but that’s only a tiny part of the attraction. It’s the way he looks at me that drives me crazy. He looks at me like he really sees me—me, not the cute, mannerly, easy-to-put-in-a-box girl everyone else sees.
Bear recognizes my ambition and believes I can accomplish anything I set my mind to. Bear understands that a woman can be a soft-spoken, book-loving cat nerd and still want to be a force in national news reporting. If I let myself fall for Bear, I know I would be accepted—celebrated—for the person I truly am.
But Bear is also very happy in Chicago, his lifelong home. He told me in September that he couldn’t imagine leaving his community, his friends, and his surrogate family behind. What kind of jerk would I be to ask him to abandon his well-rounded life to follow a cub reporter around the country from crappy job to crappy job?
What if he’d been with me in D.C.? What if he’d uprooted his entire world to follow me across the country, only for me to lose my job in three flipping days?
Sure, Bear makes the kind of money that would have made it easy to pay our rent, but we would have both been stranded far from home, friends, and family. Bear can run Clyde’s social media from anywhere, but his house-flipping business is based in the Chicago area. He might not have been able to keep that going from a distance. It would have been one loss after another, and I’m sure he would have come to resent me.
Sooner or later, he would have put his foot down, insisted we go back to Chicago, and I would have been doomed to live out a big-city version of my mother’s unfulfilled life.
Mom wanted to be a ballet dancer. She had a scholarship to Julliard, part-time modeling work with a prestigious athletic wear designer, and a super cool attic apartment in the West Village. And then she met dad the summer between her sophomore and junior years of college and fell in love with a man who couldn’t imagine leaving Bad Dog or his family behind.
By July, she was engaged.
By August, she’d withdrawn from Julliard and moved back to her tiny hometown for good.
She taught dance for a few years before she got pregnant with me and became a stay-at-home mom, but it wasn’t the same. She never fulfilled her dream of dancing with the New York City Ballet or felt the rush of performing for a crowd with dancers as skilled as she was ever again. She still can’t watch The Nutcracker ballet without tearing up and running to hide in her and Dad’s bedroom, and I can’t completely silence the voice in my head that says I’m part of the reason her dreams never came true.
Deep down, I know my mother adores me and wouldn’t take back a day of her life with Dad for all the fame and dance accolades in the world, but that’s only because she fell in love.
Love changes things. It changes people. It gives and it takes away.
For every beautiful dream love makes come true, it takes another off the table. It simply isn’t possible to have it all, at least not all at once. There are only so many hours in the day, so many years in a lifetime.
I know enough hardworking newswomen who are struggling to juggle marriage, motherhood, and work to think it’s easy. No matter how hard they try, they inevitably drop a ball. Sometimes two.
Caroline Cash, my mentor, once left her baby at daycare four hours late because she was so busy researching a story. And never remembered her husband’s birthday or work events. Marcus was so upset by it, he wanted to go to couples’ therapy, but there wasn’t time in Caroline’s schedule. Now, they’re separated, and she only sees her three-year-old on weekends. The court sided with Marcus when he claimed a woman who was anchoring the news until ten p.m. every night didn’t have the capacity to set a dependable bedtime routine for a toddler.
