8:47 p.m.: Nora: This year, instead of an expensive masquerade or even more expensive resort rental
8:48 p.m.: Deepti: omg it’s not even Thanksgiving yet, Nora. I’d expect this from Bea but not you. NOT YOU.
8:52 p.m.: Nora: For my birthday this year I’d like my gift to be: you all come to my place for canapés and cheese and punch that I make for all of you on New Year’s Eve
8:55 p.m.: Josh: sick, can I make the playlist?
8:56 p.m.: Nora: no, next question?
8:57 p.m.: Finn: can’t wait, Nor
9:00 p.m.: Bea: this sounds lovely!
9:02 p.m.: Deepti: ugh fine I accept our New Year’s Eve plans even though they’re a month and a half early (lmk what I can bring!)
FINN COLLINS, OCTOBER 1, 2024
11:57 p.m.: Finn: See! You did it!
11:58 p.m.: Finn: Good girl
11:58 p.m.: Nora:
4
CHAPTER 4: NORA
DECEMBER 31, 2024
No starter condo in Toronto can reasonably be calledspaciousand mine is no exception, but the floor-to-ceiling windows along the two exterior walls of my living/dining room and kitchen that extend into my bedroom certainly give the illusion of square footage, which helps it feel a little less crowded in here. Plus, we’ll have an amazing view of the fireworks tonight.
Josh sent me a playlist in November and despite my initial resistance to his foray into acid house, it honestly wasn’t horrible, so I’ve integrated some of his songs with my own for the party. The songs are a mix of millennial classics and actual classics, the result creating a nostalgia for a time I remember and a time I wish I knew.
The mirror balls Finn helped me hang yesterday spin and glitter with the reflection of the warm tea lights and tapered candles set on every available surface. He also helped me bake the birthday cake in my fridge, an activity I assumed he’d participated in before until he pointed at the bag of icing sugar on my counter and asked if our friends knew we’d be drugging them with cocaine or if that would be a birthday surprise.
Even twenty-four hours later, I still feel a little high from all the icing taste tests Finn asked me to do off the tips of his fingers.
The kitchen island is overflowing with the proof of all the work I did over the last seventy-two hours. A picked-over charcuterie board—which Bea keeps referring to as a shark coochie board—with four different types of cheese, red pepper jelly, pickled olives, pickled carrots, pickled pickles, and fruit salami cover one side of the island. The rest of the marble is covered with the dinner: chicken rillettes and crusty baguette slices in one corner, leek and potato crème soup with fried scallops and parsley oil sitting in a pot on a warming plate. Miniature broccoli potpies cool on a tray next to mustard gratin with potatoes and parsnips. And in the oven, guinea fowl with prosecco green grape sauce, complete with those little paper cap booties that I’d only ever seen in cartoons. The cornucopia is set around the antique brass candelabra Finn gave me for a housewarming gift earlier this year, new bayberry candles he presented to me yesterday—“For your birthday,” he said—burning in the holders.
This night is perfect. Not too loud, not too sweaty, just the people I love the most. I don’t have the space for a table big enough to fit us all, so everyone sits on the couches and floor, but they don’t mind. I’m so grateful to them for letting me do this. This is not their ideal New Year’s Eve party, but they’re here. Because they love me. And that means everything.
They’re here. All of them.
Except Finn.
I check my phone again before setting it back down on the counter a bit harder than necessary. I’m mad at myself for checking at all. I will not be the girl who spends the whole night checking her phone for a man.
A man!
Ugh.
I know he couldn’t have forgotten. He was here until ten last night helping me set up. He said work was giving him a half-day for the holiday, but maybe there’s a difference between a lawyer’s half-day and the rest of us.
It shouldn’t matter anyway. Because I am a serious woman. I own my own condo. I’m hosting a dinner party for all my friends. I have a job I’m good at. I make my parents proud.
I don’t need to kiss Finn at midnight, nor do Ineedto do anything else with him…after midnight. Because we’re friends. Good friends, now.
“What’s up, buttercup?” Bea asks. Meriah is not far behind her, chatting with Judith while they pile their plates with more food.
