“Oh, Daphne,” she says, her back still to me. “Don’t be obvious.”
And then she turns around. I see a smile creep onto her face.
“You are one of the people I love most in this world. It should be self-evident. But—” She holds my gaze; I see just the slightest film on her eyes. “There you go.”
It feels good to say it. It feels good to hear it. All this easy intimacy I denied myself for so long.
When I first met Kendra, I hadn’t gotten close with a single person outside Tae and my family for years. I was in a glass bubble. I had friends, but they didn’t understand my reality, and as the years wore on, we kept in touch less and less. I sidelined theirfriendship because I knew, somewhere deep down, that my life would never resemble theirs. That I may never get married; that I wouldn’t carry children; that I’d only progress to the middle. I didn’t want the comparison shoved in my face every day. I didn’t want to look at them and feel ugly or resentful. I didn’t want to see that the people I’d started with were already somewhere I’d never be.
And then there was Kendra. Maybe it was that she was alternative, that her life with Joel was narrated with happenstance instead of intention, or that she never questioned my life, just kept showing up, but our friendship was easy to maintain. She cracked the window. Irina flew in and blew down the door.
“What’s going on with Penelope?” I ask Irina now.
Irina rolls her neck out. “What is always going on with Penelope,” she says. “A lot of love and not as much compatibility. You think when you get to a certain age you figure it out, but life is much more like a continuum than a three-act structure. Here’s the thing no one tells you in any of these fucking movies we make: love is not enough.”
“No one wants to hear that,” I say. “It’s not sexy.”
“You need so much more than love,” she says. “Are you kidding? I’d love to be with someone who didn’t sleep until ten a.m. Or who understood the importance of a clean house. Or who didn’t splash water all over the bathroom sink when she brushed her teeth.”
I laugh. “You think you’ll ever go searching for someone who doesn’t?”
Irina kneads a muscle in her neck. “The problem with love is that it’s not enough,” she says. And then she looks up at me. Hereyes are still soft. “But it’s also nearly impossible to let go of once you’ve found it.”
I straighten up.
“Well, that is a catch-22,” I say.
Irina nods. She plucks a crumbled dish towel off the counter and begins to fold it. “Life is a catch-22,” Irina says. “That’s why God invented female friendship.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Josh, six months.
After my breakup with Tae I stayed in Los Angeles for another year. There was an easing out of constant hospital living. I still had to do all the appointments and tests and blood draws, but we were no longer in constant-crisis mode and instead in a sort of homeostasis. There was a hovering, some space, and I wanted to fill it.
On the eve of my twenty-fourth birthday, I moved to San Francisco. I had gotten the job at Flext, a tech-venture start-up that was looking to revolutionize how people worked out at home. It was pre-Peloton, and they were getting a lot of buzz.
I’d first heard about the start-up from Alisa, my old college roommate. It was a friend of hers from New York’s venture, and she asked me if I wanted to be an assistant there. They were looking for someone with a communications background who didn’t mind the grunt work and the long hours. It sounded perfect.
“The only catch is, it’s in San Francisco,” Alisa said.
“Even better.”
All during my years of dating Tae when he was at Stanford, I’d hear about the glory of San Francisco. It felt like a city comprised of everything off-limits. Hilly neighborhoods, bike rides, drinks at the top of skyscrapers, meetings on scooters.
We talked about my visiting often, but something always got in the way. I couldn’t fly; it wasn’t safe. There was another appointment.What if something happened?
Something always did.
But now I was free. I could visit if I wanted to. Hell, I could live there. So I did just that, I moved.
I met Noah the second night I was there, in that tiki bar down the block from the hotel where I was staying, and our five weeks together sped by with all the particularity of a film dissolve. When it ended, I was sadder than I should have been. And then I met Josh.
Josh was my boss. He was twenty-nine, with a 4.0 from Harvard and a hundred million dollars in venture capital. He was on fire.Forbeshad just written a piece about him. He was being followed byThe New Yorkerfor a three-month interview. He was poised to become Silicon Valley’s next billionaire. To me, he just seemed like a guy in a J.Crew ad.
I walked into Flext’s offices that day in jeans, a collared shirt, and so much enthusiasm I felt like a different person. I was excited to be there. The offices were an open-floor plan—no one had a door. Josh sat in the middle of the bullpen, typing away at his computer.
“That’s our founder,” Janelle, the receptionist, told me. “He’s hot, right?”
