And then I’d met Rebecca at some New Year’s party given by a mutual friend.
She was a photographer at the Globe, dark hair and easy smile and a camera bag always slung over her shoulder. We’d been seeing each other for a little over three weeks. She was kind, uncomplicated, showed up when she said she would, and didn’t make me feel like I was constantly auditioning for a role I’d never win.
We’d never argued. Not once. Not about where to eat or what movie to see or any of the thousand small negotiations that made up a relationship. Rebecca stated her preferences clearly, listened to mine, and we figured it out. Simple.
Not like my parents.
I’d grown up with their fights as background noise. The slammed doors and raised voices, the icy silences that could last for weeks. My mother crying in the kitchen when she thought no one could hear. My father disappearing into the garage with a bottle. They’d married young, passionate, certain they were meant for each other, and spent thirty years proving how wrong they’d been.
Danny’s death had broken them completely. Whatever love remained got buried under grief and blame and the kind of hatred that only people who once loved each other can feel.
I didn’t want that. Didn’t want passion that burned everything down.
Rebecca was safe, calm. She was everything Maggie had never been.
So why had I said yes to lunch tomorrow?
I set the letter down and rubbed my eyes. For a moment, just a moment, something strange flickered through my mind.
Valentine’s Day. Rosetti’s. The restaurant where we’d had our first real date. Maggie sitting across from me, candlelight catching the gold flecks in her green eyes, telling me she needed space. And I was nodding. Not fighting her. Not trying to convince her to stay. Because I’d already decided, hadn’t I? Already written the letter. Already given up.
She ended things. But I’d already ended them first. We just hadn’t known we were running in the same direction.
I shook my head, and the image dissolved. Crazy. I was going crazy, seeing things that hadn’t happened yet, memories of events that hadn’t yet come to pass.
But the feeling lingered. The strange certainty that I’d glimpsed something true.
I folded the letter and slid it back under the papers on my desk. Not the trash. Not yet. But not where I’d have to look at it, either.
Maggie had seemed different today. That was the thing I kept coming back to, the detail I couldn’t explain away. Not the Maggie who deflected every serious conversation with a joke. Not the woman who canceled plans and dodged phone calls and kept one foot perpetually out the door.
This Maggie had held my gaze. Asked for what she wanted. Stood there in the fish sauce aisle and saidthere are things I should have said a long time agolike she actually meant to say them.
Noon tomorrow. Mike’s on Dorchester Ave.
I’d find out soon enough if something had really changed, or if I was just seeing what I wanted to see.
5
Maggie
The offices of Harrison & Webb Publishing occupied the third floor of a brick building on Newbury Street, and walking through the doors Monday morning felt like stepping into a time capsule of my own life.
I’d spent my entire career in publishing. Worked my way up from editorial assistant to associate editor to senior editor to, as of three days ago in a timeline that no longer existed, Editorial Director. I knew this industry inside and out, knew the rhythms of acquisition meetings and the politics of imprint rivalries, and the exhaustion of shepherding a difficult author through their third round of revisions.
But that was 2014 me. That was the woman who’d earned her corner office and her reputation and her six-figure salary.
1987 me was twenty-three years old, fresh out of her master’s program, and currently standing in front of a desk piled with slush pile manuscripts that needed logging.
The surrealism of it hit me in waves.
The office was almost unrecognizable from the sleek, open-plan space I’d left behind. No computers—well, one computer, a hulking IBM PC with its beige plastic casing and tiny green-text monitor, sitting in the corner like a mysterious artifact that no one quite trusted. Instead, typewriters dominated every desk, the clatter of keys creating a constant percussion that I’d forgotten was the soundtrack of my early career. The IBM Selectric on my desk hummed when I turned it on, that electric whine that had once meant possibility and now just meant I’d be retyping anything with more than two errors.
There was paper everywhere. Manuscripts stacked in towers that threatened to topple. Carbon copies with their smudged purple ink. Memos typed on cream-colored company letterhead, routed through actual physical inboxes that sat on the corner of every desk. The mail cart came through twice a day, pushed by a kid named Dennis who was working his way through BU and always had ink stains on his fingers.
And the smoke. God, the smoke.
Harold Finch, one of the senior editors, sat three desks away with a cigarette perpetually burning in the ashtray beside his coffee cup. The smoke curled up toward the water-stained ceiling tiles, joining the general haze that hung over the office. In 2014, you couldn’t smoke within fifty feet of a building entrance without someone calling security. In 1987, Harold ashed into his coffee cup and nobody blinked. My eyes watered. My clothes would smell like an ashtray by noon. I’d forgotten this part, how we’d all just marinated in secondhand smoke like it was normal, because it was.
