The phones were rotary, heavy black things that sat on every desk and rang with an actual bell, not a digital chirp. When someone was on a call, you could hear the coiled cord stretching as they paced, tethered to their desk like a dog on a leash. No voicemail, just pink message slips that accumulated in a spike on the corner of your desk, each one a tiny paper record of someone trying to reach you.
“Maggie!” My supervisor, a harried woman named Patricia with a severe bob and reading glasses perpetually pushed up on her head, appeared at my elbow with another stack of manuscripts. She smelled like Shalimar perfume and the breath mints she used to cover her coffee habit.
“These came in over the weekend. Log them, send the rejections, flag anything that doesn’t make you want to gouge your eyes out.”
“Got it.”
She was already gone, clicking away on sensible pumps toward some crisis I couldn’t see. I looked at the stack she’d left, easily forty submissions, each one a manila envelope stuffed with someone’s hopes and dreams and months of work, and tried to remember how I’d felt about this job the first time around.
Excited, probably. Eager to prove myself. Certain that if I just worked hard enough, I’d climb the ladder and end up exactly where I belonged.
I had climbed the ladder. I had ended up exactly where I belonged. And then I’d wished myself back to the bottom rung because of a man I’d wondered ‘what if’ about.
A thought snagged me, sharp and unexpected. Emma’s face on my phone screen, three days ago—or twenty-seven years from now, depending on how you counted.Aunt Mags! I got into Harvard!That voice, bright and breathless and so full of the future it made my chest ache. Emma at five, gap-toothed and fearless, readingGoodnight Moonto me instead of the other way around because she’d decided I was doing the voices wrong. Emma surviving the cancer that had nearly killed her, coming out the other side fierce and funny and determined to save every other sick kid she met.
Emma, who didn’t yet exist. Who might never exist, if I stayed here long enough to change the life that led to her.
I shoved the thought down hard and picked up the next manuscript.
The morning passed in a blur of paperwork, phone calls, and the tedium of entry-level work. I logged manuscripts into the leather-bound ledger we used for tracking. No database, no spreadsheet, just my handwriting in blue ink joining decades of other handwriting before it. I typed rejection letters on the Selectric, fighting with the correction ribbon every time I made a typo, the white-out tape leaving ghostly shadows over my mistakes. The carriage return dinged at the end of every line, a sound I’d forgotten I knew.
At eleven-thirty, I grabbed my coat, the camel wool one with the oversized shoulders that 1987 me had saved three paychecks to buy, and told Patricia I was taking an early lunch.
Mike’s on Dorchester Ave. I’d written the address on a Post-it note, then transferred it to an index card when the Post-it fell off my bag, then finally just memorized it after getting lost twice. The restaurant was a small diner wedged between a laundromat and a hardware store, the kind of place with a hand-lettered sign in the window advertising the daily special and a bell over the door that jangled when you entered.
Jack was already there, sitting in a booth by the window. He stood when he saw me, and something in my chest did a complicated flip.
“You found it,” he said.
“Eventually.” I slid into the booth across from him, the vinyl squeaking under my wool skirt. “I may have made a few wrong turns.”
“A few?”
“Several. Okay, a lot.” I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, a nervous habit I’d never managed to break. “I have a terrible sense of direction.”
The corner of his mouth twitched, not quite a smile, but close. “I remember.”
Jack
She looked different.
Not physically. There was the same chestnut hair falling past her shoulders in those soft layers she always wore, same green eyes with the gold flecks that caught the light, same heart-shaped face that had kept me up more nights than I wanted to admit. She was wearing something professional, a cream-colored blouse with a bow at the collar and a burgundy skirt, the kind of outfit that saidI’m serious about my careerwhile still managing to look like Maggie.
But something underneath had shifted. The way she held herself, maybe. The way she met my eyes instead of glancing away. Almost as if she’d gained a lot of confidence in the past few months.
The waitress came by, a tired-looking woman in her fifties with a pencil stuck in her graying hair and a name tag that said DORIS.
“What can I get you?”
“Coffee and a turkey club for me, thanks.” Maggie shook her head when Doris looked at her expectantly.
“Just the coffee.”
Doris shrugged and shuffled away, her orthopedic shoes squeaking on the linoleum. The diner smelled like burnt coffee and bacon grease and the staleness of places that never closed. A Formica counter ran along one wall, stools with cracked red vinyl seats lined up in front of it. Behind the counter, a cookworked the griddle, the sizzle of frying eggs competing with Bon Jovi on the radio—“Livin’ on a Prayer,” tinny through the small speakers mounted near the ceiling.
“So,” I said, because someone had to start.
“So.” She wrapped her hands around her coffee cup like she needed something to anchor her. Her nails were unpainted, I noticed. Short and practical. That was new. The old Maggie had always kept them polished, part of the armor she wore against the world.
