Then I got up. Went back to bed. Lay there in the dark until the radio’s soft music finally lulled me into something that wasn’t quite sleep.
I dreamed about the corner office.
Not clearly, dreams never are, but I knew the shape of it. The big window overlooking the street, morning light slanting across the manuscript pages spread on my desk. In the dream, I was sitting in my chair, reading something important. A contract, maybe. An acquisition offer. The words blurred when I tried to focus on them, but I knew they mattered. Knew this was the thing I’d spent my whole career building toward.
Then my phone buzzed. Not the rotary on Diane’s wall, my real phone, the one with the glass screen and the camera and the whole world inside it.
Emma,the screen said.FaceTime.
I tried to answer. But my hand passed through the phone like it wasn’t there, like I was the ghost in my own life, and Emma’s face flickered on the screen—bright and laughing and alive—before dissolving into static.
I woke up gasping, the clock radio playing something I didn’t recognize, reaching for a phone that didn’t exist.
For a long moment, I couldn’t remember where I was.WhenI was.
Then the radiator clanked, and I heard Diane singing off-key in the kitchen, and 1987 settled back around me like a coat I was still learning to wear.
The dream faded. But all morning, I kept reaching into my pocket for something that wasn’t there.
12
Maggie
Day 10 — February 11th, 1987
The dream came againthat night. Different this time.
I was in an elevator. One of the old ones with the wood paneling, brass buttons, and the mechanical groan of a building that had been standing since the 1920s. Harrison & Webb’s elevator. I knew it without being told, the way you know things in dreams.
The numbers climbed. 1, 2, 3…
But when the doors opened on the third floor, it wasn’t the office. It was my apartment in 2014, the South End condo with the built-in bookshelves and the six-burner stove and the bay windows that looked out on the street, on emptiness, on a life so quiet I could hear myself not living it.
“You could still come back,” someone said.
I turned, but there was no one there. Just my apartment, immaculate and silent, every surface dusted and every book shelved and no evidence anywhere that a human being had ever laughed or cried or made a mess in it.
“You could still come back,” the voice said again. It sounded like me. Like a version of me that had never learned how to want.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think I can.”
The elevator doors closed. The numbers started climbing again—4, 5, 6—but I knew they would never stop, that I would ride this box forever between the life I’d left and the life I’d chosen?—
I woke up with my heart pounding and the taste of old coffee in my mouth.
The phone was ringing in the other room. Diane’s voice, muffled through the wall, answering it.
“Maggie! It’s for you! It’s Jack!”
I was out of bed before I finished processing the sentence, stumbling through the apartment in my nightgown, cold floor under my feet, grabbing the receiver from Diane’s outstretched hand.
“Hello?”
“Hey.” Jack’s voice, warm and close despite the thousand miles between us. “Did I wake you?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t tell him about the dream. Some things you have to carry alone. “But I’m glad you did.”
“I couldn’t sleep. Kept thinking about the interview. Thought maybe hearing your voice would help.”
