The radiator clanked. Diane was singing something in the kitchen. Madonna, I thought, “Papa Don’t Preach”, and themorning light slanted through my window in pale stripes. The clock radio on my nightstand read 7:34 AM in glowing red numbers, and outside I could hear the scrape of a neighbor clearing snow from his Buick. Everything was ordinary. Everything was exactly as it should be in a Jamaica Plain apartment in 1987, a world where Emma Owens didn’t exist yet, where Sarah Owens might never meet David at that party in 1994, where the future I’d lived was dissolving like sugar in hot water.
I reached for my phone to check if she’d texted me. My hand closed on empty air. The gesture was automatic now, so deeply ingrained that twenty-seven years of muscle memory hadn’t faded in eleven days. But of course there was no phone. No texts. No way to reach across time and ask a goddaughter who hadn’t been born yet if she still remembered the sound of my voice the way I was trying to remember hers.
I got out of bed. Found my notebook in the nightstand drawer and reread what I’d written yesterday. The bullet points. The facts. They looked thinner now, the ink fading on the page as if it had been left out in the sun.
I pulled out the Polaroid. The faces had crossed some invisible threshold overnight—Sarah a blur, Emma barely there at all, just a child-shaped absence where a girl in a Red Sox cap used to stand.
I waited for the grief to hit. It did, but duller now. Smaller. Like pressing a bruise that was starting to heal.
That was the thing that terrified me. Not the losing. The getting used to it.
The office wasits usual chaos of ringing phones and clacking typewriters and the harried energy of deadline day. I settled into my desk in the bullpen, surrounded by the comforting mess of manuscripts and coffee cups and the ever-present haze of cigarette smoke that drifted from Patricia’s office like weather. Someone had left the radio on at the reception desk, and Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” competed with the industrial rhythm of an IBM Selectric.
Patricia walked past without acknowledging me, which I chose to interpret as a good sign. In the universe of Patricia, indifference was vastly preferable to attention. The manuscript I’d championed yesterday, Chester and his cat and his list, was still sitting in her to-read pile, which was also a good sign. If she’d hated it on first glance, it would already be in the rejection stack.
I’d been working on a slush pile submission for maybe an hour, a mediocre thriller that showed occasional flashes of competence, when the phone rang.
“Harrison & Webb, this is Maggie.”
“Hey.” Jack’s voice, warm and alive despite the miles between us. “We talked through everything. It’s a really good offer.”
“That’s fantastic.”
He told me more as the bullpen hummed around me—typewriters, phones, someone arguing about royalty percentages two desks away—but it all felt distant, muffled, like I was listening through water.
“When are you coming home?” I asked.
“Tonight. Red-eye. I’ll be there tomorrow morning.” Another pause. “I want to cook you dinner. Tomorrow night. I’m giving you a key, it’s the spare and it’s under the mat. Just go straight to my place after work. You don’t even have to go home first.”
“You’re giving me a key?”
“Is that okay?”
I thought about what that meant. A key. Access. Trust. The ability to walk into his space whenever I wanted, to be there when he came home, to belong somewhere besides the apartment I shared with Diane and the corner of my desk at Harrison & Webb.
“That’s more than okay,” I said.
“Good.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “Now tell me about the cat book. Did Patricia read it yet?”
“She’s reading it. She hasn’t said anything, which with Patricia is basically a standing ovation.”
“The librarian and the cat. What was the cat’s name again?”
“Louie.”
“Right. Louie.” A pause. “You know what I like about that? The cat doesn’t care about the list. Doesn’t care about the man’s plans or his timeline or his careful categorization of how to die properly. The cat just shows up and sits on the plan.”
“You got all that from my two-minute description?”
“I’m a journalist. I extrapolate.” Another pause, and when he spoke again, his voice was softer. “Sometimes the best things in life are the ones that sit on your plans.”
I smiled into the receiver. “Was that a metaphor?”
“I don’t do metaphors. I’m a tragically literal thinker, remember?”
We talked for another few minutes about logistics, flight times, and the bureaucratic details of his success, and then he had to go, more meetings, more handshakes. I hung up the phone and sat very still at my desk, watching the dust motes drift through a shaft of winter sunlight.
Three weeks.
