In three weeks, he’d be in New York. And I’d be… where? Here, alone, watching from a distance as he built the career he’d always wanted? Or there, with him, starting over in a cityI barely knew, in an industry where my twenty-seven years of future experience would count for nothing because I’d be twenty-three again, just another young woman trying to break into publishing?
The first timeline whispered in my ear.You let him go. You let him go and you were miserable for twenty-seven years and you got everything you thought you wanted and none of it was enough.
I hung up the phone and sat very still.
My hand reached for the pocket of my jacket before I remembered—no phone. No way to text him back even if I wanted to. Just a rotary dial in Jack’s apartment and a voice on the other end of a landline and the ancient limitation of 1987, when if you wanted to talk to someone you had to actually be in the room with them, or at least within reach of a phone they were also standing next to.
Phone,I thought.I keep reaching for a smartphone that won’t exist for another twenty years. That’s how we know this is real.
That or I was having an incredibly elaborate psychotic break.
Either way, tomorrow night, I was going to find out.
14
Maggie
Day 12 — Wednesday, February 13, 1987
The last dreamwas the worst.
I was at Fenway Park. Summer. The crack of a bat, the roar of the crowd, the smell of hot dogs and spilled beer and sun-warmed concrete. I knew this day. I’d lived this day—Red Sox against the Yankees, a game that didn’t matter except that Emma was there and we were sharing nachos in the bleachers and she was telling me about medical school.
“I keep thinking about that study,” she was saying. “The one about pediatric pain management. What if we’re approaching it all wrong? What if kids need?—”
But her voice was fading. Getting further away, even though she was sitting right next to me.
“Emma?” I reached for her hand. My fingers passed through hers like smoke.
She turned to look at me, and her face was blank. Not gone—not yet—but featureless. Like a mannequin. Like a placeholder for a person who might never exist.
“You chose,” she said, in a voice that wasn’t hers. “This is what choosing costs.”
I woke up crying.
The Polaroid was in my hand, I must have fallen asleep holding it. But when I looked at it in the gray February dawn, there was nothing left. Just white. Just empty space where three women had once stood in the summer sun.
I set it on the nightstand and made myself breathe.
This is the cost,I thought.You knew there would be a cost.
But knowing and feeling were different things. And feeling this—the grief, the guilt, the terrible certainty that I was building my happiness on the foundation of someone else’s erasure—felt like something I might never learn to live with.
I got up anyway. Made coffee. Got dressed.
Because that’s what you do when you’ve made impossible choices. You keep going.
Work was brutal.
Patricia had me retyping the same letter four times because of comma placement. Then the phone rang every five minutes with authors panicking about deadlines and agents demanding callbacks and the chaos of a publishing house when everyone was trying to close deals before the end of the month.
By noon, my fingers ached from the Selectric. By three, my head was pounding. By five, I wanted nothing more than to go home, pour a glass of wine, and not think about anything more complicated than what to eat for dinner.
But Jack was home. He’d called, said he was going in to work for a few hours, then picking up groceries, so I should let myselfin to the apartment and he’d meet me there. The key was under the mat.
At 5:30, I grabbed my coat and headed for the T.
At home, I changed into something nicer than my work clothes, grabbed my overnight bag, and headed for South Boston.
