“Coming,” I said, and followed Diane out the door.
The YMCA wasthree blocks away, giving me time during the walk to reacclimate myself to a world without GPS, without constant connectivity, and without the safety net of being able to look up anything instantly.
The cold air bit at my cheeks as we passed familiar storefronts—the bodega where I used to buy overpriced milk, the laundromat that always smelled like industrial detergent, the bakery with the cranky owner who made incredible muffins.
Everything was exactly as I’d forgotten it. The same, but smaller somehow. More immediate. Without a phone to distract me, I actuallysawthe world I was walking through.
The Y itself was a temple of eighties fitness culture. Mirrored walls reflected women in neon spandex and leg warmers, their hair shellacked into immovable sculptures. The aerobics room thrummed with synthesizer-heavy pop music—Jazzercise, I remembered, was still huge, and this class was basically the same thing with a different name.
Valerie, predictably, was already stationed in front of the best mirror, examining her reflection with the intensity of someone searching for signs of aging at twenty-six. Diane shot me a look and we claimed spots near the back, where the view was worse but the judgment felt less oppressive.
The workout was harder than I expected, not because I was out of shape, but because I’d forgotten what it felt like to move in a body that actually cooperated. I coulddothings. Jump without my knees protesting, stretch without something pulling wrong, match the instructor’s energy without wanting to die.
At fifty, I’d traded intensity for sustainability. At twenty-three, apparently I’d had both.
After class, we showered in the communal locker room, something I’d forgotten existed, and something 2014 me would have found horrifying, and then caught the T to brunch. The train was crowded with Saturday shoppers, college students, and a guy playing guitar badly for change, as I stood holding the overhead rail while Diane chattered about Robbie’s dimples.
The diner was one of those places that had probably been exactly the same since 1965. Vinyl booths, Formica counters,laminated menus advertising things like “the lumberjack special” without a trace of irony. We slid into a booth by the window and ordered coffee and pancakes, and for a few minutes, I let myself believe this was normal. That I was just a twenty-three-year-old having brunch with her best friend on a Saturday morning.
“So,” Diane said, pouring an alarming amount of syrup on her pancakes, “tonight. Robbie’s friend Kevin is apparently some kind of banker? Which, like, boring, but he’s supposed to be cute. And?—”
She kept talking, but I’d stopped listening.
Because Jack Cavanaugh had just walked through the door.
He looked exactly as I remembered him. Tall, broad-shouldered, dark hair that needed a cut and probably always would. Blue eyes that saw everything, that had once looked at me like I was the answer to a question he was afraid to ask.
He wasn’t alone.
The woman with him was pretty in an effortless way with dark hair, an easy smile, and a camera bag slung over her shoulder. She laughed at something Jack said, and he smiled back at her, relaxed and open in a way I hadn’t seen in months before we’d ended things back in November.
They moved to a booth across the room, and the woman touched his arm casually as they sat down. Comfortable. Familiar.
Like they’d been doing this for a while.
“Maggie?” Diane’s voice came from very far away. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”
Not a ghost. Worse.
I watched Jack lean across the table to say something to the woman, watched her smile widen in response, and felt something cold settle in my stomach.
Three months, Diane had said. It had been three months since Jack and I ended, and he had apparently moved on. Found someone who didn’t push him away. Someone who knew what she wanted and wasn’t afraid to reach for it. So either we’d met on Valentine’s for some last ditch relationship repair dinner and failed, or the past had already changed and we’d never had the final last straw break-up over dinner?
That voice in the darkness had promised me thirteen days. A second chance.
But no one had told me I’d be competing for that chance.
Jack looked up then, as if he felt my gaze, and our eyes met across the crowded diner. Something flickered across his face. Surprise, maybe, or something more complicated, before his expression smoothed into careful neutrality.
He turned back to his companion without acknowledging me.
And I sat in that vinyl booth with my untouched pancakes and my racing heart, and wondered what the hell I’d gotten myself into.
3
Maggie
“You can’t wear that.” Diane stood in the doorway of my bedroom, hands on her hips, surveying my outfit with the kind of horror usually reserved for natural disasters.
