Dear Ms. Ashford,
Thank you so much for this incredible opportunity. I’m honored to be considered for the position. After careful consideration?—
After careful consideration of what?
I delete the draft and start again.
Dear Ms. Ashford, I’m writing to respectfully decline… but I can’t finish that sentence either, because declining means closing the door. It means committing to this life in the mountains with absolutely no backup plan, no safety net, and no escape route. I’m just not sure I’m brave enough for that.
Tuesday is my deadline. I wake up knowing I have to make the decision today. There will be no more stalling, no more drafts, no more lying awake at three in the morning running the same arguments in my head in circles.
I sit at my tiny kitchen table with coffee I can’t taste and my laptop open to Genevieve’s email.
Two hundred thousand dollars, living in Switzerland, the most prestigious etiquette position in the world, or a honky-tonk bar in Georgia, a town I’d never heard of a few months ago, and a man I’m falling in love with who deserves better than someone who can’t commit.
My phone buzzes.
Wyatt: Dinner tonight? I’ll cook.
I stare at the message.
Tonight. I should tell him tonight. Whatever I decide, he deserves to know. He’s been patient, so, so patient. And I’ve been lying to him through omission for almost two weeks.
Me: Yes. What time?
Wyatt: Seven. I’ll pick you up.
Me: I’ll drive myself. Need to run some errands first.
A pause, then?—
Wyatt: Okay. See you at seven.
I can feel his confusion through the screen. I always let him pick me up. It’s one of our things. But tonight I need my own car, because if this conversation goes the way I’m afraid it will, I might need to leave.
I spend the day trying to work and failing spectacularly. I mess up three drink orders, count the register wrong twice, snap at Presley for something that isn’t her fault, and then have to apologize immediately.
“Okay, what is going on with you?” she finally asks at four o’clock, cornering me in the storage room.
“Oh, nothing. I’m just tired.”
“You’ve been ‘just tired’ for two weeks. That’s not tired, Eleanor. There’s something else going on.”
I lean against a shelf of liquor bottles and close my eyes. “I have to make a decision,” I say, “about my future, and I don’t know what to do.”
“About the bar? But that’s in October.”
“About everything.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “Does this have anything to do with why you and Wyatt seem to be weird lately?”
“We haven’t been weird.”
“You’ve been super weird. He barely looks at you when he’s here. You barely look at him. It’s like watching two people pretend they don’t know each other.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Well, it always is.” She crosses her arms. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on. You don’t have to tell me. Whatever this decision is, make it for you, not for anyone else. Because at the end of the day, you’re the one who has to live with it.”
