The city moved around her in its Sunday-afternoon rhythm—couples with shopping bags and scarves pulled up to their chins, a man in a Patriots beanie arguing cheerfully into his phone, Christmas lights beginning to glow in apartment windows above the street. The Common was visible at the end of the block, its bare trees strung with white lights that hadn't been turned on yet. In an hour they'd switch on and the whole park would go postcard-beautiful, the kind of scene that made tourists stop walking and tilt their phones up.
Emmy turned up her collar against the wind and walked in the other direction.
She kept walking.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The head cold arrived on Monday, twelve hours after Emmy walked out of Elite Connections, as if her body had been waiting for permission to collapse.
It started with a tickle at the back of her throat during the walk home. By evening she was shivering under two blankets on the couch, her sinuses packed with concrete, her immune system apparently filing a grievance for three months of skipped meals and four-hour sleep nights and chronic adrenaline. By Tuesday she'd lost her voice entirely, which felt like the universe's idea of thematic resonance. By Wednesday she'd stopped checking her phone because the screen hurt her eyes, and the strange thing was—she didn't miss it.
She slept. Not the performative sleep of a woman who'd arranged her bedtime routine like a magazine spread—the silk eye mask, the lavender pillow spray, the carefully scheduled eight hours that never quite worked. She slept the way animals sleep after a long chase. Deep, messy, fourteen-hour stretches that left her drooling on the pillowcase with her hair matted to one side. She slept through phone calls and text notifications and what turned out to be a container of soup outside her door with a note in Serle's handwriting:
Don't heat it above medium or you'll ruin the texture.
On Thursday—or maybe Friday, the days had gone soft at the edges—she'd woken at 2 AM with a fever of 102 and her phone in her hand, Grant's name already pulled up in her texts. Her thumb hovering over the thread. The last message was from three weeks ago, before everything: Your dad is making me watch a documentary about bridges. Please advise. She'd typedI missand then deleted it and put the phone face-down on the nightstand and pressed her hot forehead into the pillow and ached with it—this stupid, enormous, useless love that had apparently been living inside her for years and had picked the worst possible moment to announce itself.
By Saturday, the fever broke. By Sunday, she could taste food again—Serle's butternut squash soup, reheated from the container on her doorstep. She sat at her kitchen table in leggings and one of West's old sweatshirts and ate slowly, tasting the cayenne, tasting the sweetness underneath, and realized she felt lighter than she had since September.
Nothappy. Not absolved. But lighter, the way you feel after finally putting down something heavy you'd been carrying so long you'd forgotten it wasn't part of you.
She'd spent the week drifting in and out of consciousness, and the strange gift of it was that her brain had stopped performing. No client reports. No compatibility matrices. No scanning every room for dynamics to manage. Just soup and sleep and the slow return of a person she almost didn't recognize—someone who liked the quiet of her apartment without needing to curate it, who read three chapters of a novel without checking her phone.
The voicemails had stacked up while she was under. Fourteen of them. Reporters mostly—the Globe, two podcasts,someone from a lifestyle site. One from a PR firm offering crisis management. She'd deal with them. Not yet, but soon.
None from Grant.
She'd known it wouldn't be. That didn't stop her from looking every time, her thumb hovering over his name in her contacts the way it had hovered over the call button a hundred times since the auction. She never pressed it. But she thought about it at lunch, when she ate soup alone at her kitchen table and remembered him showing up at her apartment with a pizza box and an attitude, settling into her couch like it had a groove shaped exactly like him, ordering for her at restaurants before she'd even opened the menu because he'd apparently decided that keeping Emmy Woodhouse fed was part of his job description. She'd found it annoying. She'd found it presumptuous. She would give almost anything to have him standing in her doorway right now, holding food she didn't ask for, watching her with that expression she used to think was disapproval and now understood was something else entirely.
She missed him all the time. That was the thing she hadn't been prepared for—the constancy of it. She missed her phone lighting up with his name. She missed fighting with him about nothing. She missed the way he said Em—like the beginning of a sentence he never finished.
She'd watched him play on TV at her parents' house the Sunday before, dragging herself off the couch long enough to make the drive. The away game against the Jets. She'd sat in her usual spot with her heart in her throat and her hands tight around a mug of tea, watching the way she'd never watched before—flinching at every hit, her stomach dropping when a linebacker drove him into the turf in the third quarter, understanding for the first time why her father kept a running count of significant contacts. She'd spent twenty years finding that habit exhausting. Now she got it. Now she understood theparticular torture of loving someone whose job was to stand in a collapsing pocket and wait.
The camera caught him on the sideline between drives, pulling off his helmet, and her chest did something complicated and awful—a squeeze, a lurch, the physical sensation of wanting to touch someone who was a thousand miles away on a television screen. She knew the scar on his left knuckle and the way he cracked his neck before a play and the sound of his laugh when something genuinely surprised him, this low startled thing that she'd been collecting without knowing it for twenty years.
She'd sat on her parents' couch and loved him and said nothing. Her father's voice a steady hum beside her—counting hits, listing symptoms, the familiar liturgy of worry she'd rolled her eyes at her entire life and now couldn't unhear.
Her mom had drifted through in a floor-length cardigan and reading glasses, glanced at the screen, and said, "He looks tired."
Emmy had kept her eyes on the television and her hands around her mug and hadn't trusted herself to speak.
Ten days since she'd quit. The cold was gone, the apartment was clean—actually clean, the kind where you scrub the tile grout with an old toothbrush instead of arranging objects on top of the dust—and Emmy Woodhouse had a list.
She crossed out the last name. Then wrote it again, smaller, at the bottom. Then stared at it until the ink blurred.
Harper opened the door in joggers and an oversized men's hoodie—Ryan's, she presumed—and her expression cycled through surprise, caution, and then a loosening around her mouth that wasn't quite a smile.
"Hi," Emmy said.
She'd walked, because the bakery on Charles Street was on the way and Harper had never once in Emmy's presence turned down a donut. She had a box of six under her arm—Boston cream, because Harper was predictable about exactly one thing—and an oat milk latte going cold in her other hand. It wasn't enough. She knew it wasn't enough. But Emmy Woodhouse had been raised by a woman who believed you never showed up to someone's home empty-handed, and if that was the only maternal instinct she'd inherited, at least it was a useful one.
"Hi." Harper leaned against the doorframe. She didn't step aside. Her eyes dropped to the bakery box, the latte. "Bribery donuts?"
"Apology donuts." Emmy held them out. "And oat milk. It's probably lukewarm by now. I walked."
"It's twenty-eight degrees."
"I'm aware."
