“I know. But you need to decide what you’re doing about Rebecca, and you can’t do that while you’re busy being distracted by me.”
I don’t want her to leave. I want her to stay here, in my kitchen, in my life, so I don’t have to think about Rebecca or arrangements or the fact that my carefully reconstructed world just got a grenade lobbed into it.
“You’re a very good distraction.”
“The best,” she agrees, her smile sad and fleeting.
She stands on her tiptoes and kisses me—a soft, lingering thing that feels like a goodbye we aren’t ready to say yet. Then she’s at the door, pulling on her coat. “Call me? When you know?”
“Yeah. I will.”
She opens the door, pauses, then looks back at me. “For what it’s worth? I think you’re going to do the right thing, Leo. Whatever that is.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you’re a good dad. And good dads always figure it out.”
The door clicks shut, and I’m left in the empty apartment, the machine’s red blink mocking me, Rebecca’s ghost lingering in the air.
I walk over to the machine and stare at it for a long moment, then reach out and hit delete. The machine chirps—a sharp, digital burial—and then, finally, it’s quiet.
Chapter 19
ANNIE
I’m crying into a taco, and it is every bit as dignified as it sounds.
Which is to say, not at all. My mascara is doing a slow, tragic migration toward my chin, and I am actively seasoning my carnitas with the remnants of my dignity. It’s a new low, even for me, and I’m pretty sure there’s a piece of cilantro stuck to my cheek, but I honestly don’t have the emotional bandwidth to care.
“We’re done. It’s over,” I sob, the words muffled by a corn tortilla. “I’m the girl in the movie who teaches the brooding widower how to laugh again right before his perfect, long-lost wife reappears out of thin air in the third act to reclaim her throne.”
Cori and Marcus are flanking me like a two-person emotional SWAT team, sitting cross-legged on the floor of our apartment, which smells like a mix of Palo Santo and the questionable street meat Marcus bought from a cart on Broadway. Cori’s hand traces soothing loops on my back, her touch warm through my sweater, even as she balances her own taco precariously. “Annie, breathe. Take a beat. He isnotgoing to leave you for this Rebecca chick, I can feel it in my bones.”
This is how it’s been for the last few days. I’ll be perfectly fine—making pancakes with Emma, laughing at something Marcus said—and then night hits and I completely fall apart.
It’s like my brain waits until I’m alone in the dark to replay every worst-case scenario on repeat. Leo meeting Rebecca at that café. Her looking beautiful and put-together and exactly like the type of woman who should be raising a child with a Columbia professor. Him remembering why he loved her. Them deciding to try again, for Emma’s sake. Me getting a phone call: “Annie, we need to talk.”
Cori says I’m spiraling. Marcus says I’m catastrophizing. They’re both right, but I can’t help it. Rebecca has history with him. She has Emma. She has a whole life they built together, even if she walked away from it. And what do I have? A night of really good sex and some nice moments feeding ducks in Central Park?
It doesn’t feel like enough. It doesn’t feel like it could possibly be enough to compete with a decade of shared memories and a literal child.
“That‘Rebecca chick?’” I hiccup mid-sob, a rogue shard of iceberg lettuce falling onto my jeans. “She’s the Mother of his Child, Cori! She has biological seniority! For all I know, they’re going to meet up and she’ll end up having, like, a celestial, life-altering vagina that’ll convince him to restore the monarchy of their perfect little family.”
Marcus snorts, reaching for a napkin. “Nobody’s vagina is that magical, Annie. Not even in the West Village.”
Cori pulls me into a hug, and I bury my face in her shoulder while Marcus awkwardly pats my knee.
“You aren’t going to lose them,” Cori whispers. “Leo would have to be blind, deaf, and lobotomized to let you go.
“Wait, wait,” Marcus says, leaning in with sudden interest. “You haven’t actually given us the full report. Howwasthe sex?Because if it was mediocre, we can just pack this up and walk away now. But if it was—?”
“Marcus, for the love of God!” Cori snaps, throwing a wadded-up napkin at his head.
“I’m just trying to establish the stakes!”
I wipe my nose with the back of my hand. “How do I put it? It made me understand why people join cults, Marcus. It made me want to learn every single one of his stupid neuroscience facts and whisper them back to him during thereallygood parts. I was already picturing us grading papers together. Naked.”
Marcus wheezes with laughter, nearly tipping sideways.
