“See you Wednesday, Leo.”
I step out into the hallway, and he closes the door behind me, and I just stand there for a moment, staring at his door, trying to process what just happened.
I got the job.
Iactuallygot the job.
I want to scream or laugh or maybe cry, but instead I just start walking toward the elevator, my heart racing, my hands shaking slightly as I press the down button.
Stanley tips his hat at me when I walk through the lobby, and I wave back, trying to act like a normal person instead of someone whose boss who literally dragged her out of a taxi by her ankles two weeks ago.
The subway ride home passes in a blur. I keep replaying the whole morning in my head—Emma dumping my purse, the tampon conversation, the camera, Leo offering me the job just like that. By the time I’m climbing the stairs to my apartment, I’m smiling so hard my face hurts.
I burst through the door and Cori looks up from where she’s stretching in the living room, still in her dance clothes.
“Well?” she demands immediately. “How did it go?”
“I got the job!” I squeal, and saying it out loud makes it real, makes it true.
Cori screams and launches herself at me, wrapping me in a hug so tight I can barely breathe. “I knew it! I fucking knew it! I told you it was meant to be!”
I hug her back, laughing, the sound foreign and bright in our small, messy space. For the first time since I arrived in this city, since I severed the tether to my old life, I feel the ground firm beneath my feet. It’s not safety. It’s not even certainty.
But it’s a start.
Chapter 8
LEO
“So let me get this straight,” Joe says, taking a long pull from his Camel filter and trying—failing—not to laugh. “The girl who you fuckin’ dragged outta a taxi by her ankles is about to be your new…nanny?”
He loses the battle then, his laugh erupting—a loud, unfettered bark that turns heads at neighboring booths. Maria and Allison join in, their laughter a contagion. Even I feel the traitorous twitch at the corner of my mouth because it really is just my damn luck.
We’re at The Corner Slice, which Joe insists is the best pizza place in all of Manhattan, a claim I’m not entirely convinced of but don’t argue about because the pizza is admittedly very good and more importantly, it’s close to campus. The place is packed for a Tuesday afternoon—families crammed into red vinyl booths, college students clustered around tables covered in grease-stained paper plates, the constant din of conversation and laughter and the clatter of dishes being bused.
There’s a jukebox in the corner playing something by Alanis Morissette that I can barely hear over the noise, and the walls are covered in faded posters of Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio and various other New York icons that have probably been there since the place opened in the late twenties. The whole restaurantsmells like garlic and tomato sauce and that particular yeasty bread smell that means the pizza dough is fresh.
Maria and I are sitting in one booth, Joe and Allison across from us in the other, pushed together so we can all talk. There are three half-eaten pizzas on the table between us—one plain, one pepperoni, one with mushrooms and olives that only Maria and I are eating because apparently everyone else has terrible taste. We’ve got sodas in classic Coca-Cola glasses, condensation pooling at the bases, and Joe’s ashtray is already a burial mound even though we’ve only been here forty-five minutes. Emma’s spending the day with my parents at the restaurant, which means I actually have a few hours to myself for once—a rare enough occurrence that I almost didn’t know what to do with the freedom when I woke up this morning.
Allison clutches her pronounced belly, her blonde Farrah Fawcett waves shaking with laughter. “I gotta stop,” she gasps, breathless. “This baby’s using my bladder as a trampoline.”
“Wait, wait,” Maria says, and I can already tell she’s about to make this worse. “So you hired the woman who called you a dick? To your face? The one who you said called you—what was it—‘entitled’?”
“She said I was acting like an entitled dick or something like that,” I mutter. “Regarding the cab.”
“Right.” Maria’s grin widens. “And now she’ll be in your apartment. Five days a week. With your daughter. Where you live.”
Joe, Allison, and Maria all burst into another round of laughter, and I want to be annoyed but I can’t help it—I’m laughing too, because when you lay it out like that, it really is absurd.
“I’m aware,” I say, reaching for a slice of pizza. “Believe me.”
Joseph Carmichael is possibly the only person on earth who could get away with laughing at me like this withoutme taking genuine offense, and that’s only because we’ve been friends since my first year at Columbia when I was a terrified new assistant professor trying to figure out how academic politics worked and he was the loudmouth philosophy professor who took pity on me and explained which department heads were assholes and which ones were just eccentric. He teaches Philosophy of Mind, which means we overlap enough professionally that we actually have interesting conversations, but not so much that there’s any professional rivalry.
Looking at Joe, you’d never guess he spends his days arguing about epistemology and consciousness. He’s built like he should be working construction or bouncing at a club. He’s got a boxer’s build, the kind where he looks like he could pick up a car if sufficiently motivated. He’s got a mop of dark curly hair that never looks intentionally styled but somehow works on him, and a cleft chin that makes him look like he walked off a movie poster. And then he opens his mouth and his Bronx accent comes out, thick enough that my students sometimes can’t understand him when he guest lectures, and you realize he’s the most New York person you’ve ever met.
He introduced me to his wife, Allison, at some university fundraiser I didn’t want to attend and I understood immediately why they worked—she’s just as loud and magnetic as he is, just as quick to laugh, just as warm in a way that makes you want to be around them even when you’re exhausted and anti-social and would rather be home reading grant proposals.
Allison’s a nurse at Mount Sinai, currently on maternity leave because she’s forty weeks pregnant with their second daughter and looks like she might go into labor at any given moment. She’s one of those people who’s genuinely kind without it being performative. When Rebecca left, Allison showed up at my apartment with food and didn’t ask questions. She told me her and Joe were there whenever I needed them and thenthey actually followed through on that instead of it being empty platitude.
