“I’m saying you could be, professionally.”
“That’s possibly the worst career advice I’ve ever received.”
“You asked.”
We’re both still whispering, neither of us wanting to wake Emma, and I realize we’re closer than we were at the start of the movie. Annie’s shifted slightly toward me at some point, or maybe I shifted toward her, and now her shoulder is pressed against mine and I can feel her breathing.
I swallow and lower my voice even more. “Did Emma really do okay the last couple days? No big breakdowns about her mom or anything?”
Annie tilts her head side to side, like she’s weighing how to answer. “There were a couple moments. But it wasn’t nothing I couldn’t handle. Yet.”
“Yet?”
“I think the camera thing helped keep her distracted. Gave her something to focus on that was fun and new.” She pauses. “But she won’t go into your office. Like, actively avoids it. I tried to grab some construction paper from there yesterday and she wouldn’t even come near the door.”
I sigh, running my hand through my hair, my fingers snagging on a few rampant curls that have gotten out of control. “It’s because Rebecca’s piano is in there.”
Annie doesn’t say anything. She just waits to see if I’ll keep going, so I do.
“Rebecca was a music teacher,” I continue, keeping my eyes on Emma’s sleeping face because it’s easier than looking at Annie. “Middle school music. She played piano, mostly. Used to play with Emma all the time, even when Emma was a baby. She’d sit Emma on her lap and let her bang on the keys, and then as Emma got older she started teaching her actual songs. Nothing complicated, just ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ and stuff like that.”
The apartment is so quiet without her music now. I hadn’t realized how much of the background noise of our life was Rebecca playing—in the morning while making breakfast, in the evening while Emma played with her toys, late at night when she couldn’t sleep. Now there’s just silence.
Annie nods like she understands. “That has to be really hard for her.”
There’s a pause, and then she asks, “So Rebecca just…left? She just packed up and left one day?” Then immediately she shakes her head. “Sorry. Never mind, you don’t have to answer that.”
“It’s okay,” I say, and I’m surprised to find I mean it. “If you’re going to be working here, you might as well know all of it. It might help you understand Emma a bit better.”
I take a deep breath. “Our relationship had been in trouble before she left. We’d been arguing constantly—about money, about my work schedule, about her wanting to move back to Boston where her family is, about whether Emma should go to public or private school. Stupid stuff and big stuff all mixedtogether until we couldn’t have a conversation that didn’t turn into a fight.”
Annie’s quiet, but listening.
“But the real issue was that we were never supposed to get engaged in the first place.” I’m not sure why I’m telling her this, but now that I’ve started it feels impossible to stop, so I back up and give her a little context. “I met Rebecca at the Met. It was almost Christmas, six years ago. I was supposed to meet a date there—a girl that had been in one of my classes in college, we’d been talking for a few weeks. I bought two hot chocolates from the cart outside and waited for her, but she never showed.”
“She bailed on you?” Annie’s mouth drops open slightly.
I run my hand through my hair again. “Yep. Totally bailed. Didn’t even call. So I was standing there with two hot chocolates, feeling like an idiot, about to throw one away because I definitely didn’t need two—”
“Obviously not, the caffeine and sugar would be excessive—”
“Exactly, thank you. But then I saw Rebecca. She was standing in front of this painting—I don’t even remember which one now—and was just completely absorbed in it. And I remember thinking she was beautiful. Genuinely beautiful. Blonde hair, blue eyes, this quality of attention that made it seem as as though nothing existed except her and whatever she was looking at.”
“So you gave her the hot chocolate?”
“I gave her the hot chocolate.” I smile despite myself. “Walked up and said something stupid like ‘you look like you could use this’ and she looked at me like I was insane because I was a total stranger but she took it anyway. We ended up talking for three hours and went through the whole museum together.”
“That’s actually sort of romantic,” Annie says.
“It was.” And it had been, at the time. “We dated for about nine months, and then we moved in together. And then four months after that, she got pregnant with Emma.”
Annie’s eyes widen slightly but she doesn’t say anything.
“I proposed a few weeks later,” I continue. “Because I loved her, but also mostly because her parents were very old-fashioned Italian Catholic, and they made it very clear that if we were having a baby together, we needed to be married. So there was a lot of pressure—from them, from my parents, from everyone. And I wanted to do the right thing. Or what I thought was the right thing, I guess.”
“So you got engaged.”
“So I got engaged.” I look down at Emma, still sleeping peacefully between us. “And then Emma was born and everything was great for a while. Being new parents was hard but we were figuring it out together. But I think we both realized pretty quickly that we’d rushed into everything. We didn’t really know each other well enough to be living together, let alone raising a kid together.”
