“Mmmhmm. So basically, what you’ve missed is that she’s disproving the concept of more money, more happiness. There’s a threshold. A Goldilocks-just-right number.” She pops back up from rootling through her bag and holds out her hand for my headphone cord. I place it in her palm and let my hand linger on hers. She meets my gaze and smiles.
“I’m really excited to share this with you. Is that weird?” she asks. Her smile falters for a moment, self-conscious.
I lift my hand from hers, trail my finger along the side of her perfect face.
“I want you to share everything with me,” I tell her.
She presses her lips together and my chest tightens. Too much? Is she searching for a parachute? Her eyes glisten in the overhead cabin light that I’ve kept on to read the legal thriller I grabbed at the newsstand at the airport. Then she smiles again, and I see what I’ve been hoping for. She’s happy. Tears-in-her-eyes and all-choked-up happy. The kind of happiness I want to see on her always.
“I think I’d like that,” she whispers, leaning over the divider. There’s so much relief at hearing her say that.
I kiss her until the plastic between us becomes unbearable against my ribs.
“You ready?” she asks breathlessly, her thumb hovering over the play button.
I’m ready, Devon. Ready for anything you ask of me.
I match her grin and nod. She sits back in her chair. Her eyes close as Dr. Basantis’s voice fills my head. And though I give the lecture my full attention, listening closely to the documented studies about how much money is optimal for contentment, I can still hear the sound of that nagging voice in my head, reminding me that Devon and I need to talk.
“A study at Princeton University did show a positive correlation between happiness and wealth, but only to the threshold of $75,000…”
But did this study take into account if your mother was about to lose her business or her home?
Devon’s hand finds me over the partition and she wraps her fingers in mine and squeezes. I shut my eyes and lean my head back. I need to tell her how I feel about her. I need to tell her about my interview on Saturday and that this is the job I want.
“A similar study in the UK saw that doubling someone’s pay increased their happiness by less than 0.2 while having a partner saw a happiness rise of 0.6 and a close relationship with family saw a rise of 0.4…”
I don’t need to choose between the three. We will make this work. I can get the 0.2, the 0.6, and the 0.4. I just need to tell her. I picture Meredith shaking her head at me, telling me to woman-up and do what needs to be done. I look over at Devon, her eyes narrowed at the window as she nods along to the lecture.
Tonight. I’ll tell her tonight.
Chapter Forty
Devon
Lesson 41: There’s something about farm-raised men.
Jeff has driven us straight through a Norman Rockwell painting and into a dream. There are farms in South Jersey, plenty in fact, but this is something different. It’s snowing and Jeff is driving like a grandma, but it gives me the chance to stare out at the white, rolling acres—so untouched I can hear the crisp crunch of the first step in the snow. The thought of someone stepping on it makes my molars grind. It’s pristine. Like a fresh sheet of notebook paper on the first day of school. We pass a stone house wrapped in oversized colored lights and I feel as if I’m at the center of a snow globe. I put down my window and lean a little, breathe it in, ignoring the fat, wet flakes that slap my cheeks.
“Are you going to stick your head out like a dog?” Jeff asks. His hand skims the inside of my thigh and I’m grateful for the cool air rushing in.
“I might.” I stick out my tongue to catch some snow and he laughs. “You said you lived in Chicago. Are you driving me out to a murder site? Is it skin-suit time?”
“I say Chicago because no one knows where the hell Wayne, Illinois is,” he explains.
Impossibly, Jeff slows down. The blinker clicks on and we turn onto a drive that I can feel is unpaved from the way the tires grind beneath us. Two lines of bare-branched oaks lead and follow us on either side as we crawl up the path.
“I’m nervous!”
It comes out too loud and I turn to see his grin illuminated by the dashboard lights.
“You want me to pull over and we can sleep in the rental car?” He eases on the brake and turns the wheel a little to the right.
“We’d freeze to death and your mom would find us naked in the back seat—a nude, eight-limbed popsicle. She’d never recover?—”
“Why would we be naked?”
“That’s what you do when you’re cold. Body heat. Basic survival. And also because we’d want to get in one last quickie before we died.”
