I sigh, disappointed but understanding. I’ll go back to Brooklyn tonight; I’ll keep practicing my pitch. I’ll see Reid tomorrow, maybe, or this weekend, after the pitch is done. No matter how it goes, I want to celebrate it with him. After all, it’s his games that helped me get started on it in the first place.
He leans in, presses a kiss to my mouth. “Soon,” he says, even though these days it all feels not soon enough.
“Okay,” I say, standing and shaking out my dress. I set my hands on my hips and look back at him. “Well, at least let me get an ice-cream cone first.”
The whole trip out here feels more than worth it to see Reid’s expression when I order something called a Salty Pimp, a caramel-vanilla soft serve dunked in chocolate. It’s a mess to eat, absolutely a disaster in the warmer weather, and every three licks or so, as we walk in the direction of his office, I hold it out to him and offer him a bite, even though I know he’s never going to take one.
“Man, you’re missing out,” I say teasingly, delighting in his smiling refusal before taking another sloppy lick. We’re close to our destination now, and I’m pretty sure I have some chocolate at the corner of my mouth, but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of point in getting it now. Best wait until the cone is finished, and anyway, however much Reid doesn’t eat sweets himself, he seems to love watching me have them, and I want to lighten his mood as much as possible before he has to go back to work. “After those spicy tacos? I can’t believe you—”
I stop myself, feeling Reid’s posture change beside me, a straightening that puts a slice of space between us. I look up at him, notice that his face has lost all the softness of before as he looks straight ahead. He isMasterpiece TheatreReid. Many-months-ago Reid.
I follow his eyes.
For a good five seconds—five this-feels-like-being-buried-alive seconds—not a single one of us in this terrible eye-contact triangle moves.
Avery Coster looks exactly the way I remember her—beautiful and composed, but not cold or distant. Everything she’s wearing looks plain but also deeply expensive: a lightweight cream sweater, a pair of cropped, dove-gray pants, pale-pink slides that don’t—in spite of where she’s standing right this second—look like they’ve ever seen the surface of a New York City street. Either she just had a blowout or she has made a deal with a being from the underworld in exchange for her mortal soul.
Reid clears his throat, and all of us take a step forward, as though we’ve all simply accepted that this isn’t allowed to be only an eye-contact meeting.
“Meg,” Reid says. “You remember Avery.”
I saynothing. I don’t even nod and smile. I am absolutely shocked; I feel as though I’ve walked into another dimension. In this particular dimension the hemline of your dress is wasted with city street dirt and you can’t remember when you washed your hair last and there’s a high-calorie dessert called a Salty Pimp running down your left hand when you run into—in a city of almosttwo million people!—the ex-fiancée of the man you’re currently sleeping with.
This dimension is calledAbsolute Bullshit.
“Hi!” I blurt, happy to at least have recovered my powers of speech. “Yes, of course I remember. Hi.”
Not great powers, alas.
“Meg,” Avery says politely, her eyesnot oncelooking at my ice-cream cone. “It’s very nice to see you again.”
It doesn’t sound chilly, or false. It sounds . . .nice. As though she doesn’t mind running into Reid at all. As though she doesn’t mind running into him with me, a woman who designed the invitation for her wedding—theirwedding—that never happened. If she was uncomfortable or surprised at first, that seems to have entirely faded away.
“Oh! Oh, same. It’s great to see you, too.”
“Business is good?”
“Yeah, it’s great. Thank you.”
She gives me a genuine nod, a genuine smile. “That’s wonderful. So many of my friends were so disappointed that you got out of the wedding business before they had their big days. Please reach out if you’re ever back in it.”
I blink in surprise, feel another trickle of cold soft serve slide between my fingers. Now that the initial shock has worn off, I’m relieved. Relieved and . . . reminded, I guess. This is awkward, but it’s not awful. IlikeAvery. I liked her when she was my client. I don’t have any reason not to like her now, and I don’t have any reason to have the kind of frantic, fight-or-flight response I’m trying to get better at ignoring whenever things get tense.
“I will, absolutely.” But deep down, I know I won’t. I’m out of the wedding business. I know how good those sketches I’m going to present are. I know, somewhere in my bones, that I’m on the cusp of something brand new.
Avery turns her head toward Reid now. “I wondered why you weren’t at the office,” she says, her voice friendly. “I stopped in to see my father.”
There’s a too-long pause, and for the first time I shift my eyes to look up at him, too. I don’t know what I expect to see—maybe a version of the set, vacant mask he had before, the one he gets when he’s uncomfortable. Maybe something closer to her expression—something warm and unbothered, the face you’d expect to see on half of a couple who split amicably, mutually, in all the ways that Reid said.
I don’t expect him to look so . . .
Sowrecked.
My stomach swoops and turns. My eyes dart around the sidewalk, desperate for a trash can, where I can get rid of this Salty Pimp. It’s possible I’ll never eat an ice-cream cone again.
Reid is still looking at Avery as though he’s seen a ghost.
The most beautiful, powerful ghost.
