“Oh?”
He half-turned my way. “My husband is going to look at his Soulmail. Marco had said that if there was one more newsworthy change, he was going to.” He mimed an explosion. “Early drop is news.”
I remembered Phoebe in the elevator, telling me Josef was unhappy with his Soulmail. A flash of Natalie-toned envy pinged through me. “I hope it works out.”
Josef prayered his hands together and bowed his head. “Gracias. I’ve always been a lucky man.”
“Really into that lucky theme, huh?”
“Some people think luck is beyond our control, but me?” He put his hand over his heart. “I keep the positive outlook. You pick up what others are putting out there, then you persevere.” He shoved a Listerine strip into his mouth. “You already know this.”
You’re just likeme,I remembered Josef saying that one day off camera. The same day he said Phoebe was scared of me.Lucky.
My own memory was suspect lately. At night, I dreamed about Caleb and me from when we were young. I’d wake somewhere between bliss and panic, desperate to go back to sleep to continue those dreams.
My mail forwarding finally went through. Ads targetingbrides-to-be arrived in one rubber-banded packet, then in regular intervals. I threw them all away, then, on second thought, rescued a pile. Some things didn’t change, and one of those was that I was a woman who couldn’t bear to give up a coupon or a promo code.
In mid-October, I interviewed a group of women who called themselves the New York Anti-Romeos. They’d peeked at their Soulmails, discovered their person was a non-romantic equivalent, and started a weekly meet-up group of people who felt they’d been given permission to live life without romance. Cilotte Cilotta, a famous romance author who broke out in a big way last summer, revealed her status as a group member. She announced her new novelReady orKnothad been pulled from publication, and she was rewriting it to “redefine tropes.” Its new title wasReady for Naught. Late one night after two glasses of wine, I pre-ordered it.
If there was one thing I’d learned those first few months after Soulmail, it was that memory was malleable. The world accepted that for all human history, no one had cosmic reassurance of a soulmate, and now it did. More and more stories came out that people “always had a feeling” that their soulmate was the person Soulmail revealed to them, that “signs stared them in the face” but they ignored them. A lifetime of being the girl whose older sister died young had taught me that rug sweeping means the dirt is always there, just hidden. Right now, forgetting the text from Cambrey to Wells would be preferable. Less painful. Keeping it present was more like living with a splinter. The skin grew over it.
“Sustenance,” Wells said. He held up a bag of old-fashioned doughnuts, his dimple flashing. It was a gray day near Gramercy Park, and he looked meticulously sculpted in his black workout clothes.
I took the bag from him, inhaling the scents of hot sugar, cakey dough. My mouth watered. “Cheers,” I said. We ate and walked, our silence more companionable than awkward. I stole glimpses of the inside of the gated park, easier now that the leaves were falling.
Wells cleared his throat and ventured a glance my way. “My therapist said I should talk to you about something. Is now an okay time?”
“Of course.”
“I’m having a hard time missing Charley,” Wells said. “I’d normally talk to—well, you know—about him. But I’m not.”
Wind gusted down the street, sending an empty coffee cup skittering into a parked car. “That’s complicated. And I’m truly sorry you’re sad,” I said slowly. “But—do you want some kind of accolade or something for not talking to her?”
His headshake was vigorous. “Not at all. I just wish you knew him.”
“Me, too. Same way I wish you could’ve known my sister.” We stepped over a crack in the sidewalk, one I always avoided on my runs. This sidewalk was full of them. There was a tiny elevation change here, one you only notice if you were paying attention. Up ahead, a construction worker in a hardhat set a cone in the center of the sidewalk, shooing a pigeon out of the way.
He brushed my shoulder. “I just wanted you to know I miss him, and my therapist said I should tell you that. I did an awful thing. It was so wrong, and it was a low point, but I promise I’m not a bad guy.”
Olivia, olive tree, olive branch. This was my soulmate. And while I’d never known Charley, I had known loss. “Maybe we should plan a trip to give us something to look forward to?”
Wells patted his pocket as if to pull out his phone, then thought better of it. “Oh, yeah? Where?”
“Someplace tropical.” Overhead, the sky deepened from pearl gray to charcoal.
“How specific,” Wells teased. “We’ll see.” He skirted the cone, then waited for me to catch up.
As I followed, the construction worker held off on revving his chainsaw and tilted it toward an already jackhammered open spot of concrete. And then I saw them: tree roots, rising like the camel humps we’d seen in Egypt, punching through the sidewalk like zombie hands in a graveyard. We had a terrible picture from that, me with visible sweat stains in a long-sleeved shirt. “Is the tree dead?” I asked the construction worker.
“Not the whole thing, if I can help it,” the worker said. “This area used to be a swamp. They drained it to make the park. I’ll be damned if things don’t grow different here.”
Something about it made me want to avert my eyes, like I was trespassing on something secret or private, but I didn’t. It was a tree. “Good luck,” I said, balling the empty doughnut bag in my fist.
“I love the idea of a trip,” Wells said once we fell into step again. Unsurprising. We’d always traveled well together, agreeing on restaurants, activities, even bedtimes. “You know me. I’m game. But don’t you think we should plan it for the spring? In the meantime, we can go visit my parents a couple weekends. We can definitely relax there.”
Tension leaked into my chest. “Definitely,” I echoed.
“Oh. Meant to tell you. I picked up my tux.”
