“Of course not,” she said. “I’ve done so many of those, I see them in my sleep.”
“Good,” he said with a relieved sigh. “Well, I’ve tried to create one, but it’s a bit of a mess. Could I send it to you and get your thoughts?”
“Sure.”
He smiled again. “Anne Elliot. Always coming to the rescue.”
“I try.” She forced a laugh. “Just email them to me when you’re ready.”
“Okay.” Then his head cocked to the side. “You know, if all goeswell and this gets the greenlight, I’d love to bring you on board,” he said after another moment. “What do you think? Theo and Anne, running their own show. Could be fun. That is, if you’re ready to leave this place.”
Anne paused. It could be a good opportunity, especially right now when it felt like she had none. But it also felt odd, like trying on a sweater that you’d outgrown. She never wanted to work in television—she hadn’t even really enjoyed it. Still, at almost thirty, it was the only long-term job experience she had.
“Let’s get your pitch in good shape, then we can go from there. All right?” she offered.
“All right.”
His voice was deep, and the words seemed to hang in the air expectantly. It was enough to make Anne’s pulse trip.
“What are you doing right now?” Theo asked after a moment. “Feel like grabbing a drink? We can exchange war stories.”
She laughed, pushing her hair away from her face again, a nervous motion. “How about a coffee after I go over that budget for you?”
He smiled again, but this time it felt so loaded that Anne couldn’t help but blush. “It’s a date.”
CHAPTER 7
The next two weeks passed without a single sighting of Freddie Wentworth. Anne would have almost thought their entire encounter outside Cricket’s door had been a fever dream except for the array of delivery trucks that seemed to be perpetually parked on the curb, with furniture and boxes addressed to F. Wentworth in apartment 8A.
Still, she was doing a good job of ignoring it. Between reviewing Theo’s production documents and responding to her father’s barrage of texts demanding an update on three boxes missing from his move, she barely had a moment to unpack her own things, let alone acknowledge her ex living just a few floors above. Thankfully, Cricket was in her final week of rehearsals, so Anne had the entire apartment to herself, and she could finally get around to making the windowless bedroom her own. She hung her mounted print of Ada Lovelace above the bed and alphabetized her favorite books along the top of the dresser—A History of Piby Petr Beckmann lined up ahead of a book by Edward Tufte about visualizing data, which sat ahead of Hawking’sA Brief History of Time—then fixed the dresser’s bottom drawer and printed out labels for its contents.
Of course, cleaning and organizing her room had slowly transitioned to cleaning the bathroom, which had spiraled into giving the kitchen a complete scrub-down, organizing the cabinets and pantry, filing the mail piled on the dining table, and systematically re-alphabetizing Cricket’s bookshelf full of movie scripts. Four hours later, Anne collapsed onto her bed with a groan. She was exhausted and smelled vaguely like disinfectant, but she didn’t care. She was officially moved in.
There hadn’t been many triumphs over the past few weeks, so she took a moment to admire her work. The cobwebs that had clung to the corners were gone and the fairy lights were neatly coiled up in the hallway closet. There were now shelves mounted above the dresser, each featuring color-coded bins labeled with their contents. She even found space for a small nightstand where she placed her coveted tower of Post-its and a vanilla soy candle. She’d call that a win.
And a win deserved a celebration, didn’t it? Or at least some takeout.
She placed an order for dumplings and orange chicken from her favorite Chinese restaurant on Fifth Street, then took a quick shower. Once she was dried off and feeling vaguely more human, she slid on a pair of black leggings and a sweater and pulled her still-wet hair into a ponytail. Then she grabbed her laptop and sat on her newly washed duvet to watch an episode ofGilmore Girlswhile she unpacked a nearby box labeledMISC. It was mostly books and pens, things that had been in her nightstand upstairs, so she simply started filling its drawers with it now. It was mindless work, and she was only half paying attention when her hands lifted out a small plastic storage box.
Her heart faltered. For a moment, she could only stare at it while Lorelei Gilmore ranted somewhere nearby. She should juststash it in the back of her bottom drawer. Better yet, put it back into the cardboard packing box and forget it forever. But instead, she slowly removed the lid.
Dozens and dozens of paper triangles sat waiting inside. Some were from lined notebook paper, others from blue stationery, a cacophony of random yellows and whites and creams. And all of them were from Freddie Wentworth. Each and every note he had ever written to her. In her more masochistic moments, she would read them, but as the years went by, the pain somehow compounded so she couldn’t even unfold one. But she could never get rid of them, either.
Her phone began to buzz, startling her back to reality. She quickly closed the box and shoved it in the bottom drawer of her nightstand before looking to see her mother’s name on the screen.
“Hi, Mom,” she answered.
“Hello, darling!” Bianca Russell’s voice sang through the line. “You sound awful.”
Anne smiled, leaning back against the wall. “That’s because I’m exhausted.”
“How’s the new apartment? Please tell me it has a doorman. You need a doorman.”
Anne rolled her eyes, but only because she was safe from her mother seeing her do so. Bianca Russell had been born into privilege and a trust fund, so the idea that life could be curtailed by a lack of funds or job prospects was entirely foreign. Still, Anne couldn’t entirely hold her at fault—she had always been careful to avoid telling her mother how much she was doing for her father, and how little he was paying her for it. She always thought it was a means of saving them both from embarrassment, but now it only seemed to feed into further untruths, like the one where Bianca assumed that Anne could somehow afford a palatial loft apartment downtown.
“Actually, I’m still in the Uppercross, just staying with a friend.”
A pause. “Like, a roommate?”
