“Just until I find a job. No one is going to approve me for an apartment until I have a steady income.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. I can just transfer you some money so you—”
“No, Mom,” Anne replied, suddenly feeling like she was fifteen years old again. They had been over this numerous times over the years, and no matter how many times Anne reiterated that she was uncomfortable with taking handouts, her mother never failed to offer it. “I don’t need money. I’ll be fine once the show comes back.”
“But who knows how long that will take,” her mother replied. Then she hummed to herself, the way she always did when she was pretending to just come up with an opinion that had actually been marinating in her head for ages. “Listen, I know you think you didn’t enjoy finance, but I’m sure that’s only because you jumped right in after Columbia. You were burned out! If you went back now, you would feel differently.”
Anne closed her eyes and let her head fall forward. She had always assumed that at some point, her mother would stop sharing unsolicited advice, but that moment never seemed to come.
“To be honest, Mom, I’m feeling a little burned-out now.”
“Then you should come stay with me in Paris,” her mother said. “The food is amazing, and the men aregorgeous.”
Anne wanted to laugh. The only thing that could make her feel more pathetic right now was going to see the City of Love for the first time with her mother. “How are things with François?” she asked, deftly diverting the conversation to safer topics.
For the next few minutes, she listened patiently to tales of her mother’s latest conquest, her subpar dinner the night before, and her continual health scares with her dogs, who had a habit ofeating objects off the sidewalk that inevitably almost killed them. It was all so predictable that Anne let her mind wander and was almost surprised when her mother asked: “So, who moved into the old apartment?”
A pit yawned open in Anne’s stomach. She had been hoping to avoid this topic.
“I’m sorry?” she asked, as if she hadn’t heard the question.
“Your father’s apartment. If you’re still in the building, I’m sure you’ve gotten a look at them. Is it a New Yorker or some rich European who’s never there?”
“No, not European,” Anne replied, trying to feign innocence. “You know him, actually.”
“I do?”
“I went to NYU with him. Freddie Wentworth?”
Anne wasn’t sure why her voice went up like a question. Her mother knew exactly who he was.
Silence filled the line, a signature Bianca Russell move, as if she had been caught off guard and was reassessing her next move.
“Freddie Wentworth?”
Anne took a deep breath to keep her frustration from bleeding into her tone. “You know Freddie Wentworth, Mom.”
Bianca tutted. “I wouldn’t say Iknowhim. I only met him once. Remember?”
Anne’s frustration deflated quickly, replaced by a decade-old embarrassment. How could she forget?
Bianca Russell’s only encounter with Freddie had been a mistake, but one that wasn’t entirely Anne’s fault. While she had actively worked to ensure that Freddie never met her father—she still cringed with embarrassment even contemplating how Walt would behave during such an encounter—she never really had the same worry with regards to Bianca. It was only that her motherwas so rarely in the city. After her parents separated when Anne was in fifth grade, her mother began to travel the world rather than settle permanently in the city. By the time Anne was in high school, Bianca barely spent more than a few weeks in New York throughout the year.
Anne still talked to her mother regularly, though, and in college, many of those conversations had been about Freddie. She told Bianca everything about his dreams for his nonprofit and yet-to-be-defined career, and about his lack of concrete plans to make it happen. And to her mother’s credit, she never prodded too much, even though she shared her opinions freely. As a woman who collected relationships like other women collect shoes, Bianca was only too happy to use her experience to steer her daughter’s love life.
“Put yourself first, Anne. You have too much going for you to follow a man around the world while he figures himself out,” her mother would say whenever Anne told her about Freddie’s plans to travel after college. “Your future is in New York, and if he loves you, he’ll stay and figure it out. I know you love him, but you have to be selfish.”
That had been Bianca Russell’s mantra since her divorce: Be selfish. Put yourself first. And as much as Anne would love to try, the idea felt diametrically opposed to every instinct she had.
But the thought still never left her head, either. And instead of trying to reconcile it, she just relied on the fact that those two worlds would never meet. After all, Bianca only ever spent time in the city over Christmas, and even then, it was usually spent at expensive lunches uptown. The probability of a chance encounter with Freddie, one where she might share her uncensored thoughts with him, was negligible.
Unfortunately, Anne’s luck never seemed to follow the rules of probability.
It all came to a head the week before Christmas her junior year of college. Freddie had skipped a seminar class and insisted on taking Anne to lunch at Bergdorf Goodman with the first check he’d received for selling microgreens from his basement hydroponics system. The check was minimal, and he hadn’t even known that the iconic department store had a restaurant until that morning, but when he asked Anne for her favorite place for lunch in the city, that was her answer, so he’d hailed a cab and away they went.
They ordered a bottle of wine from a region of France that neither of them could pronounce and laughed until they cried over something on the menu called lobster napoleon, which Freddie assumed was served with an accent and inferiority complex. It was like so many days spent together—afternoons on the High Line, evenings wandering the West Village—simple and perfect.
So perfect that Anne hadn’t considered that this was her mother’s favorite restaurant, too. Or that Bianca had arrived in town for Christmas just a few days before. Even if Anne had, what were the chances she would be having lunch there at the same time?
