“Right.” He smiled, averting his eyes down to where his hand played with the corners of his phone. “I was sure you were going to end up in finance or something.”
Her expression had dimmed a little. “I tried. After I graduated from Columbia, I got a job at a hedge fund. Then I quit five months later.”
“Why?”
She let out a dry laugh. “I may love numbers, but you and I both know I was never going to love finance.”
A sharp ache hit his chest, one he hadn’t felt in years. Maybe it was the familiarity—she had the courage to acknowledge their shared history, while he had been so eager to ignore it over the past few weeks.
The stillness was broken by a hard knock against the cab’s plexiglass partition.
“FDR okay?” the cabbie asked.
Freddie frowned. “Excuse me?”
“Cutting down FDR Drive. Second Avenue is backed up.”
Anne leaned forward. “That’s fine, thank you.”
The cabbie nodded and cut the steering wheel to the right.
Freddie turned, ready to continue with his line of questions, but Anne beat him to it.
“That’s great news about your company.”
“Sorry?”
“At the bar,” she said. “You mentioned you sold your company last year. Congratulations.”
That’s right. He had said that. At the time, it felt good, a way of signaling that he had won, that he was doing better than anyone expected, but now it made him want to cringe. “Yeah. Thanks.”
“And you have a job interview tomorrow?”
“It’s just a meeting,” he said. “There’s this company looking to do something similar to what I did with Wentworth Hydroponics. I promised a friend I would talk to their CEO. You can’t tell my mom that, though. She assumes since I don’t have my company anymore, that I’m unemployed and one ConEd bill away from moving home to my childhood bedroom.”
Anne smiled. “They must be really proud of you.”
“Yeah. I hope so.”
A long moment passed, then the cab came to a stop and there was another tap on the plexiglass. “Ninth Street at Avenue A.”
Anne reached into her bag as if she was going to try to pay, but Freddie shook his head. “I already told you, my treat.”
“But—”
“You took care of Cricket. Let me get the cab.”
She hesitated, then nodded and stepped out onto the sidewalk while he pulled out his wallet. His pulse stuttered when he opened it. The flimsy paper corners of his first note to Anne were poking out from behind his credit cards. He cleared his throat, working to ignore it as he removed his AmEx to tap on the nearby payment screen.
Tompkins Square Park was dark and loomed across the street as he exited the cab. The Uppercross was right there on the corner, but the rest of the city seemed far away, like the darkness had hidden them away in their own secret corner. A long moment passed, then he turned to her.
Anne was just a few feet away, head back and blond hair falling down the back of her peacoat as she stared up at the dark sky. The glow from the streetlights was delicate on her skin, on where her eyebrows pinched together as she waited for him to continue. Suddenly everything he had been battling with for the past forty blocks dissolved, and all he could do was stare at her. At a face that, in this light, looked as if it hadn’t really changed in eight years. Like she had been frozen, too.
“No clouds,” she said, almost to herself.
“What?” he asked.
She tilted her head to look at him. “There’s no clouds tonight.”
