Though they sat only a few feet away from each other, they couldn’t actually talk or they’d be yelled at for being off task, so the instant messenger had become their social lifeline.
Yeah EE, why’re you being so cynical?GQ wrote.100000% growth is extremely realistic.
Don’t you know anything about client service?TB added.Treat everyone like a needy narcissist.
Rae tried to eke out a smile, but she just kept scowling at the Excel grid taking up the whole of her computer monitor.
The bigger the number they showed, the bigger the fee the bank would skim. But there was nothing underlying the valuation—just random assumptions, rounded out to four decimal points for the optics of precision.
Maybe there hadn’t been anything underlying her relationship with Dustin either. Maybe she’d adopted investment bankers’ rose-colored glasses and wrongly applied them to romance. She punched in number after number, begging that the task might numb her heart, not just her brain.
“Are you sure your texts were delivered?” Mina asked for the fifth time.
It was two days later, and still no word from Dustin. Rae had sent a code-red text to the Scramblettes, and they’d all assembled to analyze the situation.
Rae was sprawled on the penthouse couch, while Mina and Sarah sat on either armrest, taking turns feeding Rae ice cream and wine. Rae was farther into the ice cream pint than the wine bottle, but she’d made an impressive dent in both. Ellen was videoconferencing from her Pittsburgh hotel room, her face on the computer on the coffee table.
“They were delivered,” Rae confirmed, passing around her phone as evidence. Mina shook her head in confusion and passed it to Sarah, who held it up to the computer for Ellen to verify.
“Maybe he had a death in his family?” Sarah suggested.
“Or he’s just really swamped at work,” Ellen said, so close to the camera that her face was out of proportion, all eyes and forehead.
“I bet he lost his phone,” Mina said.
“Guys are always losing their phones,” Sarah agreed.
“No,” Rae said. “He’s just another man-child who’s scared of commitment. But is it that hard to send a text saying you don’t see it working out? Is that really too much to ask?”
“I’d still give it another couple days,” Mina said. “In case he really did lose his phone.”
“He didn’t lose his phone,” Rae said, close to a shout. “He’s just not interested anymore.”
The group quieted, seeming to finally accept that this was, unfortunately, the highest-probability scenario. Sarah refilled Rae’s coffee mug with wine, and Mina passed her the ice cream pint.
Gratitude poked through Rae’s hurt, but not enough to fully emerge.
“Wait,” Ellen said ominously. “How many dates did you go on?”
“Three.” She’d played each one over in her head so many times that it felt like thirty.
“It’s the third-date curse! I passed it to you.”
Mina and Sarah gasped, but Rae just dug her spoon into the pint with new fervor. “There’s no such thing as a third-date curse,” she said, needing the apartment to be empty but not wanting to be alone.
“I think it came at a good time,” Ellen said. “Better to know now and cut your losses.”
No one commented that Ellen had broken her own rule about not using financial terms to talk about dating. Bleak times called for bleak comparisons.
“And it’s a whole new year,” Sarah observed. “You’ll find someone incredible.”
“We can make you a new dating app profile,” Mina gushed.
Rae felt ill at the prospect. She just wanted to sit on the couch with someone and eat pizza and talk about poetry and deep shit and be held through the night. And she’d found that, or she’d thought she had, but it turned out that no, she hadn’t, and the joke was on her. She’d plunged from pristine rooftop to polluted gutter runoff in a matter of days.
When she’d been with Dustin, she’d let her emotions take the reins, no longer consumed by crunching the numbers on the marriage math. Their time together hadn’t felt like counting down to her thirtieth birthday. It had felt like counting up from zero to something.
But the something had flipped back to nothing, and with it, the panic from her birthday returned in full force. She was nearly a hundred days closer to thirty and had nothing to show for it. Somehow she’d have to bounce back from this, even though she didn’t feel like she had an ounce of elasticity left in her brittle bones. Somehow she’d have to put on lipstick again—not red this time—and rev herself up for new dates. Somehow she’d have to hunt down her husband in these urban wastelands and close the deal before the cruel clock ran out and froze her in an irrevocable state of gloom.
