“Happy anniversary,” she said, as the snow continued to fall outside the loft, the dense flakes naïve to their impending asphalt demise.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE GREAT DEPRESSION
“Are you sure they liked me?” Rae asked Dustin as they sat side by side on the aboveground train from Greenwich, Connecticut, to Grand Central Station. The Hudson River rimmed the railroad tracks, steely gray water merging moodily with splotchy gray sky. Bare-ish trees blurred at an efficient speed.
It was New Year’s Day. After going their separate ways for Christmas, Rae had flown back east to join Dustin at his parents’ Connecticut estate. It wasn’t technically called an estate, but the word had popped into her head when she’d arrived at the magazine-worthy mansion, complete with one of those elegant portico balconies above the front door.
She’d spent two and a half days with his whole family—mom, dad, both of his older brothers, and their wives and toddlers. The highlight had been flipping through old photo albums, catching a glimpse of the boy she would’ve had a crush on from afar in middle school and only spoken to when he asked to borrow her Sharpie for a class project, which Rae would have interpreted as a declaration of his indelible love (Now if he’d asked for a pencil, I wouldn’t be quiteas confident in his unwavering affection—but a Sharpie!she would’ve spilled to her diary).
“They loved you,” Dustin assured her, for the third time now.
“You don’t think they think I’m a workaholic?” Rae asked. She’d spent much of New Year’s Eve on the phone with lawyers, hammering out the final points of a purchase agreement for an acquisition she was staffed on. Her firm had been desperate to close one more deal before year-end to boost fourth-quarter profits, and Rae hoped some might trickle into her bonus.
“My family lives and breathes Wall Street,” Dustin said, staring out the window as if the disappearing trees were hypnotizing him to sleep. “They all get it.”
“I just feel like I wasn’t on my A game,” Rae said, replaying the error she’d made with his dad, when she’d said she was rooting for the Indianapolis Colts to make the Super Bowl, only to find out they hadn’t even made the play-offs. Her scant football knowledge had been acquired reluctantly from office chatter directed around or over—neverto—her.
“Why do you need everyone to like you so much?” Dustin asked.
“I don’t. I just—they’re your family. I want them to think I’m good enough for you.”
“They don’t even think I’m good enough for me.”
The comment cut her heart in a jagged kind of pattern.
She missed her talks with Dustin, both verbal and nonverbal. Though they’d been together the past few days, they’d hardly had any alone time. Rae had chosen to stay in her own room. It felt like the proper thing to do to make a good impression, and the estate had more than enough bedrooms.
She felt drained from being “on,” balancing girlfriend and employee duties, without reaching her quota of introvert time. “Are you … taking any medication?” she asked.
“Did my mom ask you to ask me that?”
“No,” Rae said, though his mom had brought up the topic last night as she and Rae prepared deviled eggs for hors d’oeuvres.
“Dustin seems much happier than when I saw him over the summer,” his mom had confided in her, a bounce in her suburban step.
Rae wouldn’t have chosen the adjectivehappy—Dustin had been silent in most of the group conversations, picking at his plate but draining his glass at meals.
“You’re good for him,” his mom had continued, delicate features wrinkling gratefully. “And the medicine seems to be working too.”
Rae was nearly certain Dustin wasn’t taking any medicine, but she’d just nodded and dashed too much paprika over the hard-boiled egg halves.
“No,” Rae told Dustin now. “I just … got the impression she thinks you’re taking something.”
“That’s because I tell her I am,” Dustin said, as if Rae should know this. “Otherwise she worries I’ll put a gun to my head or something.”
He said it so casually, the way words could be spoken only if they’d marinated long enough in the brain to lose their flavor.
Coldness shot through Rae, as if the January air had shattered the windows. She reached for Dustin’s hand, but it was stashed in his coat pocket, so she looped an arm through his limp elbow instead.
Trying to channel Ellen’s yoga breathing, she asked, “Do you … think about things like that?”
“Not really,” Dustin answered, almost bitterly, as if he wished he had the strength to dream up such a plot.
Rae searched for words, but syllables seemed as far away as the spirit of the beautiful, broken man beside her. “I love you.”
One river bend later, he answered, eyes still stuck to the windowpane, dirty with raindrop residue. “You’re the only one who does.”
