“I’m busy at work,” Rae said, though her schedule was gloriously flexible. Her boss was usually out courting clients, and when he was in the office, he left by six to get home to his family—“I’m not like those New Yorkers with fucked-up priorities,” he often bragged.
Rae still worked into the night sometimes, but she did so from the comfort of her apartment, after trying out a new recipe for dinner. Her oven was shoeless, and she hadn’t set off the smoke detector yet.
She hadn’t named her apartment, located on the second floor of an all-amenities building on Wilcox Street in west downtown Indianapolis. She was still working on not discounting “downtown” by using quotation marks.
If shehadnamed the apartment, she would have selected the Wilcox Box. The boxy kitchen branched into the boxy living room with a boxy gas-burning fireplace, attached to two boxy bedrooms that faced the apartment complex’s boxy courtyard, complete with a boxy pool.
Initially, the nine hundred square feet had felt cripplingly large for one person, but now she couldn’t fathom how she’d ever survived with less.
Her mom had helped furnish it with warm knickknacks from the past—a knitted quilt draped over the L-shaped couch, shineless but sturdy copper pans in the cabinets, and four-by-six photos from predivorce days dotting the coffee table “to remember how happy your childhood was.” Seeming mostly relieved and only slightly stung that Rae had visited her dad’s new family, her mom was convinced that a father-daughter reconciliation would clear Rae’s emotional arteries and help her feel ready to walk down the aisle. Any lingering bitterness over the divorce was apparently very small next to the horrific prospect of Rae still being single as she approached thirty.
Rae hadn’t removed or even rearranged the family pictures yet. The bag of golf clubs was in her bedroom, filling the gap between bedside dresser and desk. A Manhattan snow globe sat on the desk, a gift from Kenny the security guard on Rae’s last day in the New York office.
The emotional numbness hadn’t lifted with the change in scenery, though it had settled into a calming numbness versus a crunching one. She still had writer’s block, but she’d been reading more and binge-watching Netflix, which she justified as her storytelling diligence process.
“You’re not getting any younger,” her mom said.
“Am I not?” Rae deadpanned. “I thought that’s how aging worked.”
“Don’t talk back to me, Raelynn. You’ve turned into a hermit, and I’m just trying to help.”
“I’m not a hermit,” Rae said. “I see you and Grandpa all the time. Chris, too.” She’d been making more of an effort to bond with Mr. Non-Right and refer to him by his real name. Ever since the Dustin Divestment, she’d had more appreciation for what her mom saw in his stability.
Her mom raised her eyebrows, asking Rae to listen to herself.
“And Brianna,” Rae added. Brianna was her best friend from high school, married and pregnant with her second child. They hadn’t seen each other nearly as much as Rae had thought they would since she’d been back.
“I hear Stu is single again,” her mom said knowingly, as she covered the rest of the pie with Saran wrap and stashed it in the luxuriously large refrigerator. “I still don’t understand why it didn’t work with you two that summer.”
“Because I lived in New York,” Rae said, preferring to use that line over delving into the whole drama with Dustin and how she just hadn’t been able to keep from playing with matches.
“Well, now you live here,” her mom pointed out, very pointedly.
Rae sat there with her thoughts. She’d like to see Stu, but she didn’t want to reach out, didn’t want to lead him on when she wasn’t sure how much, if anything, she had left to give. And more than that, it felt like she’d be stuck in a backward loop, trying to relive an expired phase of her life. “Too much time has gone by.”
“You’re overweighting the downside risk,” her mom said.
Rae smiled in spite of herself. “Where’d you learn that term?”
“I’ve overheard enough of your work calls,” her mom said, looking rather pleased with herself as she slipped on her shoes and straightened theHome Sweet Homewelcome mat she’d gifted Rae. “Just be open to the upside.”
“I am open,” Rae said, kissing her mom’s crinkled cheek and closing the door behind her.
“I’ll send the revised document in a few minutes,” Rae said, as she slowed to a walk and answered her phone on a post-work trot along the charmless but crowdless White River on Indy’s western edge. She hoped her wannabe boss on the line would mistake her panting for being winded from a negotiation with a lawyer. “Just wrapping up another work stream.”
It had been a good day. She’d presented at a client meeting and left the office while there was still daylight. Big wins, by New York standards. But now the old East Coast villains were chasing her about updating forecasts of pro forma depreciation expenses in an asset-light acquisition, as they were all “stretched beyond capacity.”
“What document?” the voice on the other end said with Midwest ease, not Manhattan speed. “If you’re referring to our prenup, I don’t want us to have one, if that’s all right. They’re so unromantic, don’t you think?”
Rae came to a full stop, watching the sunset’s bronze and blues bleed together in the river’s reflection, the current too weak to distort the watercolor creation. “Stu?”
“Guilty as charged,” the voice said, light with laughter.
“Shit,” Rae said, then realized she’d said it aloud.
“That wasn’t exactly the reaction I was hoping for,” Stu said. “Why didn’t you tell me you were back?”
Rae felt a jab of delayed remorse at how poorly she’d treated him. She tried to keep her tone as upbeat as his. “I figured some pageant queen would’ve snatched you up by now,” she said.
