In a New York Minute(10)
Cleo stood then, stretching her arms overhead. “I should get home. I have a conference call at eight tomorrow morning before I go in to teach, and I have to participate in this one. I can’t just put myself on mute and fall back asleep.”
It was after nine, which, ten years ago, would have been right when we were heading out to a bar. But tonight, work called, responsibilities hovered in the back of our brains. Except for me, I thought, excited by the one upside to this whole shitty day: I’d get to sleep in tomorrow.
“I’ll go with you,” Lola said, yawning as she rose.
“Me too,” I chimed in quickly, and they both turned to look at me. I shrugged. “I just need to get some fresh air.”
After a round of bathroom breaks, we tumbled out of my apartment, into the small foyer and then out onto the street. Every block in my Brooklyn Heights neighborhood was lined with giant trees sprouting bright-green leaves. Set against the brick town houses and the cobblestone streets, they almost sparkled with color. The subway station was just a few blocks away, and as we walked we chatted about the rest of our week, the possibility of getting together over the weekend, and Lola’s coworker who had just adopted a tortoise, of all things.
I headed back home after hugging them goodbye, and forced myself to not look at my phone for the duration of the walk. For the first few steps, it felt impossible, but then I noticed my breathing slowed, my chest unclenched, the muscles down my back relaxed, just a bit. I let my focus fall elsewhere: the places where tree roots had cracked the sidewalks, the ancient gas lamps that still flickered outside some of the austere homes in the neighborhood, the daffodils that suddenly seemed to be everywhere. For the first time today, I felt good. Normal. I was going to be okay.
A few steps from my front door, I reached for my phone out of habit, without thinking. There were alerts everywhere. In my texts, messages from reporters at the Daily News and NYN. In my email, messages from a producer from CNN, and from some German newspaper, the name of which I couldn’t quite understand. And a message from Lola—no surprise, the British tabloids love u—with a link to the Daily Mail.
“Holy crap,” I said out loud to myself as I stood there gawking at my phone. The world’s worst meet-cute had been turned into an adorable romantic comedy that everyone was talking about.
Starring me.
Chapter Two
Hayes
1:07 p.m. My cousin Perrine was exactly seven minutes late to our standing biweekly lunch date. Not one to waste free time, I waited for her on the sidewalk while scanning through work emails on my phone, tapping out one-word replies and filing every message in its appropriate home until my inbox was back at zero. My shoulders relaxed an inch the second the last email was deleted, only to rise back up when a meeting alert popped on the screen for my call at two thirty.
“Hey,” Perrine said with the huff of someone who had just jogged three blocks, tapping at my arm. I gave her The Look—yes, she’d dubbed it this sometime in high school—and leaned in for a hug. The Look was part scowl, part exasperation, part adoration. Perrine and I always fluctuated between laughing at and being annoyed with each other. “Staff meeting ran late,” she said with a shrug as we queued up at Greener Things behind every other hungry New Yorker working in Midtown Manhattan. She never apologized for work, and I never expected her to. “I literally save lives, Hayes,” she’d said to me the one time I complained about her being late for a breakfast we’d scheduled. I’d kept my mouth shut after that.
“Well, my day has been hellish, so don’t worry about it.”
I counted the people ahead of us, doing the math in my head as I tried to figure out how long the line might take, plus the minutes spent eating, and then the walk back to the office. Fifty-two minutes at least, which cut it close to the call I had scheduled about possibly expanding to a Seattle office. Plus, I was leaving work early tonight for a dinner honoring what we’d done last year revolutionizing the environmental investing space. And there was a six-mile run penciled into my calendar for five forty-five tomorrow morning that I never missed. I took a deep breath, trying to recalibrate and remember that family time was important too.
“Let me guess—another write-up in the New York Times? Too much money being made?” Perrine was so altruistic and kind and painfully polite that most people had no idea how damn sarcastic she really was. Lucky for me, I’d had a front-row seat to her many contradictions my whole life. “And where’s your jacket, by the way? Did someone dare you to leave the office without it?”
She also never missed a thing. I gave her the rundown of my weird morning on the subway in a few short sentences. When I finished, her face had gone from unimpressed to utterly baffled.
“Wait, explain this to me again.” She had stopped fiddling with her hospital ID badge that hung from her scrubs to stare at me, her head cocked to the side. “Her dress caught in the subway doors and ripped? Dear god, what a nightmare. That’s like having your fly down in front of the whole class at school, but a million times worse. Remember when you—”
“Please don’t,” I interrupted before she could continue with the story of me accepting the Senior Prize in Mathematics in front of our entire high school with toilet paper coming out of the back of my pants. She’d told the whole story in mortifying detail in her toast at my rehearsal dinner. I didn’t need to hear it again. “Okay, so if I am following this correctly, you gave her your jacket. A stranger?”