“Well,” she began, even as she spoke, not sure how she should handle this.
“Come on, Nora.” Guy’s voice sounded even more persuasive than usual, and she pictured him at the bar where they’d first met, thrusting and parrying with words. “I’ll be back from New York in an hour or two. I’ll hop into an Uber and come right to your apartment. Just tell me where it is. I’ve missed you, Red, and why wait any longer?”
Nora could think of about fifty reasons why. But she could also think of about fifty more reasons why it might be pretty darn fabulous to see him. Red, she thought.
She was also annoyed at the longing she felt, the longing she had to share her life. Her future. She couldn’t bear to imagine the next fifty or however many years with only emptiness and loveless solitude and pizza and cable TV. Sure, she could be successful, short-term, at what she did for now. Two doctors had just put in substantial orders, so yesterday’s atta-girl email to Nora from Detta Fiddler had informed her. Pharma sales was all about pretty, and she had pretty nailed. Score.
But her mother had warned her, long ago, that ‘pretty’ faded overnight. And now there was no one left, no family she cared about, no friends, no one connected or devoted to her. Not since high school. Then came Guy.
And what did he truly want? Guy and Nora hadn’t progressed to any conversation like that, never gotten past the tantalizing shallows. She needed to find out.
“My apartment is…” She stopped, midsentence, wondering what would be appropriate and believable. “… still a bit disorganized. You know I just moved in.” She took a chance. “How about your place in Back Bay?”
He paused. “How about meeting somewhere in the middle? Have a drink? Maybe dinner?”
Then she grasped what had been nagging at her. He was lying.
“Are you on a plane?” she asked. A ponytailed woman in a puffer jacket came into the vestibule, letting in the night’s bluster as she eyed Nora up and down. Nora remembered to smile, then pantomimed, I’m just on the phone, no problem, before she turned her back on her. The woman clicked open the door and vanished up the stairs.
“A plane?” Guy replied.
“Yeah. You told me you were an hour or so from here,” she said. “And that you’d take an Uber here. So, you aren’t driving. But you can’t use the phone on a plane. So—”
“I’m on the train, Miss Detective,” he said. “If you don’t want to see me,” he went on, his voice hardening as he spoke, “I get it. I won’t bother you again.”
Nora winced, ensnared in her own suspicion, snarled in conflicting desires.
She laughed her best Nora laugh. “You are so silly,” she said, trying to draw him back to her. “But, listen, you can’t show up at a girl’s apartment on such short notice.”
“Or to a guy’s, either,” he said. “So—drink? How about where we first met? Unless you’ve already forgotten where that was.” He laughed. “I bet you haven’t,” he whispered.
“Seaboard,” she said. “No. I haven’t forgotten.”
She prepared for him, aware of how much care she was taking—hair, makeup, Nora clothing—and how long it took to decide what to wear. How to be. At seven, she sat across a sleek wooden table from him. She’d chosen a soft black cashmere turtleneck. So had he.
“Did I send you a clothing memo?” He reached across the table, touched her arm so briefly she might have imagined it. “Or are we so connected that we already know what the other is thinking?”
Nora stirred her amber drink, stalling, the slender red straw whirling the cubes. A faintly seductive soundtrack, not quite recognizable, floated over them. Seaboard pulsed with the buzz of connections, strangers and scavengers and people-shoppers, eyeing each other over salt-rimmed glasses, or defaulting to their cell phones or the opening front door.
When Nora looked up, Guy was staring only at her.
“What am I thinking now?” she asked.
“You’re wondering why I stayed out of town so long,” he said. “How I could possibly have managed to keep my hands off of you for all that time.”
“You’re an idiot.” He was audacious, had to give him that. She couldn’t help laughing, then stopped herself. “You never crossed my mind,” she lied. “But okay, now that you mention it. Where out of town were you?”
“Where do you think?”
She pursed her lips, as if trying to remember. “You mentioned palm trees and red rocks. And you were in a different time zone, you said. Arizona?”
“Your detective skills are improving, Red,” he said. “Yup. Flew into JFK late last night, took a morning train to Boston, and here I am. With you. Tired, but with you.”
Nora swirled her ice cubes. “What were you doing there?”
“Now it’s your turn to guess what I’m thinking,” Guy said.
“You’re thinking I ask too many questions?”
“Wrong. I’m thinking—we should get some food.” He picked up the menu, an iPad-size blackboard with white-chalk selections. “Truffle fries?”
“What do you do, exactly, though?” Nora asked. “What was in Arizona?”
“Calamari?”
“I don’t think so.” Nora used her most alluring Nora voice. “I know you’re a lawyer, but—”
He peered at her over the top of his menu. “Nora? You knew I lived in Back Bay. So you looked me up. Ah ha.”
“I did.” She raised her hands in faux surrender. “You got me.”
Guy smiled at her, a cat anticipating the cream. “I know I do.”
CHAPTER 8
ELLIE
“Ellie Berensen, perfect timing!” Warren’s jovial voice washed over her, his booted footsteps crunching on the sidewalk’s nubby blue ice-melt, the stuff layered double thick to prevent nuisance lawsuits from litigious pedestrians arriving at Channel 11. Above him, construction workers in orange parkas balanced on a two-story scaffold, wooden planks laid over a rickety-looking metal grid. Their breath showing in the Monday morning cold, the men peeled off a white protective cover from a massive photo, revealing, inch by inch, the words The New Channel 11, then COMING SOON, and then a row of smiling and coiffed faces, carefully diverse: Sam and Darweena and Jodi and Julianne and Xavier. Channel 11, the billboard promised, would be “all the news you need.”
“See? Here we go,” the news director went on, pointing at the sign with a leather-gloved finger. “It’s a good morning, Ellie. Seeing this news baby come to life.”
“It is a good morning,” Ellie replied. What she’d discovered the night before, in her post-midnight one-last-time search of the internet, had pushed her already high-pressure timetable into overdrive. Sometimes the universe did provide, although sometimes what it provided was complicated. “In fact—do you have time to hear about my story?”
“For that? I’ll make time.” Warren, bundled in a dark blue overcoat topped by a bright yellow muffler and carrying a covered cup of Starbucks, pulled open the station’s heavy glass front door and gestured her inside. “In fact, how about now? Dump your coat, grab some coffee, come see me. Five minutes.”