CHAPTER 1
To: All Tell It to My Heart Employees
From: Leanne Tseng
Re: New “Office Space”
Team,
Although the last couple of months have been challenging, I want to take a moment to commend you for being so open and adaptable to our new direction. I also hope you are all enjoying the freedom and independence of working remotely. (I came across this article in Wired about the future of offices. We’re trendsetters!)
Also, whoever programmed my phone to play “Tell It to My Heart” for all incoming messages … I appreciate the joke. It played very well at our “Farewell Office” office party. But no one—not even the so-called geniuses at the Genius Bar—can seem to disable it.
Would you please come clean and get over here to change it back? For obvious reasons, if I ever have to listen to that song again, I will 100% murder someone. And no one gets paid if your CEO is in jail.
Yours,
Leanne
MILES
It’s fine. It’s absolutely fine.
So what if my ex-fiancée just posted a photo of her ringless fingers cradling what is very obviously a baby bump. So what if we only broke up six weeks ago and, look, I cannot claim to be an expert in women’s reproductive health or anything, but I’m pretty sure that is not what six weeks pregnant looks like. So what if I, in a split second of confusion and elation, texted her “Are we having a baby?” with an actual goddamn baby emoji next to it just in case she needed a visual representation of the word “baby” and got absolutely no response even though the read receipt confirms she saw it.
So either the baby is mine and Jordan has decided she’s not going to let me be a part of his or her life. Or … Jordan was cheating on me before she dumped me, shattered my heart, and stole the apartment.
I’m not sure which is worse.
I get a ping on my laptop, a message next to a tiny picture of a smiling brunette girl.
Jules478: Hi, how are you?
Fucking great. And now I have to work. Now I have to work trying to get other people’s love lives in order. What a cosmic joke. Not only that, but I no longer even have an office to go to, or colleagues to make small talk with, or a coffee machine that will dispense caffeine to me at will. Just a totally unfathomable espresso maker that could double as a 747 cockpit and a corner of this borrowed couch that I swear is made from burlap, because my friend Dylan lives in a Pottery Barn catalog. (You may say that couch surfers can’t be couch choosers, but I—in the throes of my melancholy and with half my hair in a permanent state of static cling—say we can all be critics.)
I close my eyes and try the breathing exercise that, of course, Jordan once taught me—inhale for four, hold for seven, exhale for eight—before I respond.
PerseMan: Hey there. I’m great. How are you doing?
It’s okay. I can do this sort of idle chitchat in my sleep. I haven’t spent the past two years becoming the top ghostwriter at Tell It to My Heart for no reason. I’ve honed these skills enough that I can practically be on autopilot. Right?
Jules478: Good.
Right. Except I just broke the cardinal rule of online dating: Much like improv, never ask a question that can be responded to with a one-word answer.
I try to rectify.
PerseMan: Have you seen the summer concert schedule for Forest Hills Stadium, by the way? It’s pretty amazing this year.
My guy … I scan my open files for his name … Farhad. That’s it. He’s a music buff, so I know this is important.
Jules478: Yes! Belle and Sebastian and Greta Van Fleet? Amazing!
PerseMan: I know, right?
I type the response automatically and then scroll over to the schedule myself, trying to figure out which one of these goddamn stupid bands Farhad might be into. Oh, right. He had mentioned LCD Soundsystem in his questionnaire.
PerseMan: Super excited for LCD myself.
Jules478: Yeah? They’re cool too.
Okay, so she’s less excited about that one. But, hey, they can each bring different musical tastes to the relationship. That’s the beauty of romance, right? Everyone brings their own interests into it, and then they mix and mingle, and sometime later, there is a little embryo that has genetically combined those passions into something that can be cradled in an artsy, black-and-white Instagram post.
PerseMan: Do you like kids?
Whoa. WHOA! What the hell are you doing, Miles? As the Tell It to My Heart Style Guide and Freelancer’s Handbook suggests on page twenty-two, there are certain things you never, ever bring up on a first chat: politics, religion, marriage, meeting the parents, and—of course—children. Not in any way, shape, or form. I know this because I literally wrote the handbook. As Leanne’s first employee, I got to sculpt a lot of what my job—and the company culture—is.
There is a noticeable pause before Farhad’s match writes again.
Jules478: Yeah. I like them.
PerseMan: Do you have any idea what a six-week pregnant belly looks like?
I have no idea what’s happening. My fingers are 100 percent working independently from my brain.
Jules478: Uh …
PerseMan: It’s not obviously pregnant, right? Like, usually, you wouldn’t be able to see a bump?
At this point, what the hell does it matter? Jules might have more insight into this than me considering she, at least, has the requisite parts and has, I don’t know, probably attended a baby shower or something.
Jules478: I don’t think so?
PerseMan: That’s what I thought.
The thing is, I know the baby isn’t mine. I probably always knew it, but the blank screen on my messages, gut-punched by that Read 8:37 AM confirms it. Jordan wouldn’t raise a baby alone, not if its father wanted to be an active part of his or her life. How many times had I held her while she told me another example of why her absentee dad was such a shithead and how it had directly impacted some aspect of her life or personality?
Jules478: So … listen. I think I’ve got to go.
Shit. I’ve been spiraling into a deep, dark thought hole instead of doing my job and convincing this girl that Farhad is a great match for her and worthy of at least a meetup.
Time for some damage control.
PerseMan: Ha! Sorry, I didn’t mean to freak you out.
I’m now racking my brain for some sort of valid excuse to ask this girl about pregnancy symptoms.
PerseMan: I’m writing a song. And this is research.
Look, if there can be songs about lady humps, why not about baby bumps, am I right?
Jules478: Oh … are you a musician?
PerseMan: It’s a hobby.
I scan Farhad’s questionnaire again.
PerseMan: I work in finance by day.
Good, good. Worked in the stable job bit smoothly. I might be back on track here.
Jules478: What kind of band are you in?
I scan the questionnaire one more time. Oh, fuck.
PerseMan: A string quartet.
There is another long pause.
Jules478: Right … I’m sorry, but my lunch break is over and I really do have to go.
It’s 8:52 in the morning.
Jules478: Maybe talk later?
But then she logs off before I can respond.
Honestly?
I probably did both Farhad and this girl a favor.
There is no such thing as love anyway. Not to get all hair metal power ballad about it, but love is an illusion. It’s just a smokescreen for future heartbreak. Why do it to yourself? Why? Either they’ll leave you, or you’ll leave them or—best-case scenario—you live together happily until one of you dies and leaves the other one completely destroyed and a shell of their former self.