Page 18 of Willow in the Wind

What could James say about New York? It captivated his imagination. It had an energy and a pulse he couldn’t fully fathom, and sometimes he couldn’t sleep because he felt the city churning around him.

“It’s great,” James said instead.

“I dated an American girl once,” the bartender said. He was maybe thirty, thirty-one, with a bubbling of pimples along his jawline. “She was fun. Loud.”

James laughed.

“Have you taken up with an American lady over there?” the bartender asked.

James rubbed his own jaw, remembering his pimples of long ago. When was his last one?

“I married one,” James confessed. “We’ve since divorced, though. We didn’t make it more than five years.”

“That’s too bad,” the bartender said.

James wondered how many people spoke about their divorces in pubs across England. “I was dating another woman recently,” he explained. “She was a book editor at a major publisher. Very smart. Much smarter than me.”

“But you broke things off?”

James’s heart thudded at the memory. “We cut things off about six months ago. It was messy and complicated. We needed room to breathe and think.” He sipped his beer. “Not long after that, I came back here.”

“To breathe in the rain,” the bartender said.

“Something like that.”

In the corner, the balding man had begun to kiss his girlfriend again. It was bizarre. They had no shame!

“I wasn’t sure if we were really in love,” James offered of his relationship with Kinsey. “I wondered if we were justpretending. Maybe we were going through the motions of romantic love.”

The bartender chuckled. “I’ve had the same thought before. But I always come to the same conclusion. How does anyone know what’s fake and what’s real? Life passes anyway. And it’s better to feel something. Don’t you think?”

James raised his eyebrows. The bartender was making a whole lot of sense. Where had he been six months ago, when he and Kinsey had cried quietly at her kitchen table and agreed “something wasn’t right”?

When James had told Nancy he was going to London for a while, she’d said, “You’re running away from her, aren’t you?”

Nancy knew him better than anyone. That was not always an easy thing.

James paid for his two pints and stepped back into the rain. It was eight thirty, and he was starving. He trudged through the city streets, thinking about his damp flat, the one he’d rented from a friend when he’d come back to London. He had five more days left here before he was needed back in Manhattan. He was set to interview the musician he’d been listening to all day prior to his gig at Madison Square Garden.

Playing Madison Square Garden was an enormous feat. James wondered if the musician was ever nervous about that. Or if he ever pinched himself and thought,I made it.

Maybe nobody ever thought they really made it, not in this business.

James decided not to go home. He couldn’t take it. He was an awful cook, and whatever he made for himself would depress him. So he cut into an Indian restaurant, where he was seated ata table with a view of the street. The server recognized him from his bi-monthly visits and asked, “The usual?” James agreed. He didn’t want to bother with the menu.

James texted Taylor back, hoping his words would motivate her to keep studying. But he knew she was heading back out on tour this autumn—this time actually playing bass in Bad Habit because their bassist had gotten kicked out of the band for saying offensive things on social media. As Taylor explained it, Bad Habit had a no-tolerance policy against that behavior.

He hoped she’d get her degree one day. But he also wanted her to live as much as she could.

We only get one life.

Suddenly, his phone flashed with Kinsey’s photograph. She was calling.

James couldn’t breathe. When was the last time he’d spoken to her? They’d gone no contact after the breakup, choosing to make things clean.

But just now, he’d been talking about her to the bartender. It was as though he’d mentally called her.

James’s hands shook. He answered the phone. “Hello?”

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