Page 41 of The Seven Year Slip

So I turned back to face the door to B4, unlocked it, and went inside the quiet, lonely apartment. I dropped my purse on the counter, changed clothes, and turned on the TV in the living room as I unpacked the rest of the kitchen box and stored it all away in its proper place.

And then I went to sleep in my bed in my aunt’s room, my bed frame creakier than hers, the curtains parted just enough to beam in a sliver of silver light from a moon 238,900 miles away. I shut the curtain and ignored it, like I should have from the beginning.

15

Timeless

And the summer spunon.

Humid June mornings finally gave way to stormy July afternoons, washing into golden-colored evenings, and Iwan had truly disappeared. I kept looking, though, thinking maybe I could find him on the crowded sidewalk or dining at a table in an upscale but unpretentious restaurant in Chelsea or the West Village that might’ve fit his homegrown personality, but he was always just a bit too far out of my reach. I was looking everywhere for someone who—above everything else—didn’twantto be found. If he did, then he wouldn’t have made it so hard, and I was beginning to wonder how much these last seven years had changed Iwan. I wondered if I’d recognize him on the street.

I wondered if I’d alreadymethim, if we’d sat beside each other on a subway somewhere, if we’d shared a joke in a dark bar, if I’d eaten his food, accidentally stolen his seat on a crowded bus.

Maybe it was time to let this go.

So, slowly, I stopped looking as hard.

Besides, my friends were very good at distracting me—well, dragging me into their schemes, anyway.

The hallway of Strauss & Adder Publishers was dark until I moved in my cubicle, and the motion-sensor lights activated. Everyone had left early for the Fourth of July weekend, so I stretched and enjoyed the silence. Summer was always humid in the city, and my aunt’s apartment didn’t exactly have central air. The window unit worked as best it could, but it never quite shrugged off the heat.

“Clementine!” Fiona singsonged, finally dragging Drew out of the bathroom, where they had both been for the last twenty minutes, changing into their fine-dining attire. “Are you ready?”

“We’re going to be late,” I replied, planting my hands on the armrests of my chair and pushing myself to my feet. Fiona had conned me into a terrible purple dress that made me feel like a grape about to be squashed into wine. “We can just call him and tell him we’re not going.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Drew agreed, fixing her tie. She wore a fresh pink dress shirt with white suspenders and dark-wash skinny jeans. Gone was her tried-and-true tweed jacket and comfortable slacks. The things she did for her wife—the things webothdid for Fiona. “We can just say we all caught a cold.”

I pointed to her. “Exactly.”

Fiona rolled her eyes. “We aregoing. This guy is perfectly nice! He lives in our building. He even pays his own rent, which is rare because we live in a building full of hedge fund babies. And you,” she added, snapping her gaze to me, “aregoingto have fun.”

As I had feared, Fiona hadn’t forgotten about our conversation on the subway, and she’d asked about Iwan a few days later. I couldn’t exactly tell her that my aunt’s apartment decided to stop bringing us together, so I never got his name, and my almost stalkerygoogling had resulted in absolutely nothing, so instead I told her something I now absolutely regretted—

“The timing wasn’t right.”

She immediately assumed that he was engaged to someone else, or getting a divorce, or moving to Australia, so she took it upon herself to do the one thing that best friends were wont to do:

Make me feel better.

So I slipped on my heels and let her drag me to the elevator and down into the waiting Uber. The restaurant my date had chosen was on the Upper West Side, a small Italian place that grated your cheese for you right at your table, and my date in question was—indeed—incredibly nice. Elliot Donovan had a kind smile. He was tall and broad, with a head full of curly black hair and chocolate eyes, and he talked about books, and events he’d gone to at the Strand, and his favorite authors. Fiona and Drew sat at a table on the other side of the restaurant, but I couldfeelFiona’s gaze on me the whole time—and so could my date.

Halfway through dinner, he leaned forward a little and said, “Fiona is a bit intense, isn’t she?”

I shoved a piece of bread into my mouth before I could say anything I’d regret, and instead mumbled after a moment, “She has her heart in the right place.”

“Oh, I’m not disputing that,” he replied, but then he took a deep breath and said, “but I don’t think this is going to work out, is it?”

On paper, Elliot was perfectly good. He was the exact kind of man I wanted to date—hardworking, with a good job and a decent book collection. He had a nice sense of humor and a lovely laugh, but when I looked at the menu, all I could think of was Iwan telling me about a romance in chocolate, a love letter in a string of fettucine, and I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay! I have to admit, I came here hoping it’d be a good distraction,” he added in embarrassment.

“There’s someone else?”

He nodded. “And you?”

“Yeah, but the timing was all wrong.”

He laughed. “That’s always the most tragic, isn’t it?” Then he glanced at Fiona and Drew’s table again—and Fiona had thegallto pretend like she was looking at the wine menu instead—and said, “We can pretend for your friend’s sake, though, yeah? Give them a good show?”

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