Page 90 of The Seven Year Slip

James didn’t understand. “Coming? What’s coming?” he asked, and I realized a second before he did. “Did her water break?”

“I have to go,” I muttered, and he didn’t stop me. As I hurried back toward my table, I felt something warm slide down my cheeks, and I wiped my tears away.

I grabbed the phone out of Juliette’s hand and my own purse as we left. “The Uber’s five minutes away.”

“I’ll flag it down!” Juliette announced and hurried out the door.

“We really don’t have to go that quickly...” Fiona was saying,but no one listened. Drew was clearing the way as she led her wife out of the restaurant.

I glanced back one last time at James, and the rest of the unfamiliar faces, and that itch under my skin was so bad now it burned. I didn’t want to be here—because he was right about one thing. Clementine West, a senior publicist at Strauss & Adder, wouldn’t have noticed Iwan at all if he’d just been a dishwasher. She wouldn’t have chased after him so hard if accolades hadn’t peppered his résumé. She was good at her job, and she was looking for a talented chef to fill a space in her imprint’s roster. She was Rhonda Adder’s second-in-command, and that came above all else. Someone steadfast. Someone solid.

But Lemon, overworked and exhausted Lemon, loved that crooked-mouthed dishwasher she’d met displaced in time, and she came to work with watercolors under her nails on accident, and she took travel guides from the free bookshelves near the elevators, and she had an itch under her skin, and a passport full of stamps, and a wild heart.

And in figuring out who I wanted to be, I thought I ruined Drew’s chances of getting this book. I ruined a lot of things, it seemed, while I tried to be something permanent—but in the end, I was the one who left, out of the heavy wooden door and onto the sidewalk, where Juliette had flagged down the black SUV.

“You chose thecarpooloption?” Drew accused her.

“I panicked!” Juliette cried.

We loaded into the SUV beside a flustered couple who looked to be going on a date themselves, and I didn’t look back as I closed the door, and we set off.

35

Two Weeks’ Notice

The labor and deliveryfloor of New York Presbyterian didn’t expect an entourage of well-dressed twentysomethings rushing in after their friend, only to be turned away at the door by an overworked nurse and told to stay in the waiting room. Juliette and I did, and we claimed a corner of the beige room to wait it out. We could have gone home, probably, but that never crossed our minds at all. We sat there and we waited, because Fiona and Drew were as much my family as my parents—we saw each other more often, anyway. We complained over wine together, and we spent New Year’s and Halloween and the odd government holidays together. We celebrated birthdays and death days, and they were the first people I called when the worst day of my life happened.

It was only natural that we were together for the best days, too.

So it was no surprise thatIwas in the waiting room. Juliette, on the other hand, was new.

“You can go, you know,” I told her, but she shook her head.

“No way, I stick things through,” she replied. I wanted to pointout that she really didn’t have an obligation to Fiona or Drew, but then I thought better of it. If she wanted to be here, who was I to say no?

After an hour, I stretched and checked my phone. It was almost 10:30 p.m. Juliette was nervously scrolling Instagram while I sketched in my travel guide, outlining the waiting room in the section titled Quiet Reprieves. The sleepy sofa. The tired-looking chairs. The family on the other side, the dad having gone back with his wife, the grandparents hunched in chairs to wait, two kids watching a Disney movie on their dad’s phone.

“Crap,” Juliette muttered, pausing at a photo.

I sat down and cracked my neck. “What is it?”

She sighed. “Nothing.”

I glanced over at her phone, anyway. “Is that Rob?”

“He had a show tonight,” she replied, but that wasn’t what was wrong with the photo. He was kissing another woman. “She’s probably a groupie,” she said, as if to explain it away. “He’s very good to his fans.”

I gave her an appalled look. “Really?”

“...It doesn’t matter. He’ll make it up to me,” she replied, putting her phone to sleep and shoving it into her purse. “It’s fine.”

But it wasn’t. I turned to her and gathered her hands in mine. “We’re friends, right?”

“I should hope so. You see my private stories on Instagram, and if we aren’t friends, I really need to reconsider that.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “We’re friends, so I just want to tell you: fuck Romeo-Rob.”

She blinked at me. “What?”

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