Hello Stranger(77)

But of all the options, this one seemed the most likely by far. Certainly more plausible than the sick grandmother. But here were the bare facts: 1. He was still in the building. 2. He was not responding to any of my attempts at contact. 3. He did not hold the elevator doors.

Plus, racking my brain did not yield anything—at all—that I might have done to him to push him away. I’d been worried that seeing his final portrait might make him run off screaming—but he hadn’t even seen it yet. And other than that, I hadn’t yelled at him or lied to him or—god forbid—asked him for help.

Wait—I hadn’t let myself need him, had I?

I’d let myself want him, but that wasn’t the same thing.

Unless asking him to sit for the portrait counted.

But wait—I hadn’t asked him to do that! He’d offered!

Weren’t those different things?

Should I never have accepted?

I could have asked these questions all night.

But Sue needed to get off the phone. She and Witt were headed to the dinner car for a jazz concert. “Guess what the Canadian cocktail of the day is called?”

“What?” I asked glumly.

“The Angry Canadian.”

“Joke’s on you,” I said flatly. “There’s no such thing.”

“That’s what I said!” Sue responded, maybe hoping we could talk about something, anything, else.

But no luck.

At last, in conclusion, Sue said, “Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe he’s got a terminal illness.”



* * *



BUT I KNEW better than to hope for a terminal illness.

And I just couldn’t seem to believe that he was a bad person, either.

It had to have been me.

Desperation over the art show had made me needy. I should’ve kept my distance. Stayed aloof. Said no when he offered to be my model. What was I thinking? Of course he’d glimpsed my life and bolted. Who’d want to get anywhere near it?

In the end, I took the portrait to the gallery without ever showing it to Joe—or seeing him at all. And then I spent the next two days being ignored and obsessing over why that was happening.

In the meantime, I rearranged my paints. Organized my canvases. Restacked the dishes in my cabinets. Painted Peanut’s toenails with glitter polish. Watched a video tutorial about how to make one large T-shirt into twelve different outfits.

And stewed. Emotionally.

Oh, and I googled “Why men don’t text you back.”

But it wasn’t very helpful.

I also had another brain scan to check my edema. And that wasn’t helpful, either.

Dr. Estrera reported that, shockingly, according to the scan, the edema had now largely resolved. He compared last week’s scan with this week’s scan—both of which looked quite similar to me. “We’re seeing an eighty-one percent reduction in swelling in the area,” Dr. Estrera said proudly.

Big news, I guess—but it didn’t do me much good if nothing else had changed.

And nothing else had changed.

After the scan, Dr. Nicole gave me a battery of facial recognition tests to compare to my baseline. And I was exactly the same on those as I’d been a month ago. The same identical numerical score.

I knocked my head against the table at the results.

“Please don’t do that,” Dr. Nicole said.

“How can I be exactly the same?” I whined.

“These results are to help you—not make you pound your head on the table.”

“Well, they don’t feel very helpful.”

“Now that the edema is resolving, you should start to see some changes in your facial perceptions,” she said, like that might cheer me up. Then she added, “No guarantees.”

But I wasn’t in the mood to be cheered up. I flopped down on her sofa in despair. “Nothing is going right.”

“Maybe you need to broaden your definition of right.”

“Don’t throw that cheery nonsense at me. My life is a shit show.”

This right here felt like my lowest moment so far. I thought I was supposed to be getting better, not getting worse. Learning to cope, at least. What the hell was going on?

“Tell me what has you feeling down,” Dr. Nicole asked.

“Everything?” I asked. Like, did she really think she could handle that?

“Sure. Everything.”

Okay. She asked for it. “I still can’t see faces. I submitted a portrait to this competition that I should have won—handily—that’s guaranteed to come in dead last. I’m being menaced by my evil stepsister. I’m embarrassed to go back to my favorite coffee shop. My best friend eloped to Canada and left me dateless for what’s sure to be the most humiliating event of my life. My stepmother wants to build a relationship with me and she’s coming to the show over my vociferous objections. My dog is a thousand years old. I broke up with my fantasy fiancé. And the very cute guy in my building who I might genuinely be in love with kissed me senseless the other night and then fully disappeared.”

“Ah,” Dr. Nicole said.

“That’s all you’ve got? Ah?”

“Of all of those,” she asked next, “which one is the worst?”

“All of them,” I answered. Then I had an idea. “Any chance you could be my date to the art show? So I don’t have to go alone?”