“The position at Randolph Group pays well,” she pressed, though they both knew the money didn’t matter. If they ended up together, whatever he made would be a drop in the ocean of her trust fund. “You need a change. A fresh start. We both do. We need to start looking forward, not back.” Sisi was always making them a we. He’d grown to love this about her, the way she made them feel like a team.
“You’re right, Sees.” Jake sighed, touching his forehead to hers. As impossible as it was for him to imagine his life without music, it seemed even more unthinkable to start playing again. Revisiting that part of his psyche would be like picking off a giant scab, reopening a raw wound and watching the blood pool. “I know you’re right.”
Jake started at Randolph Group in September, the same month he and Sisi moved into a spacious two-bedroom on the Upper East Side. They were happy, for the most part, as they fell into a steady routine. Sisi worked her butt off at Marc Jacobs—she always had—and this was a character trait that Jake found inspiring. A job wasn’t always a vocation, he was learning. For the majority of people, a job meant setting an early alarm and putting in the hours and harboring a sense of purpose when the ACH deposit hit biweekly, even if you weren’t fully clear on what that purpose was. You worked, you came home to your person, and this was life. It was predictable, and steady, and—Jake was discovering—not so bad.
And yet, there were moments that set him back, moments when he found himself reaching for the past instead of rooting his feet in the present. There was the night that Sisi was at a work dinner and he passed out on the couch, ice cubes melting in his whiskey, “Molly’s Song” blaring from the Sonos speakers. He’d drunk too much, and hadn’t remembered queueing the song on repeat when he woke to it playing at 3:00 a.m. Sisi was home from her dinner, asleep in bed. She didn’t mention what had happened in the morning, but they both knew. She stepped around the elephant in the room, her eyes cold.
Then there was the evening Jake came home from work to find Sisi on the floor of his closet, rummaging through an orange Nike shoebox he recognized instantly. It was his collection of Molly memories: old photographs, his tattered song notebook, ticket stubs from concerts and movies and Broadway plays, matchbooks from various New York restaurants, her pink scrunchie—the one he’d found in the bathroom of their apartment after she left. It was stretched out and ratty, but he hadn’t mustered the strength to throw it away.
Jake’s heart clenched, shrouded in guilt. He knew how bad this looked.
“What is this, Jake?”
“Sees.” He removed his navy coat, the shoulders dusted with snow. “I didn’t think your flight landed until nine.” Sisi had been in Milan for Fashion Week; she’d been gone ten days. “I … I found that box in the back of my closet last night. I was just bored without you, so I started looking through it. I don’t even know why. And I guess I forgot to clean it up before I left this morning.” He set his briefcase down.
“What is it?” Her eyes narrowed, green slits.
“A bunch of stuff I saved after Molly and I broke up.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Honestly, I’d forgotten it even existed. I’m obviously going to toss it.”
But he didn’t. He couldn’t bring himself to trash what little he had left of Molly, even if their story was ancient history.
It wasn’t until four years into their relationship that Jake and Sisi began to talk seriously about marriage. Her nudges in this direction were not as subtle as he could tell she intended, but by that point, Jake loved her enough to find this endearing. He couldn’t imagine losing Sisi, the way he’d lost everyone else. And so, one early spring day among the cherry blossoms in Central Park, he dropped to one knee. She squealed, elated, like he’d known she would be. Sisi had been wanting the proposal for a while, but Jake had taken longer to be ready. And still, at the sight of her wearing the ring—a brilliant-cut diamond flanked by tapered baguettes—he couldn’t help imagining what it would’ve felt like to slip an engagement ring over Molly’s finger. The thought filled him with shame, and he pushed it away.
They scheduled the wedding for January in Miami, at a luxury resort in South Beach. It surprised Jake that Sisi wanted to get married so close to where her parents lived, but she countered that it had nothing to do with them at all, that she’d been close with relatives in Miami growing up and loved the city, and the idea of a winter ceremony on the ocean.