“Maybe going to be a thing.” She repeated my words back to me.
“Not even a thing, really.” I couldn’t tell if it was a hundred degrees in here or ten. I was sweating and freezing, and kept fidgeting in my seat.
“So you were going to cancel an entire week of important meetings for ‘not even a thing’？” She was being tough, but her tone was kind. Eleanor was handling me with kid gloves, which meant she was able to tell what a mess I was no matter how much I was trying to hide it.
I ignored her. “Did you want to listen to me run through the pitch one more time? I’m not leaving for a few more hours.”
“Oh, don’t do that, Hayes.” Eleanor gave me a sad look. “You can’t just change the subject. I’ve known you long enough to know when things are more than ‘maybe a thing.’”
I sighed and shrugged. “I’m not ready to talk about it, El.”
“Well, finally, you say something you actually mean.” She eyed me again, for a beat, and then her face went soft. “I’m sorry, Hayes.”
“Me too,” I admitted, which felt too raw, too honest. “But it was a bad idea to begin with. We made no sense together. It’s for the best.”
“And what’s the best—you being alone and miserable? A total jerk to all of us because of it?”
I just sighed and crossed and uncrossed my legs. I was exhausted.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…” She spun in her chair as she thought. “What I meant is, I like you and her. Together.”
“Mmm?” I feigned disinterest, but I was genuinely curious as to where she was going with this. She’d barely seen us together. And Eleanor had never expressed any sort of allegiance to anyone I’d dated, even when it was one of her own friends. She’d obviously taken my “side” through my divorce, but even as I worked through the end of things with Angie she never uttered a negative word about her. For her to come out in favor of Franny felt like a departure from her usual neutral stance.
“Most of the time you rely so heavily on certain…qualities of your personality. You know the things I’m talking about. The…stern side. Protective, analytical. But every time I saw you with Franny, or heard you talk about her, all the hidden sides of you I like even more kept showing up.”
“And what sides are those?” I asked, leaning forward.
“You’re unfailingly kind and generous. Spontaneous, when the mood strikes. And, dare I even say, funny.”
“You didn’t think I was funny when you were yelling at me about screwing up this pitch meeting last night,” I said, managing to give her a snarky smile.
“God, and moody as all hell too.”
At first, I didn’t respond. I wanted to do what I always did before Franny entered the picture. Focus. Block everything out. Get sucked into the blue light of my computer.
Instead, I leaned back in the chair and pressed my palms into my forehead.
“I really liked her.” My voice was quiet. “But it’s done.”
“Nothing’s ever really done, Hayes.” She looked at me with sympathy. “You just have to figure out how to bring it back to life.”
*
As the week went on, and turned into two, three, and then four, I only felt more certain things were over. The seasons were shifting, September was blooming as only it could, the leaves still clinging to trees in all their bright-green glory, wringing out the last vestiges of brightness before the darkness of winter set in soon. Perrine called. Eleanor and Henry had me over for dinner. I bought something called a DockATot off their baby registry in preparation for their baby shower next month. We settled into our new office, began planning for our next round of fundraising. Investors on board, I hired three people for our new Seattle space, and we’d asked Tyler to go out and open the new office there early next year. I ran five miles almost every day, then six. Seven. Nine.
Time moved forward. But Franny did not respond to my texts, or my voicemails. Maybe it was for the best; I wasn’t even sure I’d know what words to say if she ever did pick up or write back. And yet I still kept thinking about her: what she was doing, whether she was happy, whether I’d ever get to see her smile again. But it was at home, in my apartment, that I missed her the most. And one day, her voice popped into my head. I could hear her, clear and sharp, accurately guessing all the things I had in my apartment and how sparsely decorated it was. So I went for it.
I hung a photograph Eleanor had taken for me of surfers cresting a wave in Montauk and a painting my grandmother did when I was little, a watercolor of her flower garden in August. I ordered a dining room table after digging through the file Franny had put together of all the vendors she’d used for our office. It was coming in two months from the same sustainable wood source upstate that she’d used for all our desks. I googled “indoor plants that are hard to kill” and made a list. Slowly, my space started to feel more like me, more like a place I wanted to share with people, even if the person I wanted to be there most of all was gone.