Through their letters, they had already grown close from afar, so once they were physically near, they felt almost instantly comfortable, freed from the typical tensions of early courtship. They both knew that the stakes of their budding relationship were higher than most, but Amie felt herself filled with the same urgent desire that had overcome her at Nina’s wedding. Her future with Ben—be it only a brief affair, or something perhaps more lasting—was, at the time, still uncertain. All she did know was that she wanted to take this chance, to see where it might lead.
Of course, Amie hadn’t forgotten her initial reluctance, or her lingering fears. She worried that she might not be strong enough for Ben, that she might not always be the woman from her letters, and that sometimes she would still be the flawed, anxious woman who couldn’t help but dread the future, the eventual heartbreak.
And Ben wasn’t blind to her conflict, either. When he asked Amie to dinner with his parents, he had couched the invitation in qualifiers.
“They’d love to meet you,” he said, “and I’d love for you to meet them, but I don’t want to move too quickly, if you’re not comfortable. I never want you to feel trapped, in any way.”
Trapped was such a loaded word for him to choose, Amie thought, clearly implying more than just one meal.
But she had agreed to join, she wanted to join. And she sat across from Ben’s parents at the dining room table and swapped war stories from the classroom—the four inches of Amie’s hair that were lost to an unrelenting wad of gum; the three pairs of his father’s eyeglasses crushed by students’ shoes; the two times that angry parents threatened to have his mother fired for failing their children.
While Ben’s mother was slicing the coffee cake, Amie noticed her flash a look in her son’s direction, one that Amie recognized as the same look she herself had given Nina upon first meeting Maura, nearly three years prior. A look that said, I like this girl. She’s good for you.
It was a look that held excitement, and joy, and most of all hope, and Amie realized that this wasn’t just about her and Ben anymore. She knew that Ben had wrestled with sharing the truth with his parents, before eventually telling them that fall. So Amie wondered if Ben’s parents looked at her now and thought that all of their own dreams—their only son’s future happiness, their chance to see grandchildren—possibly resided within her.
For one terrible moment, Amie wasn’t sure if she could carry their desires, too, and her sense of ease began to falter. Until Ben’s father surprised her by mentioning the strings for the first time that night.
“I’ll tell you this, Amie, I’m glad Ben’s mom and I retired when we did. I don’t envy you having to teach right now, dealing with all the kids’ questions and concerns.”
“We’ve actually been instructed not to talk about the strings in class,” Amie explained. “And honestly, it’s been really hard for me. Sometimes I feel like I’m lying to my students, or letting them down by not engaging them in any deeper conversation. It’s like I can’t even dignify their questions with an attempted answer, however incomplete it may be.”
“Well, it certainly sounds like your heart’s in the right place,” Ben’s mother said. “All that your students really want to know is, if they’re ever scared or hurt or struggling, they can come to you. And you can show them that without saying a word.”
Listening to Ben’s mother speak, Amie realized that was exactly how she felt with Ben. She trusted him with both the beautiful and the ugly parts of herself, and she always had, even in her very first letter. It didn’t matter that Ben’s parents had their own set of hopes, it was no additional burden. Amie was falling in love with Ben, clinging to the same fantasies they were.
And as dessert melted into a round of charades （Ben and Amie clinched a win with Ben’s impression of the red pill/blue pill scene from The Matrix）， Amie allowed herself to be wrapped, once again, in the same familiar contentment, the same relaxed intimacy that she had felt when dancing with Ben at the wedding.
She felt calm, even peaceful. The very opposite of trapped.
By the spring, Amie and Ben were already planning to move in together, and when Ben asked Amie to meet him one afternoon in Central Park, she knew what he was going to ask.
So she slipped into one of her favorite dresses and set out toward the park, hoping to walk off her nerves.
It was strange for Amie to think that the next time she walked down each of these streets, everything would be different. She would be engaged to the man she loved, the person she had trusted even before she knew his name.