road. A homeless man sat beneath an overhang, buried under garbage bags piled against the weather. She took the five she had in her pocket and dropped it in his bucket. They locked eyes for a moment.
“God bless you,” he said.
“You, too.”
Though, at the moment, she didn’t feel very blessed, and she didn’t imagine he did either. How did she wind up here? How did he? How did anyone wind up where they were?
In Tribeca the city seemed to lower its voice. There was the mania of midtown, the quaint chic of the West Village, the too-cool grit of the Lower East Side. Every neighborhood had its energy and personality, a character in the story of the city. But this neighborhood with its stratospherically expensive lofts and artfully curated shops, dim restaurants owned by this celebrity or that, seemed apart somehow, unattainable. Selena always thought of Tribeca as a place that was keeping a secret. You only knew if you knew.
She shook out her hair, damp from the drizzle since she didn’t have an umbrella. She was cold, chilled to her core. This was a mistake. She needed to go home and put back the pieces of her life.
But then she found herself in front of the address she was looking for and paused at the door. Last chance to be smart, to do the right and careful thing. Go home and wait for what comes next, the solid advice from a staid and reliable friend. To be the good girl that she’d been raised to be.
A motorcycle gunned up the street. Beneath her feet, she felt the subtle rumble of a subway train.
Almost. She almost turned around.
Just like she almost broke up with Graham right before their wedding. Because didn’t she know that beneath the pulse of excitement that came with doing the wrong thing, there was an abyss? Hadn’t she observed his eyes linger on other women, wondered who he was talking to on the phone with a very particular tone? There’d been a lie or two, said he was somewhere when it was later revealed he hadn’t been.
The week before she’d married, she’d had a drink with Will. He’d been dapper, as always, put together and cool, but she could see the fatigue under his eyes, knew that he chewed on his thumbnail when he was stressed. It was bitten to the quick.
“I couldn’t let this week pass without telling you that I love you as much as I did the day we met,” he said over glasses of prosecco. “That I’ll never stop loving you.”
“Will,” she said. The pull to him was still strong; her guilt for hurting him, disappointing him, was heavy on her heart. They’d been together so long—through college, and his time at law school, their first jobs. Everyone thought they’d get married. Everyone knew they would. It was like she was breaking a promise she’d made to all their family and friends.
“There isn’t more, you know.” He took her hand. “That’s what you said, right? That you want more than safe, more than predictable. You want to experiment, explore, discover. And that’s okay. Do that. Just don’t marry Graham. Come back to me when you’ve done what you need to do.”
His eyes gleamed, and she bowed her head, kept hold of his hand.
“You know,” he went on into her silence. “Quit your job. Travel. See where the road takes you. At the end of the day, when you close your eyes before sleep, think about it. What do we all want? We want to love and be loved. We want to belong. We want to see the world, but we want to go home to the embrace of people who care. That’s all there is. There isn’t more.”
Her sadness dissipated as he spoke, replaced by a bristling annoyance. Will made her feel like a child. Like he was the wise and knowing one, and Selena was the misbehaved bad girl, the one making the big mistake. She hated that feeling, and she had it a lot with Will. She didn’t want a daddy; she wanted a partner.
She’d taken back her hand, shifted away.
“I’m a grown woman, Will,” she said. “I know who I am, where I am going. And I don’t need you to explain to me the true nature of what we all want.”
He looked down at his glass, and when he looked at her again, she saw how much she’d hurt him. Something welled in her and she moved over