of coming home for a while. I know that I could get a job at—”
“No, no, Abby. Your mother and I discussed this. Not a chance. It’s totally enough that you come back on weekends, and you have that great job—”
“It’s not that great a job.”
“It’s in publishing. You’re in the greatest city in the world. Please. We are one hundred percent fine.”
“Okay,” Abigail said. “I hear you both, loud and clear.”
CHAPTER 4
Back in New York, unmoored by her breakup with Ben and feeling powerless to help her parents, Abigail moved into a three-bedroom apartment with two strangers and took an extra job as a nanny for a family on the Upper East Side to just be able to pay her share of the rent. She kept thinking about her father’s words to her, that she had a job in publishing in the greatest city in the world, and somehow those facts, instead of making her happy, made her feel sad and worthless. She was where she’d wanted to be, but she felt like an impostor, a small-town girl playing grown-up in the city.
She started spending time with her college friend Rebecca, who was heavily subsidized by her parents and had her own place near Gramercy Park. Abigail knew that some of Rebecca’s fondness for her was attraction, and out of curiosity, and a requisite amount of attraction herself, Abigail got drunk one night with coworkers, then showed up at Rebecca’s apartment at just past midnight. It was a sexual encounter so awkward that both of them seemed to know, instantly, that they’d killed their friendship. And they kind of had, even though they continued to text and meet for drinks and coffee. But by this point Abigail had decided that, despite her parents’ protests, what she really needed to do was move back to Boxgrove, stay with them, or Zoe, for a while, and get a job waitressing so she could help them with some of their bills. It wasn’t just that she wanted to do it, she was also somehow longing to do it. Moving home would give her purpose.
She was just about to enact this plan when she met Bruce Lamb. She was on her lunch break at a coffee shop, looking at job listings in western Massachusetts, when he sat down at the next table. Abigail glanced at him briefly, just as he was glancing at her, and they smiled at each other, the quick, noncommittal smiles of city people. Abigail remembered thinking that even though the decent-looking thirty-year-old man was wearing faded jeans and a rumpled blazer she could tell that those jeans and that blazer probably cost more than two months of her rent. She went back to job-hunting.
When the man finished his goat-cheese salad he stood, cleared his dishes, then came over to Abigail’s table. “Excuse me,” he said.
She looked up at him, raising an eyebrow.
“Can I take you to dinner tonight?” he asked.
Abigail laughed, but then she said, “Okay,” surprising herself a little by the swiftness and surety of her answer.
“Do you live around here?”
“Close enough,” Abigail said.
He named a restaurant with a French-sounding name, and they agreed on eight o’clock.
After he left, Abigail thought that at least she’d be getting an expensive dinner in the city bought by a perfect stranger before she left. It could be her New York story.
Dinner was actually nice. She’d thought that, considering the way he’d asked her out, he’d be a player, but he was actually down-to-earth. Almost innocent. He’d just moved to New York from Silicon Valley, where he’d been living (“not really living, just coding”) for the past ten years. He’d started two companies and sold them both, and he was sick of being the idea man and decided to be the moneyman instead, starting up an angel investor business. “I didn’t want to do it in Silicon Valley and I’d always dreamt of living in New York.”
On their third date she told him about her plan to leave the city and move back in with her parents, and she told him about the guilt she felt because of the college loans, and how beaten down her parents were, and how she was sick of the city, anyway. The words came out in a rush, her voice cracking on the word “helpless,” and another voice in her head was imagining that Bruce was right now searching for the EXIT sign.
But after she was finished talking, he said, “I’ll pay your college loans.”