Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,170

true. In the last two years, she’d been a bridesmaid five times. She had gone to three dinner parties where she was the only uncoupled attendee. When Isabella got married, Sam didn’t feel any twinge of jealousy. But when Isabella had a baby, bought a house, she suddenly grew aware of how behind she had fallen.

Sam lived alone now, in an apartment on the top floor of a house built in 1790. She sensed the ghosts of its past hanging around when the hardwood creaked beneath her bare feet each morning, when the light in the kitchen flickered for no reason.

Sam continued on until the downtown came into view.

When she lived here, there wasn’t a single chain store besides CVS and, at the end of senior year, a Starbucks. Now almost every storefront advertised a familiar restaurant franchise or clothing brand. The historic old movie theater had been converted into a Citibank.

She stood at the crosswalk at Plum and Main, waiting for the light to change. As it did, and the WALK sign lit up, a black SUV slowed to a stop in front of her. The woman behind the wheel was slight, eclipsed by her automobile. She swiveled her head and said something to the children in the back seat.

Sam started to cross as the driver faced forward.

Elisabeth.

It was her, there was no doubt. She looked exactly the same.

After college, for a while, Sam kept track of her.

She had the urge to tell Elisabeth when she learned that Clive had gotten married, a year after they broke up. It stung at the time, even though Sam had been the one to end things. Those first few months in the city, she relied on their unclean break, on the fact that she could always call him or run off to be with him if she wanted. When the option was no longer hers, she grieved over it, if not over the loss of Clive himself.

Sam was now almost the age he had been when they met. She had college interns at work. She marveled at how young they were. Just babies. She had never felt exploited by Clive, or taken advantage of. He was kind and encouraging and loyal. He had loved her. But it did occur to her that at the time it had seemed like no one else understood, when maybe she was the one who didn’t.

Once, when she was twenty-six, eating dinner with friends at a café in the West Village, she saw a poster advertising a reading by the poet Julian Wells.

There he was, smiling in his photograph. Julian, the Mollusk, from the campus library. He looked good. He’d figured out what to do with that tight, curly hair, letting it grow out a bit. He wore glasses and had a beard. Nerds were having a moment in the city, and Julian looked as if he was making the most of it.

The bio on the poster said he had published a poem in the Atlantic and had a forthcoming book. He was teaching at Columbia that semester. Sam was at a particularly lonesome point. Staring at the poster, she wondered if she had taken a wrong turn all those years ago, one which she would never be able to correct. She went so far as to email Julian at his Columbia address after a few glasses of wine. She tried to sound breezy—how funny they had both landed in New York at the same time, maybe they should meet for coffee. He never wrote back.

That same year, Elisabeth published her book The Hollow Tree to much acclaim.

Sam found it on the new nonfiction shelf at Shakespeare & Co. one snowy afternoon. She flipped through, searching for some mention of herself, but there wasn’t one. There was a chapter about a discussion group, made up of old men who met at a small-town coffee shop to talk through the ills of the world. Elisabeth quoted them, but used fake names. Sam tried to guess who had said what.

The last five pages of the chapter focused on a man she called Larry, who ran a lucrative car service, until Uber put him out of business. After building a name for himself as a volunteer advocate for workers’ rights, Larry got a job as a union organizer.

That had made Sam smile.

She still saw examples of the Hollow Tree everywhere, even more so after they lost touch. George used to shake his head and say, Where can this