or abandon it altogether. The problem was he hadn’t gotten much sleep over the previous week. He’d been working on a difficult case—a patient was boxing on him after a lung operation—and trauma had been unusually busy. So he asked her whether she could hold off for a couple of days until he was less stressed and more clear-headed. But she insisted they talk, she had her mind set, and they ended up breaking up over the phone.
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea we see each other anymore,” she said after he pressed her to reveal what she wanted to talk about. “I just don’t think this is going anywhere, Ted. What do you think?”
“Let’s just do it,” he said. “Let’s just get it over with.”
They saw each other again, of course. They’d even slept together. But he could never forgive her for that day—he couldn’t bring himself to forgive her for being so thoughtless. Maybe it was just an excuse. That’s what Trish had said. But even if it was an excuse, he thought it was a good excuse.
Looking at her now, he still thinks it was a good excuse, but it takes him longer to remember. How old is she? They’d dated two and a half years ago, so that would make her what, thirty-four or thirty-five? Holding up well, he thinks. He wants to compliment her, but at the same time, doesn’t want her to get the wrong impression. He decides on a perfunctory tone: “You look great—as usual.”
Her reply is equally perfunctory. “Thanks,” she says, angling into the booth across from him. “Here comes the waitress. I’m dying for a coffee.”
They order; she takes an omelet, he the bagel and lox platter. Another server pours them coffee from a retro, silver coffee pot—a touch for which The Creamery, a 1950s-style diner that has an Art-Deco-meets-techno veneer, is known. Everything in the place seems to be either steel colored or black, except for the servers’ T-shirts and the napkins, both of which are white. Empty, the room may have seemed cold and sterile, much like the trauma room. But filled with people the coldness is replaced by a sort of hip casualness. It’s a place where you feel you can say profound things in a few words, effortlessly. That’s what he’d once told Reinhart anyway. And on other days, under different circumstances, he might have been effortless. But today he finds himself laboring uncomfortably as he sets out to tell Carolyn what had led him to call her yesterday in a panic.
He starts from the beginning—from the time the girl came into the hospital—to the time the detectives showed up. She listens to him almost without commenting. Every so often she asks him to clarify something. She has a little trouble at first telling Kristen and Carrie apart, and it doesn’t help that he’s a little loose with his pronouns. But aside from a few interjections, she doesn’t challenge him and reserves her judgment, even when he tells her he let the girl spend the night at his house. She just nods, takes a sip of orange juice, and goes back to eating.
After he finishes, there’s a short silence. Then she says, “Why would the girl write and then tell her friend that she had sex with you, when she didn’t? And why would the friend say she saw you having sex?”
He can’t tell from her tone whether she believes him or finds his story hard to believe, and it bothers him that he can’t.
“I have no idea,” he says.
“In all your dealings with her, she seemed like a nice, sane, stable sixteen-year-old girl?”
“Except for being accident-prone, yeah.”
She nods. “You said she was attractive.”
“She was.”
“How attractive?”
He thinks about it for a second, forgetting both the animosity and sadness he has for the girl. “On a scale of one to ten she was about an eight, though she didn’t think so. But if she’d decided to stick around, she would have been a knockout by senior year.” His eyes become emotional with the thought. “I know she would have. I know these things.”
The waitress comes. Carolyn doesn’t say anything as she clears their plates. She just sits there, observing him. He can’t tell what she’s thinking. But she’s wearing one of those well, I see you haven’t changed grins. I see the same old Ted is alive and well. And she seems glad he is. But then she remembers why they are here—or he thinks she does—and