The two of them walked out into the New York City night, and it felt like she was reconnecting not only with Rob but with who she had been when they were together.

xxiv

It’s been a while since I’ve written in here. I feel like I’m getting further and further away from the person I was when you were inside me. I’m healing the wounds that made that version of me the broken woman she became. But I’m afraid I’m losing some of the good things, too, some of the things I liked about myself then.

And I still can’t bring myself to play the piano.

34

Rob and Emily were sitting in the diner they found on Waverly—one of the few places still open at one a.m. that wasn’t a bar. Emily had ordered a coffee and a corn muffin. Rob had gotten the works—scrambled eggs, toast, bacon, hash browns, orange juice, and coffee.

“I’m always starving after I perform,” he said, after the waiter walked away.

He was saying it like this was new information, but it wasn’t. Not to Emily.

“Because you’re too hyped up to eat beforehand,” she said.

Rob’s face lit up. “You remember.”

“Of course I do,” Emily said. “So tell me about you. What have you been up to?”

This was all so bizarre. For a brief moment, Emily wondered if maybe she was in some sort of medically induced coma and living another life while she was asleep. She kept looking at him and then looking down at her wedding band, as if her brain couldn’t quite process how he and Ezra existed in the same space-time continuum.

Their coffees arrived and Rob took a sip. “I’ve been writing film scores out in LA for the last twelve years. After a year on the road, I don’t know, it wasn’t doing it for me. If I’m honest, I think I’d so clearly imagined you and me on the road together, that anything else seemed . . . kind of a letdown of sorts, I guess. And James, you remember James?”

Emily nodded. Rob’s friend. Their bass player.

“He was doing some sound engineering out in Hollywood and this guy he was working with died in the middle of scoring a small indie film—no joke, I think it was a heart attack or something—and he recommended me. So I wrote some music in a pinch, and it turned out I wasn’t bad at the whole movie scoring thing, so I stayed. I got nominated for an Oscar and three Emmys, but I haven’t won. Yet.”