I halt abruptly. My feet refuse to take another step. People knock into me on both sides as they pass, clipping my elbows, giving me dirty looks, but I’m rooted to the spot like a fork in a river. Unless someone steers me to the side or shoves me out of the way, they’ll have to go around me. I picture a ladder leading to a pit, and I’m in the middle of it, unmoving. I can’t get down the ladder, and I can’t go back up, either. I’m paralyzed.

Below me, below ground in the dark, a train arrives, bringing with it a whoosh of sound and a gush of hot, disgusting air that’s been living below the city streets for a hundred stagnant years. What madness makes people ride this thing, squashed together with strangers, shaking through the city, jolted every five feet, as though humankind was ever meant to travel that way, underground like rats? Because make no mistake, I’m in rat territory now. Or I would be if I descended. Why can’t I stop feeling so scared, so stupid and helpless?

A trickle of sweat drips down the back of my neck. I feel like a lost child. But no one’s going to find me because no one’s looking for me. They haven’t even noticed I’m gone.

I take a deep breath, duck my head, and turn around to go home. My breath comes out in panicked gasps, making me dizzy.

I can’t go on like this, I tell myself. And I wish, more than anything, it were true.

Because what if the real problem is that I can?

In a city of nine million people who pass me by without a single thought, who would care if I did?

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 7

MILES

Charles is a great breakover motivator. If this whole law professor at Columbia thing doesn’t work out for him, he should consider a career change. Maybe Leanne could even hire him as one of her consultants.

I leave the house at around six a.m. now, before he’s woken up, and hit the seven-mile run at Riverside Park. I grab a bagel and coffee from the cart around the corner, and I’m back at the apartment by eight a.m., at which point Charles is gone for his first class of the day, and I get a good twenty minutes of chatting with solo Dylan—my favorite Dylan.

I shower and get dressed—I even bother to put in my contacts—and am out the door again by nine forty-five, so as to miss Charles coming home in between his two classes of the day. This is when I grab the subway and am down to Café Crudité by ten thirty, a perfect lull of time between the morning rush and the lunch crowd, which lets me stake out the good table.