“He’s fine when it comes to work stuff, but I don’t know, he seems a little bummed lately,” she says. “I don’t know him as well as you do, obviously, but he doesn’t totally seem like himself.”

“Poor guy,” I say.

“Poor guy,” she echoes. Then, after a pause, “Do you like him?”

“Of course I do,” I say automatically. “I’d go for him if I could, but I feel like I have to give Blake a chance to come back, since I asked him to. It’s like I can’t even begin to consider Raj as a real option until I know what’s happening with Blake—not because Raj is my second choice, but because I’ve already made myself unavailable.”

“So you’d settle for Blake, but if not, you’d rather date Raj?” she asks.

The waiter returns with our drinks and oysters, and I’m grateful for the interruption. We clink glasses, offer each other sips of our respective cocktails, and slurp down an oyster each.

“So . . .” she prompts again, when it’s clear I’m putting off an answer.

I groan. In high school, when I couldn’t fall asleep at night, I used to lie awake, imagining what my life would look like when I was older. I tried to envision how my face would mature into an adult one; I dreamed about the expensive jewelry I could finally afford to buy; I assumed that someday, there would be a job and a husband, just because that’s what adults did. The idea for Brooklyn Jewels was far off. But I knew I wanted a career that felt like a big fucking deal—I wanted something meaningful and exciting that I could build my life around. But beyond that, the details were hazy.

Sometimes, I was an executive at a Fortune 500 company and married to the kind of husband who wears a suit and lives in a penthouse in New York or London. Or sometimes, I was the breadwinner, while my husband was a high school teacher or a stay-at-home dad, and we lived in a charming house with a garden out front in the suburbs. Certain dreams involved becoming a Hollywood stylist madly in love with a sexy guitarist who serenaded me on a sheepskin rug in front of a roaring fireplace when we escaped to our mountain house on weekends. It didn’t matter precisely what the future held, because in each iteration of the fantasy, it always felt right. On those sleepless nights, it never occurred to me that I’d someday have trouble figuring out which choice was right for me.

The thing is, I finally grew up. The time to pick a version of the future is now. And I don’t know what to do.