Adam’s apartment is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. My condo is in Queens. The fifteen miles between us easily take an hour to travel, and a minimum of three subway trains. And then we’ve got our schedules to contend with—the battle of working hours. I am in clinic or the hospital about sixty hours a week. Adam works around fifty hours each week and often has happy hours or dinner meetings to attend. But we have found our relationship groove and make the most out of what we can offer each other.

Sometimes what we offer each other is patience. I’ve told Adam I never imagined myself getting married, which is true. I blame my job, though it is much more than that. He thinks I’m going to come around because that’s what people our age do. And while most of his friends are now fathers, he doesn’t want to have children. That’s fine with me. I’ve never thought it was safe for me to bring a child into this world, not with all my sharp edges and dark corners. I accepted long ago that I would be an endling, the last of my kind.

“I want to talk to you about something,” Adam says after the barista has set our coffees on the refurbished chess table between us.

“The wedding, I know.”

I hate that I’ve kept him waiting on an answer for so long. We’ve gone away together just once so far, on a long weekend getaway to the Bahamas, where Adam convinced me to try scuba diving. He’s been going since he was a teenager and said that I looked like I’d be a natural. I took long breaths, slow and steady, through my mouth, but still felt like I was suffocating. Everything moved in slow motion underwater. It took forever to see who or what was behind me, or if I was alone. Back on the deck, Adam chuckled and told me it might have taken him a couple of times to get the hang of it too.

“It’s not about the wedding,” Adam says. “You’ve got to come for the wedding. You missed the deadline to answer, and the default response is yes. So there we go.”

“There’s no such thing as a default response for a wedding invitation,” I groan.

This trip doesn’t involve an oxygen tank, but it does require immersing myself in his family for a long weekend in Connecticut. It’s safe to assume I’ll be hearing a whole lot about his father’s tennis elbow and having my hand squeezed by his mother while she tells me I work harder than any other young woman she knows.