“Who else was there in your office?”

“No one.”

“Were you planning to meet someone?”

“No.”

It seemed he wasn’t going to return to my five-year gap in employment. He didn’t register how significant it was. An Ivy League–educated lawyer, hired by one of the top law firms in the world, didn’t simply take off five years at the start of her career. There were no parking pads on that road to success. I glanced at Riley, but he didn’t seem struck by it, either. Neither of them thought to ask: What happened on December 19?

Chapter 6

December 19, 2013

Don’t be nervous, David said.

But did he? He couldn’t have, yet I could hear him speak the words so clearly. I could feel his lips nuzzle my ear and his arms wind around my waist as we stood at our floor-to-ceiling windows. I could feel the smile on my face and see the sun in its sparkling ascension over the towers of the city. Sparkling, everything was sparkling—the bright light of dawn, the polished wood floors of our brand-new apartment, the gleaming stainless steel in our gourmet kitchen, the decorator-designed Christmas tree in our living room, the platinum rings on our newlywed fingers.

This was how we greeted each day, beginning with our very first morning in the apartment, even before our first stick of furniture was delivered. We made love on the living room floor that night and slept there with our limbs entwined, then rose naked to the dawn and stood hand in hand with all of the New York paradise spread out before us. We were primordial man and primordial woman, I thought. We were Adam and Eve basking in our garden of earthly delights. I didn’t say it out loud because David would think it was silly. But it was worse than silly. I knew that now. It was a jinx. Because Adam and Eve fell, didn’t they? They lost everything.

Don’t be nervous. You’re a star. I could hear him say it, but he couldn’t have, not when he was passed out cold in the sagging beanbag chair with his legs sprawled out so far I had to step over them to get from the bed to the tub.

Cold. The whole room was cold. I banged on the radiator, and it let out a single gasp before it lapsed into silence again. It was like the death rattle of a corpse. Three more steps to the kitchen, and I turned on the oven and opened the door and waited for a shimmer of heat to radiate out before I moved to the tub. At least the boiler was still working. The hot water met the chill air, and a cirrus cloud of steam wisped through the tiny studio apartment.

David flung an arm over his face and snorted once before he fell silent again. It sounded like the death rattle of another corpse.

Don’t be nervous, he said, but he didn’t. Not today. I was hearing an echo from five years ago. Time was all mixed up in my head today. My first callback in over a year and it had to be on December 19? How could it not be a jinx?