“Will do,” I said. I wasn’t leaving him for her. I mean, creative director? That was a huge job. Sure, as a one-woman operation, I was essentially doing that already, but this was a large firm and the position would require supervising—I couldn’t even supervise a house plant—the art director and being in charge of the overall creative concepts and not doing the actual designing, which quite frankly was the fun part.

I ended the call and ran into the building, realizing I was entering the danger zone of lateness where Jeremy was going to be peeved with me for making him wait, especially given that it was our un-anniversary and all. Damn it!

The Top of the Hub sits on the fifty-second floor of The Pru. It’s a white tablecloth, fine china, heavy silverware sort of restaurant, which boasts outstanding views of the Charles River, Boston Harbor, and the surrounding city. Jeremy and I had been coming here to celebrate our un-anniversary ever since he landed in Boston a few years ago, shortly after I divorced Greg DeVane, aka the big disappointment, or the BD for short. Yes, he was a disappointing husband, but that’s a story for another day, preferably accompanied by a shot of three wise men with an IPA chaser.

Jeremy Pettit and I met in Georgia when I was attending the Savannah College of Art and Design and he was at Savannah State studying engineering. I spotted him at a coffee shop on Broughton Street and had been a smitten kitten on sight. He was everything a college girl looked for in a boyfriend—shy, sweet, attentive, as snuggable as an oversized teddy bear, and it certainly helped that he looked like he’d just walked out of the Patagonia catalog wearing their fjord flannel.

Jeremy had the distracted air of a guy with one foot in childhood and the other in adulthood, uncertain of which direction he wanted to go. I figured he just needed a good woman—i.e., me—to give him a solid shove in the right direction. I had not accounted for the realities that I was no readier to be an adult than he was, his mother hated me, and he had a host of issues that didn’t even start to appear until after we were married, which was a month after graduation.

If I closed my eyes and listened, I could still hear my older sister Chelsea’s shriek of outrage echoing on the airwaves to this day. Our mother had passed away six months before I met Jeremy, and in hindsight, I could see that our relationship and subsequent marriage was an attempt to fill the gaping hole left by my mother’s passing, but what twenty-one-year-old has that sort of insight? Not me.