A slight, pleasant vibration in his pocket. Grant fished out his phone to find a text from Marie. Going for coffee. The usual for you?☹ It was weird to think she was still working at Fitzpatrick, Oppler and Moore, while he was up here, about to start from scratch. Marie, a childhood friend, hadn’t even planned on going to college, much less law school, but he’d inspired her. “I figured if you could do it, I could, General,” she’d told him after she aced the LSAT. He’d put in a good word for her after she’d taken the bar, and the firm hired her, just like that. They thought they would spend their careers the way they’d spent their childhoods, side by side.

Have a double espresso for me—spiked with vodka, he started to write, then reconsidered, and just sent back an emoji of a yellow cat with a fat blue tear dripping from its eye.

“Hi, honey bunch,” Suzanne said, her voice loud, and for a moment Grant felt buoyant—but she was talking to her phone, not to him. “How are you doing? Is Grammy making dinner?”

Grammy, Suzanne’s mother, was taking care of their son, Adam, while they house-hunted. She lived around the corner from their house outside Richmond, close enough to look after Adam every day. Strangers—well, older strangers—sometimes mistook Grammy for Adam’s mother, a compliment Grammy laughingly mentioned every time it occurred. Grant always wolf-whistled in support, but Suzanne just uttered a taut, “So you’ve told us, Mom.”

Grammy had offered to move to the D.C. area to help out with Adam, but Suzanne turned her down. Grant pointed out that they’d miss having a babysitter on call, but no amount of lobbying on Grammy’s part could convince Suzanne otherwise.

“Addy wants to talk to you,” Suzanne said, handing her phone back to Grant.

Grant’s heart took wing. “Hiya, buddy!”

Adam retold the story Grammy had just read to him in minute detail, and recounted the moves of the Scrabble game they’d played. Scrabble. The kid was five! Grant listened, happy, simultaneously admiring the back of Suzanne’s head: her long neck, her long silky hair. He loved all of Suzanne’s long-ness—her long feet, her long thighs and calves too. So what if she was taller than him? It was just by an inch, easily overcome if he wore shoes with a very slight lift and she wore flats. Suzanne Gardner was a catch: student government president, president of the Young Entrepreneurs’ Club, a woman who had gotten a full academic ride to college and attended a prominent business school. She was a gifted athlete to boot. He used to get winded climbing the stairs before he started running with her. Suzanne was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Everyone said so.