Her final assessment met with her approval. She looked good. Forty-one years old and everything still more or less where it was supposed to be.
Then she shifted her gaze toward her lawfully wedded husband. James looked better than good, the way some men—the very lucky ones—were at their most handsome in their forties and fifties. She’d seen pictures of James as a younger man, all chiseled features, six-pack abs, and that hair—Jim Morrison from the cover of the Best of the Doors album, which she’d listened to on repeat in her teenage years, thinking it made her edgy. But James had grown into his looks over the years; now he had gravitas. Not only a pretty face, but a serious one too.
Sometimes she considered how close she had come to never seeing that face and therefore not living the life she now considered to be nothing short of perfection. Like a fairy tale, except that instead of leaving behind a glass slipper, she had forgotten her wallet at work. By the time she’d returned to retrieve it, it was past six and her office was a ghost town.
She’d been ready to leave her office for the second time that night when her phone buzzed with a text from Lisa Rollins, her boss at the real estate agency.
URGENT: CAN ANYONE BE AT THE LOFT IN 10 MINUTES?!!!
Jessica texted back—I CAN!!!—mirroring Lisa’s use of all caps and exclamation points.
Her phone rang a millisecond later.
“Thank God,” Lisa said. “There’s a serious buyer interested in the loft. He’s already got an offer in on this other place, but I convinced him to take a look at ours before deciding. Problem is, he’s only available to see it tonight. After that he’s heading to Europe or Asia or somewhere. So I need someone to be down there with the key in ten minutes.”
Although the agency had numerous listings, Jessica knew which one Lisa was referencing. It was the crown jewel of their portfolio at the time, described as a True Artist’s Loft in the glossy brochure Jessica had helped write, even though everyone in the office knew that a banker would likely buy it.
The loft was only a five-minute walk from the office. When Jessica arrived, James was waiting outside. She was immediately drawn to him—tall and well built with a face that seemed vaguely Italian in its dark-featured, straight-nosed way.
“I’m Jessica, the broker. Lisa Rollins asked me to show you around.”
“James Sommers,” he said, smiling in a way that Jessica would never forget.
So many times in the past year she’d used the phrase “love at first sight.” It sounded corny, but she had no other words to capture the overwhelming sense of inevitability of meeting James. Time and again she thought of that quote from Wuthering Heights, how Catherine described Heathcliff as more herself than she was, and that whatever souls are made of, theirs were the same. That’s how Jessica felt within thirty seconds of meeting James.
She led him through the space, trying to remember the tear sheet’s description of the origin of the marble surrounding the fireplace and the brand of tile in the master bath. Fortunately, the place sold itself; their walk-through lasted less than twenty minutes. During that time, however, the heavens had opened outside. By the time they returned to the street, it was hailing, chunks of ice hitting the pavement hard enough to activate car alarms into a cacophony of wails.
Jessica suggested that they escape the weather by going inside the Starbucks next door. When the hail let up an hour later, they parted ways. Jessica couldn’t sense whether James was seriously considering the loft and had no reason to think that she had made any personal impression on him. But two days later, he called her and made no pretense about his interest in both.
Wayne wasn’t nearly as naïve as people thought. He knew that attending a party to celebrate his ex-wife’s first year of wedded bliss with another man made him the marital equivalent of a sideshow freak. And yet, here he was, all dressed up on a Saturday night, leaving Forest Hills, Queens, and riding the 7 train into Manhattan for that very purpose.
Wayne’s mother often said that her husband was “a hard man.” Wayne supposed it was a more charitable description than “angry alcoholic,” although the latter was more accurate.
Somewhere along the line, Wayne’s father had decided that the world had betrayed him. Archibald Fiske was smart enough to know that his true adversaries—his boss, the man at the service station who told him their Buick needed a new transmission, or the neighbor who didn’t pull his garbage cans in from the street quickly enough—would never stand for his abuse. So, rather than risk a counterpunch, ole Archie took out his frustrations on people who would not fight back: his wife and son.
“He’s just a man of his time” was another of his mother’s efforts to justify her husband’s rage, as if every male born in the decade after World War II thought nothing of striking the woman he had sworn to love until death, or striking a child who had done nothing wrong but be born. “You’ll be different, though,” Wayne’s mother always said to him.
Wayne’s entire life had been an effort to fulfill his mother’s wish and be nothing like Archibald Fiske. It was only recently that he had come to understand that by pursuing this quest with such single-mindedness, he had failed to devote the necessary time to being Wayne Fiske.
The irony was not lost on him that, by making this mistake, he had inadvertently become hard himself. Sometimes he even drank too much. In fact, at his low points, Wayne believed that the only meaningful difference between him and his father might be that Wayne hid his demons better. Whereas his father would lose his
