Chapter 1: The Night Before

Mia Hale had been awake for nineteen hours, had cried twice in a U-Haul cab somewhere around Cleveland, and had just discovered that the hotel bar's only remaining bar stool was next to a man who looked like he owned the building. He didn't. She'd learn that later. For now he was just a stranger in a charcoal suit with his tie loosened and his sleeves rolled to the forearm, nursing something amber and staring at it like it had personally disappointed him. "Rough day?" she asked, because she was too tired to have normal boundaries anymore, and because the bartender was ignoring her, and because his shoulders had the particular set of a man who needed someone to ask him that question. "Rough year," he said. Then, like he'd surprised himself by answering honestly, he looked over. "Sorry. That's not a bar-stool answer." "I just drove eleven hundred miles with my entire life in the back of a rental truck, so I'm not exactly running a tight ship on bar-stool answers myself." She held out a hand that still smelled like gas-station coffee. "Mia." "Nate." His hand was warm, his grip easy, and he didn't let go a half-second longer than he should have, which she noticed, and hated that she noticed. The bartender finally arrived. Mia ordered a glass of the cheapest red on the list and immediately regretted it when Nate, without making it a thing, asked for two glasses of something better and put it on his tab. "You don't have to do that." "I know." He said it simply, no performance in it. "I wanted to." They talked. That was the part she'd replay for weeks afterward, longer than she wanted to admit — not the way the conversation ended but the ninety minutes before it, when he asked what she was moving here for and actually waited for the answer instead of already composing his next sentence. "New job," she said. "Marketing. Small agency, but a real one — not startup-fake, actual clients, actual revenue. I start tomorrow and I have never wanted to throw up so much in my life." "Why." "Because I'm twenty-seven and I moved across the country for a job I'm not sure I'm good enough for, and if I fail there's no falling back on anything. My mom worked two jobs so I could go to school for this. There's no version of this where I get to be mediocre." He turned his glass slowly on the bar. "My father built a company from a rented office with two employees and a fax machine. He died when I was twenty-six, and the board handed me the keys before I'd finished grieving, because somebody had to hold it together and I was the only Calloway left who wanted to." He said it flatly, like a fact he'd recited so many times it had worn smooth. "So. I understand not getting to be mediocre." "That's a lot heavier than my bar-stool answer." "You asked for the real one." He glanced at her, and something in his face loosened, like he hadn't said that out loud to anyone in longer than he wanted to admit either. "First time in a while I have." They kept talking — about ambition, about the particular loneliness of starting over, about her mother's two jobs and his father's fax machine, about how neither of them had done anything reckless in years and how strange it felt to sit here doing something that at least resembled it. He made her laugh, once, so suddenly she nearly choked on her wine, and he looked so startled and pleased by the sound that she laughed again just watching him. By midnight the bar had emptied around them and neither had noticed. "I don't do this," she said, when he asked, careful, no pressure in it, if she wanted to come up. "Any of this. I want you to know that before — whatever this is." "Neither do I." And she believed him, because his hand wasn't steady when it found hers, and a man performing confidence doesn't have unsteady hands. The elevator doors closed. Nobody said anything else that needed saying with words. She left before six, while he was still asleep, his arm draped across the space where she'd been. She didn't wake him. She didn't leave a note. She told herself, pulling her shirt back on in the gray half-dark, that this was exactly why it had been perfect — a whole, complete thing with a beginning and an end, no last names, no expectations, nothing left over to complicate the life she was about to start in nine hours. It was, she told the mirror in her own hotel room, a one-time thing. A goodbye to the person she used to be before she became someone who couldn't afford to be reckless anymore. She almost believed it.

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