London Is the Best City in America

“What part is that?”

“The part where you need to choose among the choices that are there, and not the ones that aren’t anymore. At least not how you need them to be. You’re still stuck on some imaginary idea you have of how it could have been. You need to think about how it is now. And how you want it to be.”

How it might have been. How I want it to be. The list was forming in my head. In the “might have been” column there was Matt and me, Meryl and Josh. There was a trip to London that still hadn’t happened, and there was a future—a hundred of them, or one—that I still hadn’t begun to imagine. What was in the “how I want it to be” column? What could I find to put there? Did a new set of questions count?

But I didn’t ask her. I didn’t say anything. Not when what I was thinking was, I had no idea how far my life had gotten from any life I had wanted for myself. I was living in a small town, all alone, which would have been fine if I had chosen it for myself. But I had just not chosen anything else, and all of a sudden, it became very clear to me that this wasn’t at all the same thing.

My mom took her fork back, making herself a final bite, big and full of icing. “And don’t be offended, okay? But I wouldn’t wear that shirt again. No one really loves the Mt. Airy Lodge. Even when they pretend to.”

I was just under twenty minutes late by the time I got to the diner. It didn’t look like it had changed a drop in the last decade: big open windows lining the entire restaurant, large white pillars on either side of the entranceway, a huge neon sign shining in bright pink. I searched for a spot, parking the car haphazardly near the garbage tub in the back, making a beeline on my one good foot for the front door. All of a sudden I couldn’t get there fast enough.

It wasn’t that I was looking forward to saying no to Matt, or that I had magically figured out what I needed to say in order to completely let him go. But I did want to tell him I was sorry for leaving the motel room—not because it was the wrong thing to do, but because I finally understood that it stopped us from doing the only right thing. Saying good-bye in a way that I would believe it was for real. I was ready to do that now. And I wanted, very badly, to wish him luck in Paris. I wanted to wish him luck.

Only, when I got to the diner, he was already gone. The host told me he came in earlier and didn’t even sit down. He didn’t sit down or even really take a look around

. He just handed him a large manila envelope and asked him to give it to a girl named Emmy.

“And I take it you’re the girl named Emmy?” he said, pronouncing it “E-my” in a thick Greek accent. “I take it you’re not going to order anything either. You know this isn’t a messenger service.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, taking the envelope from him. “I really appreciate it.”

I tried to smile at him, which he wasn’t having any of, and went outside to the front steps. I took a seat by the banister and opened the envelope, slowly, afraid to see what he’d written to me.

But inside there was no letter for me. There was no real note—no card even.

There was just a little arrow drawn on the envelope’s flap pointing downward, THIS STILL BELONGS TO YOU written in all caps right above the arrow’s stem.

I opened the envelope wider.

And, there, tucked into the deep left corner, something glistened back at me. My engagement ring.

I reached in, carefully taking it out, holding it in my hand. This part of Matt and me—this tangible part of what our life had been together. I flipped the ring onto my pinky finger, holding it to my mouth. And then there I was: back in a motel room in Narragansett. I was looking up at the ceiling. I was taking the ring off my finger. I was about to do what I had to do one last time. I was saying good-bye.

It was a tricky kind of luck, saying it to myself because I, alone, was left to believe it. But this time, it felt like Matt was saying it too. From just beyond the parking lot, where he had driven away sometime before I arrived. When had he decided that was the thing to do? This morning when he woke up, thinking about us, or—maybe—on the way over here, thinking, again. Maybe when didn’t matter. It just mattered that he came to the same decision. And for the first time, in a very long time, both of us were giving the other exactly what we needed.

Matt had left the ring in Scarsdale this whole time because he hadn’t wanted to look at it either. He hadn’t wanted to look at it any more than I had, which maybe wasn’t the worst way for both of us to remember that it counted. But that it wasn’t going to count for everything. Knowing that, the distance between us started to disappear. And I had the smallest trickle of what was to come—a glimpse of the truth of this whole thing—which was that the distance between us would come, and it would go. It would be different, and it wouldn’t be so different. I’d remember Matt, and I’d remember him wrong. And that was probably when I’d miss him most.

From behind me, I heard knocking and turned around to see the host with his nose pressed up to the diner’s glass front door, flattened there against it, his hands on either side.

“You okay?” he mouthed to me through the pane.

I smiled at him.

“Almost,” I mouthed back.

“Well,” he said, opening the door. “Then can you almost get off of my steps?”

I had one more stop to make.

My plan, initially, was to go right back to the house and meet Josh—call him if he wasn’t back yet—but along the way, I couldn’t do that. I wasn’t even sure I remembered how to find my way to this place, exactly, especially in the dark. There were so few times I’d been there, and all of them had been so long ago.

But the thing was, I was going to figure it out, right then, even if it was the last thing I did.

Berringer was playing basketball in the driveway when I pulled up. He was standing right under the hoop and throwing one swish in after the other, catching the ball as it came through the net. The driveway was dark, so he was playing under the beam of his car’s headlights. He looked soft, flushed, in the glow.

I walked up to him slowly. “Aren’t you afraid you’re going to wake the neighbors?” I said.

He looked over at me, fairly surprised, holding the ball under his arm and smiling.