Madly (New York 2)

“I could swear I saw that sign about the youth program already.”

He gestured ahead. “It’s just a few more blocks in this direction.”

“You sure? You’re not going to walk me into a blind alley and murder me?”

“I hadn’t planned to.”

“?’Kay. Saving that for your creeper apartment, I guess.”

“What’s a creeper apartment?”

“You have two apartments—one to live in, and one for creeper activities, I can only assume. Tea drinking. Fetish things.”

“Nothing that sinister. Well, maybe I could be accused of tea drinking, but in the quite regular way, not the creeping way. I bought it for my daughter, Beatrice. But she doesn’t want to live there—she’s a student at NYU. She decided she’d rather live in a terrible five-flight walk-up with three other people, making noodle packets in a coffeemaker and painting murals in the stairwell.”

“You have a daughter. That opens up, like, a whole world of Winston I hadn’t imagined.”

“What had you imagined?”

“Actually, it makes complete sense that you have a daughter.”

“Do tell. It never makes very much sense to me.”

Allie dropped back to walk beside him and gifted him one of her open smiles. “This. Walking me home. Rolling my bag. Keeping reserve in the conversation, and looking more and more worried that you’re lost in your own neighborhood but can’t tell me because you’re supposed to be responsible. Though you must have been a kid yourself, if your daughter’s in college.”

“I didn’t think I was a child. I was properly out of university. Had an important job. Married.”

But when he’d last looked at his wedding portrait, framed on the desk in his London office, he’d been struck by Rosemary’s youth and by his own callow expression. They’d had no business making the kind of decisions they made in those years, one after the next. He’d been a father and a husband before he had his own daughter’s ability to know her mind.

He’d realized, one sleepless night after Rosemary left him, that their problems—his problems—had begun in those early days. The baby had come as a surprise, necessitating they marry in a rush, and he became convinced there were things they had to do to make a proper life for Beatrice. That he had to work for the bank, climb the ladder, demonstrate his fitness to take charge. That they had to buy a proper country home, no matter that it was difficult to make the money stretch to pay for it or it meant Rosemary would be stuck miles out in the middle of nowhere with a new baby to mind, renovating their crumbling pile of stone, turning it into a home whether she wanted to or not.

She hadn’t wanted to. He’d known that. But it seemed impossible to make it a consideration, because had to crowded out any possibility of conversation about want to.

He wished, now, that someone had told him to attend to what he’d loved about Rosemary—her big plans to climb mountains and write books—and cultivate that. He wished the birth of his daughter had seemed to him the beginning of an adventure rather than the first ritual necessitating decades of sacrifice to propriety.

Most of all, he wished he’d learned to pay attention to what he wanted—to ask questions about it, think about it as hard as he’d thought about what was expected of him. Perhaps if he had, he’d never have ended up in New York, unsure how to begin anew when it felt as though he’d wasted his best years on anxiety and error.

“Tell me where we’re going. I’ll put the address in my phone.”

“Don’t bother, I’ve just texted my driver.”

Allie laughed, and the past slipped pleasantly away from him, supplanted by the sound of her enjoyment. A breeze had kicked up, pleasant and dry, and her hair was escaping where she’d pinned it up earlier.

Most nights, by this time, he would have caught himself falling asleep in front of the third episode of something, resistant to getting up off the sofa and readying himself for bed because it would mean another day was over without his actually having lived it.

Today already had so much life in it.

Jean pulled alongside the curb, the black Lincoln Town Car obediently quiet and expensive. Winston had more in common with the car than with Allie, but he found himself hoping there would be just a bit more life in this day, with her.

“You know,” she said, “they say never to let them maneuver you into a car.”

“Them?”

“Murderers.”

“That does make sense.” Winston stepped aside to let Jean open the door for Allie and take her bag from him. To his relief, Allie slid into the car with a little smile.

“Where to?” Jean stowed the luggage in the trunk and opened Winston’s door. He very professionally behaved as though Winston escorted women about town on a regular schedule, though he did give Winston a look that said he expected the full story, later.