And so I stood there for several long minutes, blood rushing around in my veins, heart aching in that strange new way, thinking.
A little while later, I took a steadying breath, raised my hand to the door before me, and knocked. After what felt like a very long time but must have been only a few seconds, the door opened.
“Rachel?” Sumira’s voice held a multitude of feelings that I couldn’t pick apart, but I knew I was feeling them too. “What are you doing here?”
I thought about words I could say, but nothing felt right. So I threw my arms around her neck and hugged her for a very long time—too long, probably. And then I handed her a bag of Reese’s cups.
“My favorite,” she whispered. I nodded.
“Was it trick-or-treaters?” came a man’s voice.
Sumira met my eyes with a wary look. “Ajay’s here,” she told me, unnecessarily. “We were about to start watchingHocus Pocus.”
I nodded briskly, took off my coat, and led the way to her living room.
“Hi, Ajay,” I said. “Scoot over.”
And that is how I spent the rest of my Halloween: wedged in between Sumira and her fiancé, watchingHocus Pocus.
(In case you’re wondering: Ajay laughed at all the right parts.)
At home that night, I curled under a blanket on the couch with nothing but a few flickering candles for light. I felt strangely calm and content. It had taken me long enough, but I’d finally made up with Sumira, and she’d apparently forgiven me for my overreaction and my general self-absorbedness. And now that I was alone again, there was only one person that I—inexplicably—wanted to talk to.
I opened Instagram and started typing a message to Christopher.
“Hey. Happy Halloween. How are you?” No, that was stupid… I deleted it and tried again. “Hey, see any good otters lately?” No, that was too stalkerish. “Boo! [Ghost emoji.] Haha, scared you.” Ugh. This was pointless.
I closed the app. He didn’t want to hear from me. I was being ridiculous. And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about him. His house was yet another example of how I’d misjudged him. Sure, you couldn’t judge a person by the look of their house, apartment, shack, whatever. But I really had pegged him as a modern-town-house kind of guy, the type of house with aggressive anglesand floor-to-ceiling glass windows. And clearly—as usual—I’d been wrong. His house was classic. Historical.Beautiful.
It was the type of house I imagined myself buying one day. You know, after I had a few glasses of wine and conveniently forgot about the fact that I’d never be able to afford a house in this market.
And it occurred to me, not for the first time lately, that I might be a complete moron. I could barely remember my initial objections to Christopher Butkus. All I wanted to do now was think about him, to remember the way he’d beamed at those trick-or-treaters. I wondered if he’d been hosting a Halloween party or if he’d been home alone, eagerly waiting for the doorbell to ring. I wanted to learn more about him.
Okay, I would allow myself to google him for ten minutes. I would obsess over him to my heart’s content until the timer went off, and then I would carry on with my life in a sane and responsible manner. Perhaps, in a way, this temporary Christopher obsession was protecting me from the Jane-related guilt spiral I’d been living in.
Forty minutes later, I had learned that he was a Virgo, that he had grown up in Miami, and that he had studied abroad in Zurich. Truly, this had not been one of my best ideas. Now my head was full of things I wanted to ask him about but never would, because then I would have to admit to googling him and also I was never speaking to him again anyway.
Still, he was in my head now. It was like I had a little Christopher sitting on my shoulder, commenting on everything I did.
As I pulled some pajamas out of a pile of rumpled, clean laundry: “You should try folding it when it’s warm from the dryer. That’s what I do.”I bet he does.
As I spread peanut butter and jelly on bread: “Nice, a PB&J for supper. Classic.”
“Did you just say supper?” I muttered to my empty apartment.
When I checked my phone for the billionth time, hoping for a word from Jane: “You could fix it, you know.”
At first I ignored this, as one should when hearing strange voices in one’s head. But then I thought,I could?And little Christopher nodded and said, “You have to think bigger.”
But since he was a figment of my imagination and not a fully formed human, he did not expand on this point. WhatwouldChristopher do, I wondered. He was a grand-gesture type of person. Would he skywrite an apology to Jane? Or storm into the newsroom demanding they put her back on TV? No, probably something with less bravado and more brain. Like…
I sat up straighter and set my empty PB&J plate on the coffee table.Write.Not a letter like some Jane Austen hero, but a news story. I could write a story for Jane to present to her boss. I’d already written a lesson plan about the #MeToo movement for one of my educational sessions. (That had been Kenneth’s idea. I could only assume that he’d seen the cursed video, but he hadn’t mentioned it. He’d just suggested in a soothing and gentle way that I might choose #MeToo as a future topic. That man might have some class after all.) So I could use some of my research as a starting point and go from there. The piece would have to be poignant and powerful. It could be about how #MeToo affects women psychologically—hearing about it all the time and losing trust in men they thought were safe. And different ways to cope with the psychological stress and trauma.
I grabbed my laptop, opened a blank document, and began to write.
CHAPTER 28
I WROTE AND RESEARCHEDand fact-checked until the wee hours of the morning. Until the dark autumn sky outside my window became bleached around the edges, a heavy gray streaked with silver. Until my alarm went off at seven o’clock, and I emailed Kenneth to say that I needed a sick day, crawled into bed, and fell asleep.
