The Seven Year Slip

I SPENT THE REST of the weekend deep-cleaning my aunt’s apartment and sketching Mother and Fucker in the NYC travel journal section titled “Wildlife.” The apartment didn’t send me back to Iwan—though I wished it would have. Painting was an easy way to distract myself, at least until I started to clean out my purse and found the letter from Vera again. The address was on the Upper West Side. So close—just across the park from the Monroe—but an entire world away.

The longer I lived in my aunt’s apartment, the more I could see why she’d kept it. Why, after her heartbreak with Vera, she hadn’t sold it, and instead traveled the world to stay away. There was a possibility in the sound of the lock clicking open, in the creak of the hinges as the door flung wide, a roulette that may or may not bring you back to the time when you felt happiest.

Analea had said that romance across time never worked, but then why was Vera still writing to her? I wanted to open the letter, to read the contents, but that felt too personal. It wasn’t my business to read whatever was inside, and I doubted my aunt would want me to. The most I could do was return it, and ask Vera in person.

When I arrived to work on Monday, Rhonda was already in her office, looking more worn out than usual. She had shrugged out of her blazer already—something she usually only did after lunch—and had exchanged her heels for the sensible flats she kept stowed in her bottom desk drawer.

I knocked on the glass door, and she glanced up. “Ah, Clementine! Perfect timing.”

“Early start?” I asked.

“I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I might as well get some work done.”

Which meant that she had thought of something in the middle of the night that kept her awake, so she came into work early to get it done. Her entire life’s work was this imprint, she poured her entire life into it. Her hobby was reading, her downtime spent brainstorming new strategies for the next big book, her social circles peppered with the directors of other imprints. That should be me, too—I wanted it to be me, but there was an itch under my skin that was growing by the day. A feeling like I was in a box too small, a collar too tight.

And I was afraid of it, because I’d spent so long trying to find somewhere permanent to stay.

“By the way,” Rhonda went on, tapping her ballpoint pen against a notepad on her desk, “have you decided what to do about your vacation?”

“I think I’ll just be around the city,” I replied, knowing she was asking to make sure I was actually going to take it. I was—against my will.

She nodded, though from the bend of her shoulders, I could tell that she was relieved. “Good, good. With the transition, you might need to be on call.”

That made me pause. “The transition?”

“Yes.” She didn’t look at me as she spoke, neatly organizing her pens in her tray. “As I said, Strauss’s splitting my job into three—copublisher, director of marketing, and director of publicity. I’m nominating you for the director of publicity, but he wants to interview outside of the company as well. Something about healthy competition,” she added deadpan.

“Oh.” I nodded. “I mean, that makes sense. I’ve only been here seven years.”

Finally, my boss looked at me, and her face was pinched. I recognized the expression—she was angry. Not at me, though. “And you are one of the most talented people I’ve met in a long time. I will fight for you until the end, Clementine, if this is what you want.”

“Of course it is,” I replied quickly, hoping the words could be the salve for the itch under my skin. “I want this.”

Rhonda’s red lips quirked into a smirk. “Good. I expected nothing less. Strauss might want to hire someone else, but there are two people at Strauss and Adder, and I have just as much weight as he does. You,” she went on pointedly, “just have to nab James Ashton.”

“Oh, that’s all?” I asked, trying not to sound too panicked. “As easy as catching the moon.”

“Go get ’em,” she cheered.

I returned to my cubicle, where there was so little privacy I couldn’t even scream into my donut neck pillow I had tucked under my desk for days when I took cat naps in the stock room. I already knew the imprint and my career were riding on the acquisition of James Ashton. She didn’t have to remind me.

Breathe, Clementine.

If I wanted the career I had been working toward for seven years, I had to do this.

No matter what.

I sent a few emails and followed up on some podcast interviews, and slowly my eyes strayed to the landscape watercolors I’d painted years ago, hanging on the corkboard beside my monitor. The Brooklyn Bridge. The pond in Central Park. The steps of the Acropolis. A quiet tea garden in Osaka. A fishing pier. Snapshots of places I’d been, and the person I’d been when I painted them.

That restless feeling under my skin returned, more terrible than ever.

The painting of a wall of glaciers had hues of purple and blue, from the summer I turned twenty-two—the Clementine from Iwan’s time—fresh off a heartbreak with her boyfriend. I should’ve seen it coming, but I did not, and I was an utter mess afterward. I’d graduated, and went back to my parents’ house on Long Island, and holed myself up there to waste the summer away while I applied to curation jobs I wasn’t sure I wanted.

My boyfriend and I were going to go on a backpacking tour across Europe, but obviously that didn’t happen when he dumped me and decided to take a tech job in San Francisco, and I almost refunded my airline tickets—until my aunt caught wind of it and refused to let me.

“Absolutely not,” she said over the phone. I was lying in my bedroom in my parents’ house, staring up at the ceiling filled with boy bands from my youth. All of my things were in boxes in the hallway, moved out of my ex’s apartment in a whirlwind of twenty-four hours. “We are going to take that trip.”

I sat up, startled. “We?”

“You and me, my darling!”

“But—I didn’t plan for us to go. Half the hotels I have booked have one bed and—”

“Life doesn’t always go as planned. The trick is to make the most of it when it doesn’t,” she said matter-of-factly. “And don’t tell me you don’t want to sleep butt-to-butt with your dear old aunt?”

“That’s not what I’m saying, but you must have something else to do. That trip you were talking about, the one to Rapa Nui—”

“Nah! I can postpone it. Let’s go backpacking across Europe!” she said decisively. “You and me—we haven’t done it since you were in high school, remember? Just one last time, for old times’ sake. You only live once, after all.”

And whether or not I wanted to say no, Aunt Analea was the kind of force of nature who wouldn’t let me. I could have thought up any excuse, found any reason to stay home and wallow in self-pity, and it wouldn’t have mattered. My aunt showed up the next morning with her bags packed, in the blue coat she always reserved for travel, and large sunglasses, a taxi waiting on the curb to take us to the airport. Her mouth twisted into a smile so big and so dangerous, I felt my heartache break way to something else—excitement. A longing for something new.

“Let’s go on an adventure, my darling,” she declared.

And, oh, did I realize then, that I had the thirst for adventure sown into my very bones.

I missed that girl, but I felt her coming back now, little by little, and I didn’t quite hate the thought of something new anymore. The longer I sat here, in this small cubicle, the more I began to wonder what, exactly, I was working toward.

I thought it was the idea of Rhonda, a woman surrounded by framed bestseller lists and accolades, quite happy where she was, and I imagined myself in her orange chair. What I would look like. I’d need to throw my whole self into it. As many hours as I’d worked, I knew Rhonda put in more. Made herself available to our authors, to their agents, to her staff, every waking moment. She wore her job the way she wore her Louboutins. To be as good as I wanted to be, I’d have to do that, too. I’d trade my flats for heels, buy a set of blazers, be the kind of person everyone expected me to be—

Someone like James, I supposed.

I wanted that. Didn’t I?

My phone vibrated, and I glanced at the text message from Drew.

It’s in! Second and final offer!! Send good vibes, she said with a praying-hands emoji.

YOU GOT THIS BABE! Fiona replied.

James and his agent invited us to the soft opening of his new restaurant on Thursday. Move Wine & Whine to then and there?? Drew asked.

Sounds good, I texted, and Fiona gave a thumbs-up.

I turned my phone to silent, and went back to work. It was out of my hands. Whoever James chose was who he chose. There was nothing I could do about it now.

Everything would run its course—come into my life and then leave again, because nothing stayed. Nothing ever stayed.

But things could return.

That reminded me of something. I pulled out my phone again and added, Would you two like to go with me to deliver the letter?