They rose early to get to the rented kitchen, where the four of them spent all day preparing the many trays of items needed for the event the following day: the salted caramel bars and mocha brownies and latte cake pops topped with cacao nibs, as well as the mushroom tarts Lola had insisted upon. Sam almost never cooked, but he was good at following instructions, and so Kevin put him in charge of packaging up the items as they came out. When lunchtime came, Sam was so involved with his work that he didn’t even realize Kevin had left—and when the guy reappeared with a lobster roll, a bag of Wachusett potato chips, and a local beer for him, it was almost enough to convince him to call a truce for a day.

  In the evening they all went out to dinner at a touristy spot on the water, with Lola dominating the conversation with her pre-game strategy for how they would handle the event the following day. Once they returned to the hotel, Sam clicked on the TV and left Amy alone, but her mercurial mood had shifted, and she snuggled up to him on the bed. He was gentle with her, and afterward, as they lay beneath the crisp white sheets, she said, “Everybody here really does have an accent. It’s not just a TV cliché.”

  “Yeah. It’s even thicker up in New Hampshire.”

  “How come you don’t have it?”

  “Because I was born in New York. That’s where I grew up.”

  Her eyebrows drew together a bit. “So when did you move here? Because this is where you went to high school, right?”

  “Uh, yeah. We moved to Lowell, like, right before I started high school.”

  “And that’s where you met Tabitha? Was she in one of your classes or something?”

  “No, we met on the bus.”

  She curled up against his side. “Do you have any old pictures of her? I just want to see what she looks like. I mean, if it makes you too sad to look at them, I understand.”

  He hesitated. It had been a long time since he had looked at any of those photos. Once he and Amy got serious, he had forced himself to stop. Quit picking at the scab, he’d told himself, though even then the improvement was minimal.

  But it would be suspicious of him not to show her—suggestive of how deep that knife still cut, and he didn’t want her to worry over that. He picked up his phone from the nightstand and scrolled back through his photos—far enough back to cue that aching sense of lost time. At last he clicked on one, and there on his screen, he and Tabby stood in the bright sunshine before a magnificently blue sky, the Blue Ridge Mountains rising up behind them, somewhere on the road to Nashville after they had ducked out of Massachusetts. He had his arm around her shoulders, and her body was turned to nestle against his chest; they were both squinting a bit, but also smiling. The loose curls of her hair were tousled by the wind, and the sunlight painted bits of gold and auburn amid the brown.

  “Wow,” said Amy, sounding a bit sorry she had asked. “She was beautiful.”

  “Yeah.” He had joked for years that Tabitha was way out of his league, but it seemed all the more obvious now, seeing their pairing through Amy’s eyes. He knew he should click out of the photo, and yet he didn’t. Dutifully, and with a sense of deep disloyalty to Tabitha, he said, “But so are you.”

  “Not like that.”

  Now he clicked, and it disappeared. “You’re just different, that’s all.”

  “Do you still miss her sometimes?”

  The mere idea of answering that question made his breath vacate his chest. There was no honest response that wouldn’t ruin everything, and without any purpose or benefit. The answer was too absolute for Amy to bear.

  “You know what,” Sam said, and set his phone back on the nightstand. “I’m here in bed with you, and there’s only room for two of us here, and I’m looking forward to the future.”

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  She smiled. “Yeah, me too.”

  She fell asleep in his arms the way she always did, and it was Sam who lay awake until almost dawn. Every time he thought he had smoothed a decent patch over the hole inside him, there it was again. There it was.

  ~ * ~

  “There it is,” said Kevin, his voice upbeat from the driver’s seat of their rented van. “New York City.”

  In the back seat, Sam nudged Amy awake, and she stirred and picked her head up to look out the window. The previous two days had been punishing—the event in Boston the previous day, followed by a return to the kitchen to make everything they needed for the stop in Brooklyn tomorrow. It was all packed in refrigerated bins in the back of the van, and Amy, as soon as the vehicle started moving, had rested her head against Sam’s shoulder and essentially collapsed.

  It was sunset, the sky streaked with orange-pink clouds, and the Triborough Bridge afforded only a broken view of the Upper East Side—but Sam craned his neck and tried to take in every glimpse he could catch. This Manhattan—the one of tall silver buildings and luxuriant stretches of landscaped green—was not his Manhattan at all. It looked like a different city entirely, and that was comforting in a way. Nothing felt lost to him; nothing reminded him, at least not yet, of a vanished time to which he could never return. It was simply a new place.

  “Pretty,” said Amy. She closed her eyes again.

  He pulled her against him and kissed the crown of her head, then held it against his chest. He stroked her hair as he looked out the window at the sights rushing past.

  They were staying in Brooklyn, which he had never visited, and had no plans to set foot in Manhattan on this trip at all. That seemed a shame to Sam, but he wasn’t the one paying their way or setting the schedule. He hoped he would be able to talk Kevin and Lola into it before they returned home.

  Kevin dropped the two of them off at the hotel, telling Sam that he and Lola needed to drive to the venue to get the product into the refrigerators there. Amy was practically asleep on her feet, and so Sam checked in quickly and shepherded her upstairs, where she barely kicked off her shoes before she fell into bed.

  Sam tucked the blankets around her. She was stirring slightly, not yet fully asleep but at its precipice.

  “I’m just running out for a smoke,” he whispered to her. “I’ll be back in like fifteen minutes.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The excuse was genuine. He skipped up the stairs to the rooftop bar and, as long as he was there anyway, ordered a drink. The place was more upscale than he had anticipated, with gleaming wood and tiny lights wrapped around every vertical column, so he ordered a whiskey instead of his usual beer. He carried it over to the edge, lit his cigarette, and looked out at the view.

  It was phenomenal. The lights of Manhattan dotted the horizon like the sheet music to a symphony. He felt an irrational swell of pride at the sight of it, that in some tiny way he had helped build this city.

  He could go there tonight, if he wanted to; Amy would sleep soundly through his absence, and he didn’t really need more rest for the busy day tomorrow. But he still felt chagrined at the way he had pestered her for sex, tone-deaf to the fact that a human woman could not be like Tabitha, always understanding of his desire and always at least moderately interested. He would need to come up with some excuse to slip away the following night, yet for tonight he wanted to be true to her and to feel peace in that.

  His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he saw Rose’s face appear on the screen, requesting a Facetime call. He swiped through to answer. “Hey,” he greeted her happily.

  She did a comical double take at his surroundings. “Where the heck are you?”

  “I am at a rooftop bar in Brooklyn.”

  “How fancy. Is Kevin there with you?”

  “No, he and Lola drove over to get everything into cold storage. They shouldn’t be too long.”

  She nodded. “That explains why I couldn’t get in touch with him. What about Amy?”

  “Sleeping. Tired girl.”

  “Awww. And look at you, living it up.”

  He grinned, then exhaled smoke toward the camera. Rose made a face. “That’s disgusting. Aren’t you at least going to think about quitting when you have a kid on the way? You don’t want to die of lung cancer when they’re ten years old.”

  “My plan is to live forever.”

  “Well, good luck with that. Maybe your superhuman body is just as immune to cancer as it is to food poisoning.”

  “No reason to think it isn’t.”

  She smiled. Her hair was escaping her bun in little tendrils. “Listen, just tell Kevin to call me. Is it bad to admit I’m a little weird about him being off in New York with the Queen of the Swingers? Don’t tell him I said that.”

  It was amusing, in a sad sort of way, to hear her fretting over Lola. “I’m sure he’s behaving himself. Believe me, there’s no time to do anything here except bake and sell stuff. I can vouch for that.” He took a drink of his whiskey. “Unfortunately.”

  She grinned. “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Not as sorry as I am. How’s work?”

  The face she made said it all. “Two more weeks, Sam. Summer can’t get here fast enough. I could have used one of your hugs yesterday when I was weeping in the teachers’ lounge after an IEP meeting.”

  “A what?”

  “Never mind.” She offered him a fond smile. “Have a good time in New York. Try not to let the big city corrupt you.”

  “Too late,” he said, and her laugh was the best thing he had heard all day.