Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
One
Hallie
Present Day
So what stupid thing happened to you today?"
I stumbled on one of the concrete steps that led up to my apartment as my boyfriend's question echoed off the stairwell walls from the loudspeaker on my phone.
A flush of irritation made itself known in my cheeks even though George's tone was teasing. "Nothing," I replied defensively as I continued climbing, trying not to sound out of breath.
I struggled to hold my phone and my oversized purse with one hand while I opened the door with the other.
"Come on." George chuckled. "Something had to have happened. It's been almost a week since the last one, so that's, like, a record."
"The sandwich doesn't count." I huffed, dumping my bag onto my small dining table, which doubled as my office desk.
"Eating something that makes you nauseated to please a client counts."
So, okay, maybe I ate several salmon-and-cucumber sandwiches at a client meeting even though the slippery, slimy texture of the salmon made me want to vomit. "Please don't take me back there." I gagged, but the sound softened into a sigh of pleasure as I kicked off my high heels and flattened the arches of my feet onto my cool hardwood floors.
"You're telling me you've gone a full week without something ridiculous happening?"
Perhaps I was merely exhausted and low on a sense of humor, but sometimes it seemed like George only stuck around because he found me entertaining. And not in a good way.
Biting back hurt feelings, I wondered if my defensiveness was less about feeling tired and more about the fact that something stupid had happened to me today. "Fine." I cringed. "About thirty minutes ago, I was on the subway and I saw this guy standing across from me who was super familiar, and he kept looking over at me."
"Right . . ."
The mortifying moment was doubly awkward as I relived it. I squeezed my eyes closed against the memory, gritting my teeth. "Well, have you ever bumped into someone who you know but you can't place them or remember their name?"
"Yeah, that's the worst."
"Exactly. I'm thinking, Oh God, I know this guy, it's probably from college, but for the life of me I can't remember his name. When he looks at me again, kind of squinting, I'm thinking, Jesus, he knows me and he thinks I'm so rude for not saying hello. . . . So I just cover my ass and blurt out, 'Aren't you going to say hello? It's been forever; it's great to see you again.'"
"And?"
I buried my face in my hands, just moving my fingers from my mouth so George could hear my reply. "He looked at me like I was crazy and said, 'I'm sorry, we've never met before. I have no idea who you are.' Well, I couldn't explain to him who I was because I couldn't remember who he was, so we just stood there trying to avoid each other's eyes for the next ten minutes, and just as I got off the subway . . . I remembered where I knew him from."
"Where?"
My cheeks almost blistered my fingers with the heat of my embarrassment. "It was Joe Ashley, the news anchor, whom I have never met before but do watch regularly on TV."
There was a moment of silence, and then the sounds of choked laughter came from my phone. George was laughing so hard a reluctant smile curled the corners of my mouth.
"Oh man, oh babe, I'm sorry." George hee-hawed. "I don't mean to . . . but that's hilarious."
"I aim to entertain," I said dryly, switching on my coffee machine.
"Only you," he snorted. "These things only happen to you."
It certainly felt that way sometimes. I attempted to change the subject back to the reason I'd called him. "Are we still on for dinner tomorrow night?"
"Uh, yeah . . . but I was thinking you could come here and I could cook."
A romantic dinner at his place? My earlier annoyance fled the building. How sweet. How unlike him. It was our three-month "anniversary" next week. Maybe he wanted to commemorate it. I grinned, my mood lifting. "That sounds great. What time? Should I bring anything?"
"Uh, six thirty. And just yourself."
Six thirty was early for dinner. Why so early? I frowned. "I don't know if I'll have finished work by then."
George snorted again. "Babe, you're not a heart surgeon. You plan parties, for Pete's sake. I'm pretty sure if I can be here by six thirty, you can."
I sucked in a breath as his words ignited my anger and the urge to tell him to go screw himself . . . but that infuriating piece of me that hated confrontation squeezed its fist around my throat.
"Hallie, you still there?"
"Yes," I bit out. "I'll try to be there at six thirty."
"Then I guess I'll see you at seven thirty," he cracked. "Night, babe."
My apartment grew silent as George hung up and I stared at my phone, taking a couple of deep breaths to cool my annoyance. Lately, my boyfriend had gotten more and more patronizing. I wanted to believe he had the best intentions and that he was only teasing. But if he didn't have the best intentions and he was just kind of . . . well . . . an asshole . . . then I'd have to break up with him.
I made a coffee and pulled my laptop out of my purse, my stomach seesawing at the thought of breaking things off. I'd been dating since I was fifteen years old, and I'd only ever had to break up with two boyfriends in the past thirteen years. The rest had either broken up with me or ghosted me. Still, the thought of having to break things off with George made me anxious.
Maybe I didn't have to break up with him, I thought, as I sat down at my desk and flipped open my laptop. Maybe I could just tell him I found some of his teasing derogatory and he should do better not to be such a freaking tool.
Suddenly my cell chimed behind me on the counter and then chimed again and again and again.
"What the . . ." I turned to grab the phone, some kind of sixth sense making me dread the sight of the notification banners from my social media apps. Tapping one-
"Oh my God." Nothing could have prepared me for the video someone had tagged me in.
The video someone had tagged my mother in for her prominent role.
I'd totally forgotten she was attending my aunt Julia's bachelorette party tonight. In typical Aunt Julia fashion, she'd forced everyone out on a weeknight to avoid the weekend crowds. Aunt Julia was my mom's best friend from high school and had been terminally single for most of my life. Then, three years ago, she met Hopper. He was a couple of years younger than her, divorced with three grown kids, and he and Aunt Julia fell madly in love after meeting in a supermarket, of all places. Now they were finally getting married, and I couldn't be happier for her.
However, my mom, who'd been divorced from my dad for less than two years and had to watch him move on to a younger woman, was in a fragile place right now. So I could be mad at Aunt Julia for allowing my vulnerable, postdivorce mom to get recorded at the bachelorette party giving a male stripper a lap dance while sucking the banana he held in his hand.
Yup.
My mother, ladies and gentleman.
I shuddered.
Noticing all the shares on the video, I came out of the app and slammed my phone down on my desk. Part of me wanted to race out of my apartment, jump in a cab, find my mom, and drag her out of whatever strip club in Newark they were in.
Yet there were only so many times that I could rescue my mom and dad from themselves. This was their new reality postdivorce, and I needed to let go. Maybe if I didn't have a pile of work to get through, I might run after my mom.
Who would undoubtedly find the online video mortifying once she sobered up.
Sighing, I grabbed my phone and called my aunt. To my shock, she answered. The pounding music from the club they were in slammed down the line.
"Hey, doll face!" Aunt Julia yelled. "I've changed my mind and you're allowed to come! Do you want the address?"
Aunt Julia had decided she wanted a bachelorette party that allowed her to do whatever the hell she liked without feeling weird in front of me or any of her friends' grown kids. I was relieved to be left out of the invitation.
"No," I replied loudly, "I'm calling because that video of Mom is all over social media!"
"What video?"
"The lap dance! The banana!"
"Oh shit," she cackled. "You're kidding? Okay," she yelled even louder, "Who put the video of Maggie online?"
Realizing she was talking to her friends, I stayed silent.
"Jenna, you creep!" Aunt Julia yelled good-naturedly. "Take it down!"
"It's not funny, AJ!" I called her by the nickname I'd given her as a child.
"Oh, it's kind of funny, honey, if you're anyone but her daughter!"
"Just make sure she doesn't do anything else lewd that ends up online. Have a good night!" I ended the call before she could reply.
It was clear they were all drunk. Aunt Julia was usually on my side when it came to calming Mom in any postdivorce antics-I'd never had to worry about my mother in any way until her marriage fell apart and she started acting unpredictably.
However, there was no reasoning with drunk bachelorettes.
"Shake it off," I whispered to myself, willing my pulse to slow. "You cannot undo what has already been done, but you can focus on your work so you don't lose your job."
I was an event organizer. I worked for one of the best event-management companies in Manhattan: Lia Zhang Events, owned by my boss, Lia Zhang. After college, I'd planned to go backpacking across Asia, a lifelong dream of mine, but the reality was I needed money to pay for that. So I'd gotten a job as a manager at a large Manhattan hotel, and when the event planner quit three weeks before a big wedding, I'd stepped in to take over. I'd met Lia at the fourth wedding I planned for the hotel, and she was so impressed by my work she offered me a job. The pay was hard to resist because it would take me closer to my backpacking dream.
Four years later, I was still working for Lia, had been promoted to senior event manager, and almost everyone I knew had talked me out of my backpacking trip.
My latest project was planning Darcy Hawthorne's engagement party. She was a true-blue New York socialite. If we got this right, Darcy would more than likely hire us to plan the wedding.
The issue was that Darcy, an environmental lawyer and elegance personified, was marrying her complete opposite. Her fiancé, Matthias, was a French artist and musician. He wanted a "modern, stripped back, yet artistic party with a rock band" while Darcy was all about traditional opulence. She was a flowers-and-string-quartet kind of woman. It was my job as their planner to find a compromise, so I'd asked Darcy and Matthias to email me images and music for inspiration.
I'd been run off my feet at work finalizing plans for another client's spring wedding, so I hadn't had time to look over their emails. I had a lunch meeting with them tomorrow. Hence the late night.
Slamming back coffee, I opened my email and found the couples' separate replies.
Matthias had sent me a helpful Pinterest board. It had to be the artist in him. Most guys I worked with either didn't care about the minute details of the event or didn't know how to communicate what it was they visualized. Clients who were creative, however, were always a godsend because they usually knew how to tell me what they wanted.
While Matthias's board was straight to the point, I discovered Darcy had sent me a link to an online cloud account where she had several digital folders for me to look at. To my confusion, some folders were named with numbers that read like dates. I opened a folder from a year ago to see it contained a video.
Huh?
Had she sent me YouTube videos for inspiration?
I double-clicked and the video started.
A somewhat familiar man's face took up most of the screen, but behind him I could see a strange, organized jumble of pipes and wires on a white wall. I could hear a loud hum of machine noise in the background.
"Well, here I am, Darce." The man grinned into the camera, a glamorous white-toothed smile that caught my attention as if he'd reached out of the screen to curl his hand around my wrist. "I'm on the International Space Station. I still can't believe it."
Two
Chris
One Year Ago
Staring into the camera on my laptop, I tried to picture Darcy at the other end, and it was more difficult than I'd ever expected. Maybe I was still on sensory overload. I'd been on the International Space Station for six weeks, and my excitement still hadn't worn off. I didn't know if it could. All I had to do was look out the window, and I felt a sense of amazement and wonder, like a kid who believed in Santa Claus all over again. My big brother's boyhood dream of being an astronaut had amazingly come true for me. If he was really watching over me from the surrounding stars, I hoped he knew that this was for him. I hoped he was proud.
"I've tried calling," I said into the camera with a little smirk. "But we keep missing each other. Guess that's what happens when your girlfriend is an amazing lawyer. I got your emails though."
Tom, the commander of the Soyuz, and my crew had given me this look the last time I tried to get Darcy on the phone and couldn't. Tom was the kind of man who could say a thousand things with just one look. Anton, a cosmonaut and our right-seater on the Soyuz had given me a similar look when he'd joined us for dinner the other night. But unlike Tom, who just let a person make up their own mind about things unless their way of thinking would lead to a disaster in space, Anton had said in his thick Russian accent, "You should send a video. Like a letter. People act strange when their loved ones are in a situation they do not understand. Show her what you do here."
