Always

by Sophie Lark

  But before the smile could even begin, a cool, smooth mask of politeness slipped over his face. Instead of the man she knew, a stranger stood in front of her.

  A handsome stranger, tall and fit, with a California tan, and clothes that looked casual but probably cost more than all the furniture in her office.

  “Hello, Anika,” he said calmly.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “I suppose you got Liam’s email?”

  “I did,” she said. “Thanks for coming.”

  “It was the least I could do,” he said, “for him. He helped me get my first job in the valley. He’s been a good friend to me—the best of friends.”

  He said it mildly, but she couldn’t help but hear a devastating reproach in his words. Liam Doyle had been everything to James that she had failed to be.

  “I don’t know him well,” she said, “but he seems like a wonderful person.”

  Gwen looked curiously between the two of them. She sensed the strange, awkward undercurrent beneath everything they said.

  The less-perceptive Hannah said, “James has been telling us the funniest stories! He knows all kinds of people—he says he’ll invite them to our gala. Can you imagine if Tom and Gisele came? Or Elon?”

  Anika smiled slightly, hearing that Hannah was apparently already on a first-name basis with James’s famous friends and acquaintances. She glanced at James, and again for a moment she thought he perceived her amusement and shared it with her. But then the moment passed, and she was only conscious of how bedraggled her hair looked from her dash from the subway station, and how dowdy the slacks were that she had pulled on last minute from the floor of her closet. She could have applied some mascara at least.

  “Well,” she said slowly, “it sounds like you guys have been filling James in on all our current projects.”

  “We have!” said Gwen cheerfully.

  “In fact,” Hannah said, “I was just about to go over to the Angel Orensanz building to give them our deposit and see what their tables look like. James said he’d give me a ride! That’s his Tesla Roadster out in the parking lot.” She pointed toward the window. Anika didn’t bother to look out.

  “I’m coming too!” Gwen said quickly, grabbing her purse off her desk.

  Calvin looked disappointed that there was no pretext for him to join. With a glum face, he turned back to his computer screen.

  “Good luck!” Anika said weakly.

  James gave a casual wave to Calvin and Anika. He left with the Fletchley sisters, Hannah and Gwen chatting animatedly as they followed him down the stairs.

  With all the pretty and interesting people gone, a great dullness fell over the office. Calvin yawned and casually picked his nose.

  Anika went into her office and sat down hard on her chair.

  It was over.

  She had seen James. They had spoken politely. The worst was past.

  She hadn’t betrayed her emotions or made a fool of herself. So in that sense, it wasn’t as bad as she had feared. But the misery of being nothing to someone to whom she was once everything...the sharp pain of that seemed lodged in her sternum, like a lump of stone jammed into the muscle and bone, compressing her lungs. As she slowly breathed in and out, the lump rose and fell. It seemed unlikely to dissipate any time soon.

  Anika had about fifty unread emails waiting for her, plus stacks of applications to review. Though her workday was just beginning, she felt horribly tired.

  6

  James didn’t return to the Red Line offices, and neither did Gwen and Hannah. At some point Gwen texted that they were going to lunch at a ridiculously expensive sushi place on Broadway (James’s treat, no doubt), and invited Anika to join them. Anika declined, citing her mountain of paperwork. Gwen texted back, Probably for the best, or we’d have to invite Calvin too!

  Anika accomplished a number of things, but she couldn’t remember what any of them were. She felt overheated, dissatisfied, and generally distracted.

  Around three o’clock, Calvin poked his head into her office to say that he was leaving early for a dentist’s appointment. After sitting alone a few minutes more, Anika decided she would leave too. After all, it was Friday. Why should she stay here alone while Gwen and Hannah were eating sea urchin by the pound, and Calvin absconded on some imaginary dentist appointment?

  She packed up her over-stuffed carrier bag and turned out the lights. As she was heading toward the staircase, she heard Gwen and Hannah coming up, talking to James. Anika paused—in that moment, she had no desire to meet up with them again. She wondered if there was some way to sneak away unseen.

  As she hesitated, she realized they were talking about her.

  “You took a university class with Anika?” Gwen was saying.

  James murmured something, probably a simple confirmation.

  “Was she as serious then as she is now?” Hannah laughed.

  “I wouldn’t have recognized her at all,” James said seriously.

  “Really?” Hannah asked.

  “No,” James said, “she’s nothing the same.”

  Gwen and Hannah wouldn’t have noticed it, but Anika heard the disgust in his voice. It was clear that what she had perceived as guardedness was actually disdain. Seeing her again, he found her so changed for the worse that he could hardly believe he had ever been in love with her.

  Humiliated, Anika backed into the office. But they would be up here in a moment. There was no back door. She couldn’t avoid the meeting. She pushed forward through the doors again, making sure to jostle them so that Gwen and Hannah would hear her coming out.

  “Oh, hi!” she said, seeing them at the top of the stairs. “I was just leaving! It’s Friday—I’m sure you girls have plans tonight, you should go too!”

  She tried to sound cheerful and oblivious.

  Hannah looked thrilled at the unprecedented time off. Gwen seemed pleasantly surprised, but slightly suspicious. James was searching Anika’s face, perceiving her strained smile and flushed cheeks. Guilt flitted across his face as he wondered if she had heard them.

  “Thanks again for coming by!” Anika said, slipping past James. “I’ll have Hannah contact you with the plans for next week.”

  She forced herself to descend the stairs at a normal pace. Once she was safely out on the street, she practically ran to the subway station. On the train, she rested her face in the crook of her arm as if she were sleeping and tried to cry without making any noise. It was stupid, incredibly stupid, to care what James thought about her after all this time. She already knew she wasn’t beautiful anymore.

  She wasn’t hideous, of course; she’d had a couple of relationships, even a boyfriend that proposed to her a few years back, though she’d turned him down and ultimately ended the relationship. But she had lost her spark, the enlivening flame that attracted someone of James Dawson’s caliber.

  When Anika got home, the apartment was mercifully quiet. Yet, somehow, she couldn’t settle in her room with a dinner plate to catch up on work or read as she usually would have done. She felt too frustrated and distracted for her usual quiet pursuits.

  Instead, she went to her closet and found the box labeled “Shoes.” She dug out a pair of sneakers that she hadn’t worn in over a year. She pulled on a pair of shorts and tied her hair up in a ponytail. Grabbing her headphones, she left the apartment and jogged into Central Park.

  She hadn’t come into the park since moving back to the city. She was struck by the quiet, how well the trees dampened the noise of cars and horns and music and ringtones and talking. She ran down pathways, across bridges, past benches, through groups of mothers with strollers and teenagers jostling one another. Other joggers waved to her in passing, as if she were one of them, as if her panting and heavy sweat weren’t giving her away.

  She skirted the west side of the reservoir, down past the great lawn, threading between the Shakespeare Garden and the turtle pond, then crossed the Bow Bridge.

  When she had exhausted herself, she
walked for a while, and when she remembered how adoringly Hannah and Gwen looked at James, and how dismissive he had been of his connection to her, she started running again as if she could outpace her own miserable thoughts.

  She kept going until well over an hour had passed and she was too tired and sore to take another step. She exited out onto 59th Street, using her phone to call an Uber back to her apartment.

  When she woke up Saturday morning, her legs were sore absolutely everywhere, to the point where she could hardly sit on the toilet to pee. She was also ravenous. But instead of attacking the bagels Stella had delivered every weekend, Anika made herself a protein shake. She was tired of feeling geriatric when she was only twenty-eight.

  She heard a thump from Stella’s room, probably a shoe hurled against the door in protest at the blender running so early in the morning. Anika ignored it. For once she didn’t care in the slightest if Stella was perturbed.

  Anika pulled out her phone to text one of her girlfriends that she hadn’t spoken to in a month.

  What are you doing today?

  Playing tennis with Carmen and Amanda. You wanna come?

  Anika considered her throbbing legs, then firmly typed her response.

  Love to! I’ll meet you at the courts in an hour.

  A pause, then Kelsey typed back, Really? You’re actually coming?

  I’ll be there, Anika promised. I just have to find my racquet.

  7

  In the weeks that followed, leading up to the Red Line Gala, Anika hoped she would see less and less of James. He had only been recruited to this project through Liam Doyle and via Aunt Molly’s unknowing request for assistance, a tenuous connection at best. Surely such a secondhand obligation could not endure long.

  Aunt Molly was indeed horrified at what she had inadvertently brought to pass, and she called Anika more than once to apologize. She carried a heavy burden of embarrassment, remembering only too well the part she played in convincing Anika to end her relationship with James. To have James back in town, flaunting the success that was in direct opposition to Aunt Molly’s pessimistic predictions, gave her a highly unpleasant sensation of guilt. She told Anika she would understand if her niece harbored resentment over the whole situation.

  “It’s not your fault, Aunt Molly,” Anika sighed. “I made my own decision. Besides, we were so young then. We probably would have broken up no matter what.”

  She only said the latter part to ease her aunt’s mind. Whatever the outcome, she would give a great deal to go back in time and let the relationship run its course. But that was impossible. So there was no point lashing out at the one person who, this situation aside, had always given Anika the love and support she was unlikely to get from the rest of her family.

  Given a choice, James might have found an excuse to pull back after his initial meeting with Anika, but he had charmed Gwen and Hannah too thoroughly. They latched onto him, pulling him into all their plans and preparations. Under their friendly harassment, he was soon soliciting donations from a dozen influential friends and accompanying the Fletchley sisters on all their errands and outings.

  While it was annoying to watch Gwen and Hannah abandon the more tedious aspects of their job duties to drive around in James’s roadster, it was infinitely worse when they did come into the office. The laughing and flirtation was nonstop, as were the invitations to join them for lunch or after-work drinks, which Anika could only find so many excuses to avoid.

  Most obnoxious of all were Calvin’s continual debates over whether it was Gwen or Hannah that James seemed most interested in dating.

  “Gwen is sexier,” Calvin would say. “She’s got that whole angsty bad girl thing, like you’re a little afraid she might murder you if break her favorite coffee mug, but you also know she’ll do some really freaky stuff in bed.”

  “Calvin, please stop talking before I have to hire an HR department,” Anika said.

  Ignoring her, he continued: “But Hannah is so sweet. She has that innocent girl-next-door thing that guys love, and she’s definitely the one you would want to introduce to your parents. Gwen is a little bit smarter—you know Hannah locked her keys in her car twice this week. But Hannah is taller, and James is tall, and maybe he wants his kids to be basketball players?”

  “It’s a real live episode of The Bachelor, isn’t it?” Anika said. “Now please leave me alone.”

  She found herself deliberately assigning the girls to all the outside activities they desired, (sampling caterers, visiting the florist, finding the musical entertainment, ordering decorations), just to keep them all away from her.

  Anika heard Hannah whisper to James, “It feels like planning a wedding, doesn’t it?”

  Anika closed her office door, using every ounce of restraint not to slam it in their faces.

  She continued to distract herself with runs through Central Park every day after work, twice-weekly tennis sessions with her girlfriends, and any other excuse she could think of to keep out of the increasingly tense environment in the penthouse apartment. The close quarters were beginning to wear on Bennet and Stella as much as on Anika, resulting in endless squabbling between her father and sister.

  Anika went back to her book club, signed up for a watercolor class, even took the train out to the Hamptons one weekend at Mr. Doyle’s request.

  He said the horses were missing her. They came trotting over as soon as she stepped out of her cab. Domino thrust her nose into Anika’s hand while Goliath nuzzled her face with his cheek.

  “Don’t knock me over!” she chided them, so happy to see them she could hardly stand it. She’d almost forgotten that warm, musty-sweet smell they had, and how soft their noses could feel.

  Tom gave her a long hug. “You’d better ride Goliath first,” he said. “He’s been unmanageable without you.”

  Anika knew Tom was only being kind—the horses were his babies and obeyed him completely. But climbing onto Goliath’s saddle and riding across the field gave her the first genuine burst of happiness she’d felt in months.

  The turf was damp and beautifully springy. There was a light breeze bringing the smell of the ocean. And a susurrus from the beech leaves rustling together.

  After an hour or two of riding, Mr. Doyle came out to see how she was getting on.

  “Don’t let me interrupt you!” he called out. “Keep going as long as you like!”

  Only when she felt the bruises forming on her bottom was she willing to hand the reins back to Tom. She gave the horses one last rub down and fed them some carrots, then joined Mr. Doyle in the house.

  He had the housekeeper bring out a plate of turkey croissants and a tray of mojitos. Anika protested that she rarely drank, but he pressed her to try the fresh mint from the greenhouse. When her first glass was empty, he persuaded her to take another.

  Anika asked Mr. Doyle to tell her about his work in Silicon Valley. He obliged, explaining what it was like to work with computers in the very early days, when no one knew what the applications of the technology would be, but the possibilities were endless.

  “I had always liked taking things apart,” he said. “So when I first heard about these machines, I saved up twelve hundred dollars—that was a lot of money to me then, almost everything I’d made with a landscaping business over the summer—and I bought one and completely dismantled it. Then I put it back together again, which took a lot longer. And immediately I started thinking how it could be improved. They didn’t have hard drives back then, or any way really to store memory, so the first thing I wanted to do was solder in a drive for memory storage. So I did that, and I added a few other features that you couldn’t buy ready-made at the time, and I sold it to a friend at college.

  “With the profits from that, I bought two more computers and I sold them to two more guys I knew. By the third round, I had people’s dads asking me for computers, and then after that I had businesses calling me. The businesses were asking if I could complete orders of twenty or thirty computers at a
time, and I just kept saying yes, even though I was doing all this out of my dorm room, and I had no idea when I agreed where I would get all the parts or the hours to assemble them all.

  “Anyway,” he said with a laugh, “what I learned there is to always say yes. Once you say yes, you can figure out how to make it work afterwards.”

  At this point, Anika was well into her second mojito, and Mr. Doyle’s high quality rum had dissolved some of the barriers she usually kept high all around her.

  “It sounds like you’ve made your decisions out of bravery,” Anika said. “I think I’ve made most of mine out of fear.”

  “Well,” Mr. Doyle said, “you can’t be brave unless you thought long and hard first how you might fail. Otherwise you’re not being brave at all—only reckless.”

  Mr. Doyle swirled the ice around in his glass.

  “How has my boy James been helping you?” he asked.

  “He’s been incredibly helpful.”

  “That poor boy. He’s a little lost, I’m afraid. When I met him, he had suffered a disappointment in love. A terrible disappointment. He was so unhappy.”

  Anika flushed. Did Mr. Doyle know? Surely not. He seemed so casual. He wasn’t even looking at her, he was still idly stirring his ice with his straw.

  “I think, with all the people he’s met since, that no one has quite measured up to that first love. He said she was so intelligent and so genuine. A truly good person, he said, good to her core. He thinks he’s over it now, but you know, some things leave scars. Oh, well,” he set his glass down on a side table. “That’s why I encouraged him to come out here. I think the change will do him good.”

  “I’m sure it will,” Anika mumbled, eyes on the carpet. It was not her father’s carpet—they were sitting now in what had been his study—and he certainly would not have allowed turkey croissants or any kind of food to be eaten in it.). The tufted leather couches were the same as they always had been, but the desk had been moved, and this new—or, rather, very old—antique rug, had replaced the minimalist carpet that once had lain across the wood floors. That, and a few other alterations mingled with the familiar parts of her old home, felt extremely disorienting, especially in her state of mild inebriation. She became a little sick, either from the liquor or from what Mr. Doyle had said.