Chương 1
"""By the fourth replay of Preston’s voice message, I had stopped pretending I was going to board my flight without making a public spectacle of myself.
I stood beside the check-in line at JFK with my phone pressed to my ear, listening to the man I had loved for three years explain our ending in forty-two careful seconds.
“Eve, I know you’re about to board, but I think it’s better if we end things.”
His voice had that maddening softness he used whenever he wanted to sound reasonable while doing something cruel.
He said he had been thinking about it for months.
He said we wanted different things.
He said he would collect his belongings from my apartment while I was in Boston, which meant he had apparently planned the logistics of leaving me before bothering to tell me I was being left.
Then he finished with, “Have a good trip.”
I stared at my phone.
A woman behind me dragged a pink suitcase around my feet and muttered, “Excuse me.”
I moved without looking at her.
Three years had contained birthdays, two apartments, his mother’s surgery, my father’s funeral, a disastrous camping trip in Vermont, approximately six hundred arguments about whether wet towels belonged on the bed, and one conversation last Christmas in which Preston had asked whether I preferred emerald-cut or oval engagement rings.
Forty-two seconds seemed administratively insufficient.
I played the message again because some stupid part of me expected additional information to appear.
It did not.
By the time Preston wished me a good trip for the fourth time, my mascara had reached my cheeks.
I tried calling him.
Straight to voicemail.
I called again.
Voicemail.
The third time, I understood that his phone was off.
That was somehow worse than the message.
He had not merely broken up with me.
He had scheduled my reaction for a period during which he would be unavailable.
My boarding pass shook in my hand.
I shoved my phone into my coat pocket and immediately pulled it out again because I needed to do something with my fingers.
People were beginning to notice.
Most performed the polite New York kindness of pretending they had not.
One teenage girl openly watched me until her mother nudged her.
I wanted my sister.
I wanted my apartment.
I wanted Preston to answer so I could call him a coward and then, humiliatingly, ask whether he was sure.
Instead I was surrounded by rolling luggage, departure screens, fluorescent light, and hundreds of people who had places to go.
My chest tightened.
I tried one of the breathing exercises my sister had taught me after Dad died.
Four seconds in.
Hold.
Six seconds out.
I made it to two.
Then I turned and saw a stranger standing several feet away.
He was tall enough that I noticed that first.
Dark hair, gray eyes, black overcoat open over a charcoal suit that fit him with the severe precision of something made specifically for his body.
He was perhaps thirty-five, perhaps forty, though there was something about his expression that made age difficult to guess.
Three men stood behind him.
Two had the watchful stillness of security.
The third, younger and visibly anxious, held a red notebook and two phones.
Under ordinary circumstances, those details might have warned me that this was not a man one randomly approached at an airport.
These were not ordinary circumstances.
I walked directly toward him.
His attention sharpened.
One of the men behind him moved half a step forward.
I grabbed the stranger’s lapel.
“Please,” I said.
My voice broke so badly that I had to swallow and try again.
“Just hug me for a second.”
Nobody moved.
The stranger looked down at my hand clutching several thousand dollars’ worth of tailoring.
I almost apologized.
Then Preston’s voice replayed inside my head.
Have a good trip.
My face crumpled.
Something in the stranger’s expression changed.
He lifted both arms and placed them around me.
It was possibly the worst hug I had ever received.
His elbows seemed uncertain about their jurisdiction.
His hands landed carefully between my shoulder blades, and his entire body remained rigid, as if an attorney had advised him that comforting strangers created unacceptable liability.
I cried anyway.
I pressed my forehead against his shoulder and made a sound I would spend the next three days trying not to remember.
He smelled faintly of cedar and coffee.
His suit jacket was warm from his body.
For several seconds, he remained stiff.
Then his arms tightened.
The change was small but unmistakable.
His chin lowered near the top of my head.
He exhaled.
And suddenly he was not politely enduring a hysterical woman at an airport.
He was holding on.
Not flirtatiously.
Not possessively.
Desperately.
The realization interrupted my grief long enough for me to notice him.
I pulled back slightly.
His face had closed again before I could read it.
One of the security men held out a folded white handkerchief.
I stared at it.
He gave it a tiny encouraging shake.
“Thank you.”
I took it and blew my nose.
The younger man with the red notebook looked horrified.
The security man did not.
I automatically tried to return the handkerchief.
His mouth twitched.
“You can keep that.”
“Right.”
I looked at the evidence in my hand.
“That makes sense.”
A quiet sound came from the stranger.
I glanced up.
“Did you just laugh at me?”
“No.”
“You did.”
“I didn’t.”
His face was almost expressionless, but there was amusement around his eyes now.
“You’re also very bad at hugging,” I said.
The younger man made a noise that might have been a cough.
The stranger looked past me at him.
The younger man became intensely interested in his notebook.
“So I’ve been told,” the stranger said.
That answer landed differently than I expected.
Not defensive.
Not playful either.
May you like
It sounded like a fact someone had once given him and he had filed away.
I stepped back completely.
