Page 49 of The Best Worst Thing

New York City

January, Two Years Ago

You first,” Logan said, nodding Nicole through the office building’s revolving doors. She thanked him, then stepped outside where, at once, New York was ice on her nose, lips, and eyes.

The six o’clock sky was charcoal: a stretch of dark, damp clouds that cloaked Midtown’s skyscrapers and streetlights in a low, thick haze.

Over the past few hours, a winter storm had brewed over Manhattan, sending the city into a frenzy of honking horns on swollen avenues and rushing coats on cold, cracked concrete.

Neon dulled and delis shuttered as steam slipped through the rusted grates of shaking, shimmering sidewalks, where too-full subway cars screeched below.

“So,” he said, fumbling for his gloves. They were headed east on Fortieth Street, buttoning their coats and tying their scarves. “You doing anything fun tonight?”

“I’m pretty tired. I’ll probably just clean up the new vendor list back at the hotel.”

Logan raised an eyebrow. “On your thirtieth birthday?”

“How’d you know it was my birthday?”

“Oh, just, Mari mentioned it to me fifteen times during our four o’clock sync, that’s all.”

Nicole chuckled, her breath visible as they stopped at Fifth Avenue’s crowded curb. Strangers swarmed around them, bumping, nudging, desperate to get home.

“You don’t have any friends out here from college or anything like that?” he said.

“Not really. We all kind of fell out of touch.”

Logan rubbed his throat.

The walk sign turned white.

“You know what?” he said as they began crossing the street.

He pulled his scarf—Watch plaid, navy and green and black—tighter around his neck.

His cheeks were pink and his peacoat, gray.

“We should do something. Dinner, a drink, anything you want. I’ve got Quentin’s credit card.

If we invite a client, we can go spend eight hundred dollars on raw fish sliced within ten yards of a disgraced celebrity chef.

Mari’s favorite thing to do when we’re out here. ”

Nicole laughed, then dug her hands into her pockets.

She hadn’t had much fun these past couple of months.

Since the miscarriage, everything had been sad and flat and all wrong.

But this training trip—a last-minute thing for Nicole, whose boss had to put out a fire in LA—had given her a new energy.

Something to do besides fall apart over a baby that’d been gone since autumn.

She could totally go to dinner, right? After all, that was what people did on business trips.

Worked, then got something to eat. It’d be weird not to go.

Besides, she and Logan were friends. Things had been different, sure, since September in that copy room, since November in that hallway, but they were still colleagues—still friends.

And work friends ate work dinners on work trips.

“Actually, sure,” Nicole said. “Doing something sounds kind of nice.”

Logan, at once, yanked off a glove and began swiping through his phone. “Was that a yes on the shark-tasting menu? Because there’s a ton of tables. Guess all the rich people here are afraid of a few feet of snow.”

Nicole smiled. “Would you want to maybe just go for a walk or something?”

“It’s”—he gestured broadly—“not exactly frolicking weather, Speyer.”

“I know,” she said. “But I love New York like this, right before that first big snow. It gets so quiet. It gets so still.” She looked up at him. “Do I sound totally unhinged?”

“It’s more … insufferable blizzard propagandist, if anything. But I’ll allow it.”

Nicole rolled her eyes and then, without bothering to make a plan, the two of them walked and talked and zigzagged south through Manhattan’s narrowing streets as the city swirled by.

They sipped crappy hot chocolates from an overpriced bodega near the Empire State Building, then barely noticed as Thirty-Second Street gave way to the Flatiron, to Union Square, and then to the Village—to the New York Nicole had always known.

They discussed the unequivocally superior snack selection in the new office and the pros and cons of speculoos cookies and how strange it was to live in a place where it never, ever snowed.

And then, at Thirteenth Street, Nicole’s feet turned right.

It was instinct, really. It just happened.

“I used to live around here,” she said as they wandered past the empty wine bars, bistros, and bookshops that lined the familiar sidewalks of her old walk home.

By now, downtown was quiet, but for the occasional taxi, a few thirtysomethings taking tiny dogs in teeny coats on hurried walks, and a handful of doormen standing in warm yellow lobbies, arms crossed over their tired bodies as they watched the city slow from double-paned doors.

“In college?” he said. “Kind of fancy for a dorm.”

“Oh, no. For a year, before I moved.” She took a few more steps, her feet guiding her down Eighth Avenue. “There was this little hot dog cart, it’s always open, on the corner of—”

“Jane Street.”

Nicole itched her neck. “You know it? Did you live around here? How have we never talked about this?”

“Nope,” he said. “I lived in StuyTown, as is required of all thirty-year-old men who are too lazy to come to New York and find an apartment themselves. I was only here, like, eight months—April or May to right before Christmas. That was six years ago now. Quentin poached me before I even understood the subway system. But my office was right by here, in Chelsea.”

“Oh, wow,” she said. “I left that June. We must’ve just missed each other.”

“Guess so.”

They walked in silence for another minute.

They both knew the way. When they found the cart—there it was, like nothing had ever changed—they ordered a few hot dogs and settled onto someone else’s stoop while snow began to fall in thick, soft flakes.

She sat a step in front of him and a couple of feet to his left, beneath an awning that kept their bent bodies dry.

The brownstone’s glistening lobby, their backlight.

“So,” he said, opening a bag of chips, “you one of those girls who makes liking New York their entire personality?”

“First of all, rude. Second of all, yes.”

Logan snickered, then offered her a chip.

She snatched the whole bag and began unwrapping the foil around her dinner.

The same one she’d shared with Gabe a hundred times, back when he’d spend his entire Saturday roaming around a botanical garden.

Back when he’d ask her to final-eye his projects for school.

Back when he’d happily salt the pasta water at the silly dinner parties her friends would throw in their shitty apartments.

Back when he was just another fancy little fish in a New York–sized pond.

“What’d you love about it?” he said.

“I don’t know. I just always have. I always wanted to move here.

And then, when I did, it was even better than I’d imagined.

It was so packed and crowded and gross and expensive, and still, I couldn’t get enough of it.

If I wanted to be energized, I stepped outside.

If I wanted to be alone, I closed my door.

But no matter what, I could always stare out the window and put my hand on the glass and take it all in.

It always felt like a living, breathing thing to me.

” She looked over at him and cringed. “Sorry, does that make any sense? Do I sound totally nuts again?”

He nodded, smiling wryly. Nicole shook her head, cheeks warm.

“Why’d you leave, then?” he said. “Doesn’t sound like you got tired of it.”

“Gabe’s from Manhattan Beach.”

“Oh, right,” he said. “You guys met here?”

Gabe had told Logan as much that night at the agency’s holiday party, but that was over a year ago now. He must’ve not remembered.

“Yeah,” she said. “And he had this really good job lined up in LA after he was done at Columbia, the kind you don’t turn down.

And I never really got the job I wanted here, so I was working in advertising, and he had this big career ahead of him and that was kind of that. Been in California ever since.”

“You like it?”

“LA?” Nicole laughed as she reached for a napkin. “Not one bit.”

Logan gave her a quick raise of his brow. Nicole cringed again.

“God,” she said, “when I say it out loud, it sounds a little pathetic, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, come on. Undesirable relocation is a rite of passage. We all do dumb shit for love. Believe me, I’d know. I almost moved to Milwaukee for a girl.”

“Milwaukee? Seriously? It’s like a colder, smaller Saint Louis, except everyone’s obsessed with cheese.”

“Tell me about it,” he said. “But when you know, you know. And there’s nothing stupid about going after exactly what you want.”

Nicole wrinkled her nose. And then she handed him back his half-finished bag of chips and decided not to ask any follow-up questions about the mystery woman in Wisconsin who, from the sound of his voice, had almost certainly broken his heart.

“Anyway,” he said. “What was the job you wanted?”

“Publishing. I wanted to edit books.”

“You’d be good at that.”

She yanked a loose thread from the sleeve of her coat. “Yeah, well, maybe in some other life.”

“Right,” Logan said, squishing a ketchup-sodden foil wrapper into his fist, then chucking it into an overflowing trash can a few yards away. He didn’t miss. “Maybe in some other life.”

They sat quietly for a few minutes.

Logan cracked open his soda.

Nicole scrolled through her phone.

Snow had blanketed the empty street.

“Hey, I just …” He fiddled with the tab on his can. “I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while now, if you’re doing okay? With, you know, with everything? With what happened?”

Nicole found another loose thread to yank at.