“That was an accident.”
“Okay,” Joe said, not too interested in Mr. Kim. “But I’m also here because I got your voicemail.”
I held still. My best wishes voicemail.
Joe waited for a response while I kept my eyes on the city.
“Did you listen to it?” I finally asked.
“Yep.”
“All of it?” I asked.
“Yep.”
Why was he bringing this up? “And?”
“And … I didn’t realize you were going through such a hard time. I’m sorry.”
Wow. So little and so late. I made my voice flat. “It’s fine.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
“I thought for sure you’d ignore it. Like you ignored all my other voicemails.”
Joe let that dig go as he edged closer to me.
So I turned toward him. He wanted to do this? Fine. We could do this. But once we were facing each other, I realized there was a lot more to that verb than I’d ever noticed before.
“So…” he said. “Can you not see me right now?”
“I can see you,” I said, maybe a tad more irritated than I needed to be. “You’re standing right there.”
“My face, I mean, though.”
I sighed. “I can actually see your face tonight. For the first time ever.”
Joe frowned. “For the first time ever?”
I thought maybe he was having a hard time with the idea that I’d been looking straight at him all these weeks—had touched him, talked with him, even kissed him—and had never seen his face. It was a tricky thing to comprehend, to be fair. I was just about to launch into a whole neurological explanation of how acquired face blindness worked when he jumped in.
“You never saw me before your surgery?” he asked.
I thought back. “There was that one time. In the elevator. When I overheard you talking about your one-night stand with the bulldog.”
Joe shook his head. “But I’ve lived in this building for two years.”
Okay. “But I only moved in not long before the surgery. So I was new.”
“But you’ve been using that space on the roof as a studio for a year.”
I frowned. “It’s weird that you know that.”
“I know that,” Joe explained, “because I helped you carry up your art supplies when you first moved in.”
I thought back. “You did?”
“All this time, you didn’t know that was me?”
I shook my head. “Was that you?”
“Are you sure you weren’t face-blind all along?”
I gave him a look, like, Very funny. But then I thought about it. “I remember the guy from that day. But he had a huge crazy beard.”
“Yeah. That was me.”
“Hell of a beard, bro. You could park your Vespa in that thing.”
“My wife had just left me. I’d abandoned all grooming.”
“Hence the baseball cap.”
“Exactly.”
But I was calling it: “I don’t think you get to mock me for not recognizing you from that day. You were basically ninety-eight percent beard.” I reminded myself to stay bitter. We were not friends.
“I’m just amazed that you didn’t know who I was,” he said. “That whole time.”
I conceded. “I did not know you were Art Supply Guy.”
“I said hi to you sometimes, even—but nothing.”
“Did you?”
“I’m just thinking about how it wasn’t until after you got face blindness that you started to recognize me.”
“I recognized the bowling jacket,” I corrected. “Not you.”
“How are you doing now?” he asked. Like he really wanted to know.
How was I doing now? “Better, maybe?” I said. “I had swelling in my brain right near the area that recognizes faces. They kept telling me I might get the ability to see them back once the swelling went down … but it kept not going down. Until recently.”
“And did you get the ability back?”
“Sort of?” I said. “Partly. I can see some faces, but not others.”
“But you can see mine.”
“Weirdly, yes. Even though I’ve never seen you before.”
“But as we’ve just established, you’ve seen me a lot.”
“Apparently so.”
“I guess your brain remembers me, even if you don’t.”
“I guess it must.”
“Well,” Joe said then, like maybe he was winding it down, “I really am sorry. I would have been nicer to you if I’d known.” And then, like an afterthought, he added the most wrong thing I’d ever heard anyone say. “Even after you dumped me.”
Even after I—what? What was he saying? “I didn’t dump you, dude. You dumped me.”
Joe looked at me like I was nuts. “I didn’t dump you.”
“You fully did,” I said. “You ghosted me.”
“I ghosted you,” Joe admitted, “but only after you dumped me.”
Wait.
Hold on.
“Joe,” I said. “I did not dump you. I’m madly in love with you. So, A, I would never do that. And B, I would definitely remember.”
But Joe stepped closer, looking into my eyes in wonder. “You’re madly in love with me?”
I looked away. “Was,” I corrected. “Past tense. Was.”
“Why did you break up with me if you were madly in love with me?”
“I didn’t break up with you!”
“You told me you liked someone else.”
Someone else? Fine. Okay. Full confession time: “I did like someone else—briefly. And by ‘like,’ I mean I briefly decided I had a desperate, obsessive crush on my veterinarian. And okay, whatever, I may have spent some time googling Nordic locations for our destination wedding and fantasizing about taking his last name. But I really think it was more about trying to manufacture something to look forward to during the craziest low point of some very crazy weeks. It was never real, you know? It was just a fantasy.”
But Joe was shaking his head. “Your veterinarian?”
“Yes, okay? My dashing veterinarian.”
“Who?”
“Who? Are you, like, going to give him trouble or something? It doesn’t matter—”
“Who?” Joe demanded.
I blinked for a second. “He saved Peanut for me, okay? He brought him back from death’s door. His name is Dr.—”
And then, in unison, we both said, “Oliver Addison.”
I frowned. “You know him?”
But Joe had already slapped his forehead and spun around to start pacing the roof. “Oliver Addison?” he said, almost more to himself than to me. “You dumped me for your veterinarian, Oliver Addison?”
My voice got quieter. “Sounds like you do know him.”
I mean, obviously he did. What exactly had I done? Was this Joe’s ex-bully from high school? Or his best friend from college? Or maybe his secret twin brother?
He was clearly somebody important. Joe was still pacing around.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Joe was taking deep breaths now. Then he came over to me and put his hands on my shoulder. “You broke up with Oliver Addison…”
I nodded.
“At his vet clinic … during a workday … out in the side yard…”
I nodded again. How did he know this? Were they friends?
“And you told him that you liked somebody else.”
Another nod from me.
“Was the somebody else that you liked”—even as he was saying it, he was shaking his head—“me?”
I sighed. Was he really going to make me say it? I met Joe’s eyes. “Yes. Obviously. Of course it was you.”