Whatever was happening at whichever house she was at, Abby’s bike could save her. She could say, “I’m going on a bike ride,” and go off by herself: to a friend’s house, or the Willow Grove Mall, or to the path that ran from Center City all the way to Valley Forge. She could pedal, feeling the wind against her face, until she was calm again, until she’d gotten some perspective, until whatever had happened no longer felt as dire, and she didn’t feel so sad.
“Biking made me who I am,” Abby concluded. She removed a wet wipe from its package and rubbed barbecue sauce from her fingertips. “It saved me.” Those dorky, ridiculously sincere words seemed to echo in the restaurant, audible even through the noise of other diners and music from the jukebox, and Abby wished, immediately, that she could unsay them. She glanced at Sebastian as a waitress came to clear the table; bracing for scorn, or boredom, but seeing neither one. He looked interested, and thoughtful. She wondered if biking had been like that for him. Except what did Sebastian need to be saved from?
“And how about you two?” she asked, looking at Lincoln first. “Lifelong cyclist?”
“I’m a city kid. I learned to ride in Central Park, and on the Hudson Greenway,” Lincoln said.
Abby finally let herself turn toward Sebastian. “How about you?”
“I grew up in the suburbs, so I’d ride to my friends’ houses.” It sounded idyllic. Which figured. Of course this handsome, confident man had enjoyed a perfect childhood, with two married parents and just one house. “I didn’t really get into it until I moved to New York, after college.”
“I made him ride with me,” Lincoln said.
“That is true,” Sebastian said. “And I’m grateful every day.”
“You should be,” Lincoln said. “If it hadn’t been for me, the only exercise you’d get would be…” Lincoln’s voice trailed off. Abby felt her neck get hot and she tried not to squirm as she refilled her water glass.
“What about Mark?” Sebastian asked. His tone was calm, almost indifferent. His eyes were on his notebook, but the set of his jaw looked pugnacious. “Does he want to learn to ride someday?”
Abby blinked. “Biking is my thing. Just like running is his thing. It’s fine. I think it’s fine when women have their own interests.” She did believe this. She just hoped she sounded convincing.
Sebastian looked skeptical. “So how often do you ride? Like, two or three times a week?”
“Something like that.” It was actually more like three or four times, and that wasn’t counting the riding she did to run errands, or to visit Lizzie’s house, or to get from her apartment to Mark’s, or from Mark’s place back to hers, or to work in the morning. Most Saturdays she did a group ride with her bicycle club, and almost every Sunday she did her own thirty-mile loop first thing in the morning, as a way to center herself and prepare for the week ahead.
“And how far do you go? Twenty-five, thirty miles?”
“Depends on the day,” Abby said.
“On average.”
She thought. “Twenty-five or thirty for the weekday rides. Longer on the weekends.”
“So two or three times a week, for three or four hours at a time, you’re literally riding away from this guy.” Sebastian’s voice was neutral. Abby’s head was churning with fury and guilt. It felt like Sebastian had peeked into her brain and effortlessly plucked out one of the only things about Mark that she wished were different, like he was now holding up that thought, pointing at it, making it impossible for her not to see it.
“I once dated a woman who didn’t ride a bike,” Ed was saying, from his spot at the middle of the table. “Didn’t last.”
His wife patted the side of his arm. “It didn’t last because she emptied out your retirement account and used the money for her essential oil business.”
Ed’s expression was mournful. “Well,” he said, “there was that.”
Abby forced herself to look directly at Sebastian. “Have all of your girlfriends been stage-five clingers?” she asked. “Were you joined at the hip, every minute of the day? Oh, but wait—you don’t have girlfriends, do you?”
Lincoln murmured, “Yikes.” Sebastian’s expression was no longer neutral, or thoughtful, or anything close to pleasant. He was, instead, unabashedly glaring at her, eyes narrowed, jaw clenched. If looks could have killed, Abby would have been bleeding out into the shawarma.
“When actual grown-ups love each other, they’re okay with spending time apart,” she said, and hoped she’d delivered the line coolly.
His expression and his posture didn’t change—at least, not overtly—but she could tell that he was angry. “It just doesn’t seem to me like you’ve got a lot in common with this guy.”
Abby’s knees were trembling. She felt breathless with fury. “Mark and I have a lot of things in common.”
“You just got through telling us how much you love riding your bike, how it’s your favorite thing, how it made you who you are, how it ‘saved your life.’?” He’d actually hooked his fingers into air quotes to deliver the last line. Abby felt her skin go icy. It was her own fault, for being honest like that, for being so vulnerable in front of a guy she barely knew.
Sebastian appeared not to notice her distress. He said, “It’s important to you. And he hasn’t learned how to do it.”
“You don’t get it,” Abby said. Her voice was calm as her pulse thundered in her throat. Her fists were clenched. “You don’t have any idea about what it takes to be part of a couple.”
He gave another shrug. “If there was something I really loved to do, something that was important to me, I’d want my girlfriend to do it with me.”
“Well, you’d need an actual girlfriend to find out.”
Sebastian’s face went stony, and Abby felt concurrently ashamed and relieved. Ashamed of herself for being mean, which, as someone who’d absorbed a fair share of the world’s unkindness, she tried never, ever to be. Ashamed that she’d hurt him; ashamed that she’d felt that impulse in the first place, that she’d wanted to hurt him. And, also, she was relieved. This connection she’d felt between them, the bond of memory and intimacy—how easy he was to talk to and how it had felt to be naked, skin to skin with him—now she knew, for sure, that it had all been in her head. Or, if it had been real, it was over. If there had been a thread stretching between them, she’d snipped it. Now she could stop her stupid, pointless yearning. She could stop hoping that Sebastian was actually attracted to her, to Abby Stern, the person, and not as a novelty, or a body to warm his bed. Men like Sebastian did not fall for girls like her. Maybe in romance novels or rom-coms they did. But not in the real world.
Besides, she had Mark.
“All set here?” asked the waitress, with the check in a leather envelope in one hand. “You need anything else?”
“We’re all set,” Abby said. “Everything was delicious.” She held out her hand for the check and made herself smile.
Kayla
Day Seven: Syracuse to Seneca Falls Sixty-one miles
It was a secret, something she’d never told her husband, something she’d barely admitted to herself, but when Kayla had gotten pregnant for the second time, she’d secretly, quietly, hoped that the baby would be a girl.
They had had Andy by then, and she and Dale had decided that the second child would be their last. Buying a nice house in a good school district, taking the occasional, reasonable vacation, and eventually sending their children off to college, from which they’d graduate with no more than the average amount of debt, would be tough but feasible on their combined salaries. Three kids would tip the scales from possible to impossible. She’d cried, quietly, in private, when she’d learned that she was having another boy, and she’d ignored her friends and her own sister when they’d tried to soothe her, telling her what a challenge daughters could be.