By the next morning, Janey’s room smelled of both French fry grease and lilies from four bouquets Hugh had sent over. He was in Tokyo for meetings until the end of the week but promised to send flowers every day she was in the hospital. She didn’t tell him why she was there, had just mentioned she caught a terrible bug down in the islands and was severely dehydrated. He’d called to see how she was doing instead of texting. She’d forgotten what it was like to have someone call her on the phone and she much preferred it to communicating via emoji.
When she received a beautifully wrapped Tiffany-blue box with a large white ribbon she assumed it was another present from Hugh. She opened it eagerly, tossing the paper-thin tissue paper to the floor.
The gift wasn’t from Hugh. Inside the box was a silver picture frame, small and oval with a black-and-white photograph inside. Janey had never seen this particular print of her and Beau from the debutante ball in Charleston. She didn’t even know it had been taken. It was just the two of them, shot from behind, holding hands and walking through an immaculate southern garden. A wave of dizziness swept over her, and her hands shook so hard she nearly dropped the photograph onto the linoleum floor. Beau’s childish script was scrawled on a note card inside of the box.
“Found this the other day. Thinking of you. Xoxo, Beau.” The last interaction they’d had was in that boot camp when she’d beaten him in that absurd obstacle course. The sweetness of the note implied something nefarious. It was too random and too calculating to be anything but trouble. He wanted something.
And there it was. On the bottom of the card was much neater handwriting, clearly written by someone else, his attorney most likely. “There are a few things that need to be taken care of in the office. Since you’re in the hospital you can give me power of attorney to sign for you.” A document folded neatly in the bottom of the box had a place for Janey’s signature. It would allow Beau to make decisions for their company in her absence.
She looked at the photograph again and then back at the piece of paper before placing them both on the table beside the hospital bed. She tried to close her eyes, pushing the black-and-white image of her and Beau, so young and so happy, out of her mind. A nurse interrupted her reverie and moved the package and its contents to the far corner of the room to give Janey her lunch. She had the option of a kale salad or fried chicken and she cautiously asked for both, not sure which one would be edible. After looking at her chart the nurse was happy to oblige her.
“Glad to see you’re getting your appetite back,” she said. “We need to get some weight back on those skinny bones!”
Jacob came by later in the morning, probably on an early lunch break. To his credit, he was sheepishly apologetic for taking her to the early morning rave. He was as handsome as ever in his tight but not too tight Levis and flannel shirt, his chin and cheeks covered in several days of scruff. Even with the man bun gone, the spark between them had finally gone out. She punched the buttons on the remote control glued to the side of the hospital bed, trying to lower the volume on the episode of Friends she’d been watching when he walked in.
“I had no idea what happened to you down there,” he started. “I only just read about it in the newspapers. If I’d known…”
She let him take her hand. His fingers were different from Hugh’s. His skin was smoother and softer, and she noticed, for the first time, the dirt beneath his fingernails.
“You couldn’t have known. I didn’t tell you.” There were other things she hadn’t told him. She hadn’t said that she didn’t think it would work out between the two of them, that dating two men at once had been exhilarating at first, but now it was just exhausting. She liked him so much, but there was only so far like could go. It was clear their short-lived affair needed to come to an amicable end. It wasn’t the fact that Jacob was the kind of person who wanted to go to sober raves at four in the morning and that Janey was never going to be that person. It wasn’t even his singular interest in liquid nutrition or the questionable hairstyles. She’d lost every bit of stability in her life in the past twelve months—her parents, her best friend, her marriage, her job. If she was going to choose to be with anyone right now, she wanted that person to be strong and stable. She wanted to be with a man and not a boy. She’d been prioritizing boys all of her life.
“Jacob?” she began.
He gave her the look of a Labrador puppy whose favorite ball has just been lost in a lake.
“I know,” he said. They both sat there in silence, staring up at the muted television screen. From their wild gesticulations, Janey could tell Ross and Rachel were having an argument.
Jacob’s breathing grew more relaxed and he unwound his fingers from hers. “We’ll still be friends,” he announced with his youthful confidence.
They could still be friends. Why couldn’t they? Who said everything had to end badly?
“Yeah. We’ll definitely still be friends.”
Jacob stood and pushed his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans, tilting back on his heels before he leaned down to kiss her forehead in a way she imagined he did every night to his daughter. He left her with a Tupperware of bee pollen and a sweaty pitcher of Green.
After Jacob left Janey got out of bed and padded through the hospital hallways, down to the first-floor conference room, where the doctor suggested (gently, but sternly) that she might enjoy visiting one of the hospital’s weight counseling sessions.
“It’s a good idea for you. Just a mix of some patients and women from the neighborhood. I could send you to a drug counseling session if I thought that would be helpful, but how about we do this as an alternative?” Janey agreed that this was the better option.