On Monday night, four days before Thanksgiving, Adam cooked dinner for me at his apartment. I had stopped being coy, stopped pretending at early mornings and other excuses. I wanted him all the time. It was the best sex of my life—in the shower, on the dining-room table, in every corner of his beautiful apartment. Sometimes I worried about the loss of control. I was in too deep; I was getting sloppy. Making all the clichéd mistakes that people make when they have affairs. But then I fell for the biggest cliché of all: I thought I was different. It was going to be different with us. What Adam and I had ran deeper than the physical, I was sure of it. I felt like I was finally beginning to understand myself, that I was finally seeing in myself what Adam had seen all along. Potential. Something bigger and better. A chance to live a different kind of life.
I got home around midnight on Monday, figuring I had a few hours to spare. Evan didn’t usually leave work until two or three in the morning. But as I approached, I noticed the light shining from beneath our door and the dull garble of the television coming from inside. I smoothed my hair, tugged my clothes straight, wiped away the last traces of lipstick. I’d been putting more effort into my appearance lately, but Evan didn’t notice.
He was sitting on the futon, staring at the TV. Among the beer cans dotted across the coffee table, there was a plain manila envelope. Evan reached for the remote to mute the TV. Then he turned to look at me, like an afterthought.
“Where were you?”
“Out with coworkers.” I hung my coat on the back of the door. I’d had the excuse ready to go for weeks. It was the first time I’d had to use it. “We got a late dinner afterward.”
The room smelled like beer. Evan shifted forward in his seat, tenting his fingertips over his mouth for a moment. Then he reached for the envelope on the coffee table and held it between his two hands.
“What is that?” I asked, my curiosity getting the better of me.
He cleared his throat. “Michael and I finally talked about Vegas.”
He turned the envelope over, examining the other side. There was no postage, no writing or marking on it. I wondered what he was looking for.
“No one’s getting bonuses this year,” he said. “We’d all known that for a while. Some of the guys were pissed. They were counting on it. But it wouldn’t look right, not in this economy. Bad optics, you know.”
Optics. This was not the Evan I knew.
“Michael reiterated that today. No bonuses. But, he said, he wanted me to have this. As a token of his appreciation. He said he was proud of the work that I’d done on this WestCorp deal.”
He handed me the envelope, nodding at me to open it. Inside were several stacks of crisp new hundred-dollar bills wrapped in paper bands.
“How much is this?”
“Twenty thousand dollars.”
“Jesus. But Evan, what are you—you can’t keep this, can you?”
“I don’t know.”
He stood up, taking the envelope back. On his way to the bedroom, he dropped it on top of the bookshelf, like he was tossing aside a pile of junk mail. A gesture of indifference that both frightened and disgusted me. Evan couldn’t feign innocence any longer, not like before Las Vegas. He knew exactly what Michael had done—what he himself had done. They were breaking the law. And this time, he hadn’t asked my advice. He was acting like this was the most normal thing in the world. The Evan I knew was never coming back. So then what was his deal? It was so obvious he didn’t care about me anymore. Why was he still here?
Later, in bed, wide awake. “When are you leaving for Boston?” he asked.
“Oh. Uh, Wednesday afternoon.”
He was silent. I wanted to sit up, turn on the light, ask him what the hell he was thinking. But we were past that point. Whatever words we might once have said had nowhere left to land.
“Are you…” I started to say. “For Thanksgiving, are you—”
“I’m staying here. Work.”
“Right. That makes sense.”
He rolled over, away from me. Our cheap mattress bounced and sagged from the shift in weight. “Goodnight,” he said. A few minutes later, he was asleep.
*
Elizabeth was waiting for me at the train station. It was colder in Boston than in New York, and she wore a huge parka with a fur-lined hood. She was the small one in our family—a delicate build, a foxy face—and the parka made her look even tinier.
“This is weird,” I said, climbing into the front seat of her old silver Saab. Hot air blasted from the vents. I kicked aside the empty Dunkin’ Donuts cups rolling around in the footwell.
“What?”
“I should be the one driving. I’m your big sister.”
She laughed. “You’re a bad driver. I wouldn’t let you.”
“You got home today?”
“Yeah. The roads were terrible. It snowed last night. Can you believe that? In November.”
Elizabeth went to a small college in Maine. She had been at the top of her class in high school and would have had her pick, but she decided to forgo the most competitive schools—no Ivy League for her. She was majoring in studio art. She wrote poetry on the side, and she developed her own photographs. My parents had expressed concern about the path she seemed to be headed down, but Elizabeth kept telling them this was what she wanted to do. Eventually it sank in, and for the most part, they left her alone.
“Plus I barely slept,” she said. “I was in the studio until four in the morning. So how’s New York? No Evan this year?”
I grimaced inwardly at his name. “He couldn’t take the time.”
“Are things any better between you guys?”
“Actually, there’s this guy I sort of reconnected with. From college.”