Page 104 - In Five Years

Chapter Seventeen

September is busy season at work. If everyone agrees to take a collective breath
at the end of August, then September is a full-on sprint. I come back from the
beach to a pile of documents and don’t look up from them until Friday. Bella

calls me on Wednesday, gasping with laughter.
“I told him!” she says. She squeals, and I hear Aaron there next to her. I
imagine his arms around her, around her chest, careful with her, with this life

now between them.
“And?”
“Dannie says ‘and,’ ” Bella says.

I hear static, and then Aaron is on the line. “Dannie. Hey.”
“Hi,” I say. “Congratulations.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”

“Are you happy?”
He pauses. I feel my stomach tighten. But then, when I hear him speak, it’s

the purest, most obvious resonance of joy. It fills up the phone. “You know,” he
says. “I really, really am.”
On Saturday, Bella and I pick up coffees at Le Pain Quotidien on Broadway
because she wants to go shopping. I expect we’ll hit up the stores on lower Fifth,

maybe pop into Anthropologie, J.Crew, or Zara. But, instead, I find myself,
Americano in hand, standing outside of Jacadi, the French baby store on Twenty-

First Street.
“We have to go in,” she says. “Everything is too adorable.” I follow her.
There are rows of tiny onesies with matching cotton hats, knit sweaters, tiny
overalls. It is a shrunken department store—full of petite Mary Janes and patent-

leather loafers, all in minute, pocketable sizes. Bella is wearing a pink silk slip