Page 82 - In Five Years

have to sift through that much history. We have twenty-five years now, and
there’s already too much to pull from, too much to make her weepy. Old age is
going to be brutal.
“No,” I say. “It’s a restaurant. We’ve come here a lot.”

Bella rolls her eyes. “You had just moved down from Columbia, and we were
celebrating your job with Clarknell.”

I shake my head. “We celebrated Clarknell at Daddy-O.” The bar off Seventh
we used to frequent at all hours of the night for the first three years we lived in
the city.
“No,” Bella says. “We met Carl and Berg there before we came here, just you

and me.”
She’s right, we did. I remember the tables all had candles on them, and there

was a bowl of Jordan almonds by the door. I scooped two handfuls into the
pouch in my purse on the way out. They don’t keep them stocked anymore,
probably because of customers like me.

“Maybe we did,” I say.
Bella shakes her head. “You can never be wrong.”
“It’s actually part of my job description,” I say. “But I seem to remember a

night in late two thousand fourteen.”
“Way before David,” Bella says.
“Yeah.”

“You love him?” she says. It’s a strange thing to ask and it’s not lost on either
one of us, this question, and that she’s asked it.
“I do,” I say. “We want so many of the same things, we have the same plans.

It fits, you know?”
Bella cuts a slice of feta and spears a tomato on top. “So you know what it’s
like then,” she says.

“What?”
“To feel like you’ve met your person.”
Bella holds my gaze, and I feel something sharp prick my stomach from the

inside out. It’s like she put the pin there.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry if I was weird with Aaron. I really do like him,
and I’ll love him if and whenever you do. Just take it slow,” I say.

She puts the bite into her mouth and chews. “Impossible,” she says.