“Are you with your dog?” I asked.

“Yeah, I just got home,” he said. “He wants to go on a walk.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’ll let you go then.”

“I don’t need to hang up. Unless you need to,” he added.

I gave a one-shoulder shrug. “I’m not doing anything. Just ran an errand. Back at home.”

I heard the jingle of a leash attaching to a collar and the clickety-click sound of nails on tile.

“Oh yeah?” he said. “What kind of errand? Tell me your day today from start to finish.”

“Why do you want to know?” I asked.

“Why wouldn’t I want to know? I’m curious. Unless you’re a reporter and you’re afraid to let it slip.”

“Ha ha.”

I heard a door closing and echoey footsteps in a hallway.

“Call me old-fashioned,” he said, “but we’re talking about undertaking the exhaustive, extremely intimate, time-honored tradition of breaking a curse together. We can’t start until you come back from Hawaii, but we can prepare by getting to know each other.”

“Oh, so it’s a curse now?”

“I mean, isn’t it? It’s keeping us from being happy.”

I scoffed to myself. He wasn’t wrong.

“What do you think we did to deserve it?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, putting in my earbuds and grabbing lotion off the nightstand. “I think I’m a good person. I don’t think I do deserve it.”

“Me either. I can’t for the life of me think of why someone would waste a perfectly good hex on me.”

I heard elevator doors opening.

“So your day,” he said, getting back on topic. “Tell me.”

“Well, I woke up and had my coffee—”

“What’s your coffee?”

“Just regular coffee with sweet cream in it,” I said, putting lotion on my legs.

“And where’d you drink it?” I heard the ping of an elevator.

“On the sofa in the living room while I scrolled through my phone.”

“So day off today then,” he said.

“Day off. No nursing until tomorrow.”

“Why’d you become a nurse? Did you always want to do it?”

“Yeah. Always. Since I was ten.”

“Really? Why?” he asked.

“I have the right temperament for it. I’m patient. I’m not easily frustrated or grossed out. I have a high threshold for stress—”

“And you knew this at ten years old?” he asked.

“I did. I mean, I knew I wanted to take care of people at ten years old. I was already good at it.”

“Who did you take care of at ten?”

“My mom.”

“I see…” he said. “Was she sick or something?”

“Or something.”

He must have sensed my disinterest because he changed the subject. “So is there a view from your living room? What’s your house like?”

“We have a fully furnished two-bedroom A-frame cabin,” I said, leaning over to grab the red nail polish off my nightstand. “We always try to find someplace fun. A beach house or a loft in a big city where we can walk to things. We stayed in a converted grain silo once, it was really neat. Oh, and a tree house.”

“A tree house?” He sounded impressed.

“Yeah, it had rope bridges and everything. We were on a quick two-week assignment to Atlanta. Maddy and I had to share a bed, but it was so cool.”

“Wow.”

“In Hawaii we’re staying in a condo,” I said, my chin to my knees while I painted my toes. “It’s not that exciting. But we can walk to the beach.”

“Nice. So you drank your coffee. Then what?”

“Then I made breakfast,” I said. “Scrambled eggs and cheese on an English muffin. Grapes.”

“Seedless?”

“Of course. I’m not a sadist.”

“So you know how to cook,” he said.

“Yeah. Do you?”

“Yeah. I’m a good cook,” he said.