“Was it for you?”

Hannah chucked a piece of bagel at him. “Seriously, Will.”

“You’re really considering doing this?” His expression was amused yet surprised.

The hair on her arms stood up, and her shoulders tightened. “Should I not be?”

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m stoked that you are considering marrying me, Abbott.”

Of course he would still call her that, a habit he’d fallen into after a frat row party two weeks into their friendship. She supposed there were worse things he could’ve called her—such as “Nana,” which was what Kate called her at her drunkest. It always started with “Hannah Banana,” but by the end of the night, she would just be “Nana”—not even the whole fruit.

“It’s just not your style,” he said, sitting back in his chair. “I expected to get laughed out of your building. Spontaneity was never your strong suit.”

Will’s definition of spontaneity fell more along the lines of spur-of-the-moment tattoos than random trips to Wawa. The muscles in her back unclenched a bit.

“You’re not a drug addict, a recovering alcoholic, or dying or anything, right?”

“We’re all dying, Abbott,” he said, his tone somber for a change. “But no, I am not actively dying. Nor am I addicted to anything harder than caffeine.”

She nodded. “Okay.”

He stood and took a lap around her small kitchen. “Now that that’s out of the way, do you have any other questions?”

The detailed mental questionnaire she had meticulously crafted disintegrated, each question dropping from her mind as she tried to recall it. Everything she wanted to know about his life in the last five years was replaced by one blinding need. “Why?”

Hannah watched Will pick at his fingernails, his eyes trained on what must have been the most interesting hangnail ever. It was becoming increasingly apparent that Hannah didn’t know this Will. He had changed since graduation, and it wasn’t simply growing up. Whatever the change was, it was rooted deep in him. There were still hints of the boy she had loved all those years ago, but there was a weariness to him too. It was as if all the fears he had and all the expectations he had to meet were crushing him.

“Why what?” he asked, leaning against the doorjamb. 

There were so many whys, but she would settle on one for now. “Why do you need to get married?”

“Always so on point,” he said, tapping his nose twice. He sat down again and took a sip of his coffee.

“I mean, that’s why you want to initiate the pact, right? There’s a reason you need to be married,” Hannah said lightly. She knew she was being pointed, but he was wasting time if his reasons were less than noble.

“It’s not anything...” His eyes scanned the kitchen before landing on her. “Can we do this anywhere but here?”

It was an odd request, but then again, sitting at a table figuring out the details of a sudden marriage was an odd thing to do on a Sunday morning. They had always done their best talking while walking. “Where do you want to go?”

THIRTY MINUTES AND a subway ride later, they were almost to the High Line. When Hannah needed quiet on loud days in the office—and there were many loud days—she sometimes came here or to Madison Square Park. She’d sit and people watch, imagining the lives of whoever caught her eye, practicing her profiling skills as if she were writing a feature story that started with that very meeting. Sitting on a New York City park bench, the man illegally feeds a pigeon... It was weird being here with Will—or with anyone. The only person she’d ever walked the High Line with was Stephanie, on the morning before her wedding as her sister had a panic attack about becoming a wife and stepmother at twenty-four. In a city where it was impossible to ever be alone, it was important to find havens.  

“Four, almost five months ago now, I found out my girlfriend was cheating on me,” Will said between beats and without inflection. Hannah paused where she stood, expecting him to say more, but he kept walking, his stride never breaking. “My dad, he likes to throw this big kickoff-to-summer party at our place in the Hamptons. It happened there in a very public manner. Life got messy after that.”

Empathetic phrases bounced around Hannah’s head, but none seemed quite right, and she knew from experience that those well-meaning words did little. They usually made it worse. Hearing that his emotional anguish was commonplace wouldn’t help alleviate Will’s pain. “What happened?”

“I tried to go back to work to keep up appearances, but after something like that, I just wasn’t there, you know?” he said as they sidestepped a couple and their two dogs. “I work as in-house counsel for my family’s real estate development company. There’s a lot of red tape at the start of a project. We hire consultants to do impact and site assessments and basically to tell us if the land is going to be a pain in the ass. During due diligence, I missed something. I missed it.”

Hannah could tell that the mistake still haunted him and maybe always would, but it would also make him better at his job. Will didn’t make the same mistake twice. She remembered the night during junior year he told her that straight off a broken heart.  

“We lost in court,” he continued. “We didn’t get the permits. It cost the company a lot of money and delayed the project indefinitely.”

They walked in silence for a few minutes, stopping to take in the latest art and enjoy the view of the city whenever they caught a break in the crowd. It was nice walking the High Line with Will; he understood its pull. There was no chatter like there would have been with anyone else. Comfortable silence had always been one of the great things about their friendship. They could sprawl out on the floor of her dorm, heads touching, sharing a pair of earbuds. Hannah would be studying, with Will reading when he should’ve been studying. All of it, nearly every moment, had been set to Wilderness Weekend. They took a seat on a nearby bench with a view of the river.

“Things have been really bad at work since then, obviously. My dad wanted me fired,” he said, worrying at that thumbnail again.

Hannah couldn’t imagine ever working for either of her parents but tried to picture an instance where they pressed to have her fired. It sounded like Will had failed epically at his job, though given the circumstances and that he worked for his own family, maybe that was exactly why his dad wanted him fired. He still had to be accountable. Nepotism only went so far. Hannah didn’t know enough of Will’s family to say.

“My uncle—he’s the CEO—convinced my dad and the board to give me another chance. But I need to prove to them that I have my act together, that I’m serious about my job. The thing is, I’ve been showing up in a full suit and working twelve-hour days. Nothing is working. I have practically memorized the last three reports that came in—I’m like Mike friggin’ Ross right now, minus the whole fraud thing.”

While Hannah was always one for a good pop culture reference, Will had done a very good job of circumventing the point. A relationship gone wrong leading to a giant mistake at work didn’t add up to marriage. If anything, Hannah thought, that would make him seem impetuous, which wasn’t a word usually associated with lawyer.

“I need them to take me seriously,” he continued.

“But I don’t see how—”

He held up a hand to stop her train of thought. “I know doing something crazy to make them see me as serious seems counterproductive, but at this company, only age or marriage gets you a seat at the table. At thirty, I was supposed to get a spot on the board. My dad did, my uncle did, and so did my older brother. They haven’t invited me to a meeting yet.”

Will turned had thirty in April, apparently just before everything in his life had broken down. Hannah’s mind churned, going over his words again and again. For the first time since Will had shown up at her doorstep, Hannah could see how this might work. Will didn’t need a pretend wife or a fiancée. He needed it to be real and binding and searchable in the public domain. She’d spent much of last night worried that Will would have the same reaction as Brian to her insurance request. But since he was the one who had sought her out, Will needed her possibly more than she needed him. “So, it has to be legal?”

“Yes, it has to be legal.”

She laced her fingers with his, seeing how each finger fit into her own. She’d held hands with Will before; they’d had that type of friendship. There had also been that weekend he’d pretended to be her boyfriend when a particularly persistent law student wouldn’t leave her alone. Will’s hands were dry, and she felt a callus on his pinky. She wondered if he dragged his hand when he wrote. If he even wrote longhand enough for that to be possible. The texture of his hands held a story, and the longer their fingers stayed intertwined, the more she wanted to know it.

A shiver ran through her as she brought her gaze up. His eyes studied her face, not their hands as she had expected. Unbridled longing and desire and hope stared back at her. Then with a blink, each of the emotions dimmed, settling into curiosity. Before she could overthink it, she kissed him. Their lips moved against each other, clumsy and uncertain, but she couldn’t deny the spark. It had been there eight years ago, and it was still there now. She didn’t know what that meant for them, except that kissing Will unsettled her in ways both good and bad.

It’s not going to be forever, she reminded herself. One career saved and one knee surgery later, they’d move on with their lives, both better off.

“What was that?” he asked after they pulled away.

She ignored the breathiness of his voice and shrugged. “I wanted to know what I was signing up for.”

Chapter 7Will

Leave it to Hannah to make their second first kiss sloppy and confused and flavored of everything bagel. The kiss hadn’t been unpleasant—he didn’t think there was any way that kissing Hannah could be unpleasant—but it hadn’t been earth-shattering. It didn’t live up to the memory of that graduation-night kiss; it was not a kiss you told your children about. He shook his head, chiding himself for the thought. This wasn’t about that. And it might never grow into that. No matter what he had once felt for Hannah, he needed to keep his head on straight. But the little details of Hannah burned in his memory—her inquisitive golden-brown eyes when she caught him watching her, the freckle on the crest of her right cheekbone, and even the pen marks littering her right hand.

Hannah stood and held her hand out as if the kiss hadn’t happened. “Come on, I want to show you something.”

She chattered incessantly from the moment they got on the downtown subway until they skirted Washington Square Park. Even with the students and the tourists, the park smelled of freedom and creativity. Or maybe that was just the scent of weed wafting off half the hipsters they passed. He didn’t miss the hipsters. As Hannah led them down a side street, he could already imagine her office building—quaint, classic, full of stories waiting to be uncovered. Why Hannah wanted to show him where she worked, he wasn’t exactly sure. The magazine she worked for was small—he was ashamed to say he’d never picked it up, though he’d seen it a few times. It was unlikely they were the Google of magazine offices, but she’d insisted, and he was kind of excited to see how she lived.

She unlocked the office doors with a key—not a swipe or fob, but a physical key. Musty, stale air, heavy with the scent of hardwood and old city brownstone, greeted them. The scent took him back to long ago production nights in the Brown House with Hannah and a mismatched group of wannabe journalists. He wondered if Hannah had felt the same way when she first walked in, if she felt it still, and if it somehow grounded her to this publication.

She sat down at one of the smaller desks with a picture of a coworker and her girlfriend in one corner. “When I started, this was my desk.” She rubbed her thumb over a worn spot that on closer inspection showed her initials carved into the wood. “I’d finished my masters, and Deafening Silence was just opening in New York. It looked so much like the Brown House here, and Riley was young and broken and determined. It became like home. Five years later, I feel more like myself between these walls than I do in my apartment.”

He waited for her to continue, to add to the end of the statement, to give it meaning. Loving your job was a privilege not afforded to many, but to love it more than your home life felt an uncomfortable balance. Even with everything that had happened these last few months and the even more tenuous ties to his family, home was still better than work.