“She hasn’t visited everywhere yet.” The explanation sounded lame even to my own ears, but it’s the one she gave me again and again.

My friends nodded as if it all made sense, and thankfully Jensen changed the subject, but I tuned out after a few bits of exchange regarding a merger of two large pharmaceutical companies.

Hanna and I had been so focused on the wedding and then the idea of her career beginning that we hadn’t actually discussed the how.

Everything felt too hectic, and the Let’s figure it out after the wedding motto had been an easy way to put off any actual decision making.

Here we were, married, in love, and on the verge of changing nearly everything about our day-to-day lives. And we still had no idea at all how it was going to look.

I pulled a beer from the fridge, popping the cap off with a satisfying hiss.

“You’re not drinking my cream soda, are you?” Hanna asked on the other end of the line.

“Do you really think I would steal your cream soda?” I volleyed back, settling on the couch. “I may be new to this, but I know how marriage works.”

She laughed. “Good. I’ve been saving it.”

“You know,” I told her, missing the heat of her body next to me on the couch, “even if you finish it, you can get another.”

“Hush. I like the anticipation.”

Growling, I said, “I know this about you.”

“Will.” The single syllable was a quiet plea, a gunshot at the beginning of a race.

I draped my arm across my face, working to not get distracted by phone sex. “Let’s play in a minute. Tell me about your day.”

She let out a prolonged exhale and then started. “Welllllll. Let’s see. I think my talk went well. There was a lot of great discussion. And I like the lab space they’ve suggested.”

I waited for more.

Hanna fell silent.

“And?” I prompted. “You like the faculty?”

“They seem great.”

Shifting my arm away, I stared up at the ceiling. “Hanna?”

“What?”

“Are you at all excited about this process?”

“Seriously?” she asked incredulously. “I’m giddy.”

“It’s just not like you to be so tight-lipped about it.”

Sighing, she said, “I’m trying to be contained.”

“With me?”

I could practically see her helpless shrug. “I’m trying to keep my moment-to-moment opinions in check right now. I figured we would talk about it after we have all the information.”

“Yes, you mentioned that, but I’d still prefer to be processing it together as we go,” I told her. “I mean, I know you had to take all day Sunday to think, Hanna, but it’s not like you really told me much of what you were thinking about, other than being annoyed with me. It’s a big move.” I paused, then added, “For both of us.”

“Max reminded me to worry about the job, not the location,” she said. “I mean, you can work from anywhere.”

I sat up, transitioning quickly from relaxed conversation to irritation. “Oh, Max said this?”

“Well, and you did, too,” she added quickly. “Early on you said let’s not worry about location, let’s just see where things fall.”

“Maybe because I expected to be talking about it as we went,” I argued, standing to pace the living room. “But every time it comes up, you say, ‘Let’s wait and see what the choices are.’ At this point, Hanna, the choices are every fucking corner of the globe. Can we at least narrow it down a little? Begin to form a plan?”

“I don’t know which place has the best offer yet!” she argued, voice tight.

I laughed out an incredulous breath. “Well, we can lay out the landscape so far. I mean, doesn’t my opinion factor in at all?”

“Of course, but we don’t even have offers from every school.”

“Hanna, we can assume everywhere you’ve been is an option!”

It sucked having this conversation over the phone, but I was too wound up to wait. After reading my friends’ reactions today, I knew it was absurd that we didn’t even have an inkling of where we were going yet. I didn’t want to put it off anymore.

I heard her take a calming breath before she said, “I feel like planning right now would be putting the cart bef—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” I cut in. “You are the fucking cart! You are the fucking horse! You’re leading this. Every school wants you!”

“Will.”

I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose. She sounded so vulnerable, but her placating tone chipped away at my already frayed patience. “What?”

“Don’t yell at me. I don’t want to fight.”

I felt too upset to diffuse this immediately. “At this point, getting off the phone with me or putting this aside doesn’t mean we aren’t fighting. The fact that you’re eight interviews in and I have no idea where you’re leaning is already a problem. I want to have it out.”

Hanna went quiet on the other end of the line, finally uttering a small “Okay.”

Trying to calm down, I said, “Babe, there’s nothing wrong with fighting. Sometimes we won’t agree. Sometimes we will actively disagree about how to handle something. It has to be okay for us to have a fight.”

“Well, we just argued this weekend, too. And this one feels big,” she said.

“Because it is,” I answered with an incredulous laugh. “I mean, hey, it’s only our future.”

She didn’t respond. All I could hear was a quiet tapping on the other end: her nervous habit of flicking a pen against her leg.

Leaning against the wall, I said, “Hanna. I need you to say something.”

“I’m not sure what to say because I don’t feel like I can make a decision yet. I haven’t been to Caltech. I haven’t heard back from Harvard, Berkeley, or Rice yet, either.”

“And that’s fine,” I told her. “All I’m asking is that we talk about it, because you do have offers from five schools, but you won’t even lay out some hypotheticals with me. You loved Harvard. You loved Princeton, but were iffy on a faculty spot at Hopkins and MIT. Right?”