“What?” she said, eyeing him.

“I’d hate to … not articulate how grateful I am …”

She shook her silvery head. “Grateful,” she said with disdain.

“My life,” Jake said, stumbling into the apparently foreign thicket of the English language. “It’s … so much better with you in it.”

“Oh? Well, I don’t doubt that, from a practical standpoint. But I have to admit, I’d been hoping for something more. I mean,” said Anna, who wasn’t looking at him anymore. “I feel like I knew my own feelings right away. I’ll admit, leaving Seattle was probably a crazy thing to do, but we’ve lived together for six months now. Maybe not everyone knows how they feel as quickly as I did, but I think it’s really been enough time now. And I mean, if you still don’t know what you want to happen here, maybe that’s its own answer. This is what I’m in the weeds about, if you want to know the truth.”

He stared at her, and a sick feeling surged through him. Eight months since their meeting, six of them spent living together as a couple, exploring the city, adopting a cat, meeting his family and his friends and broadening their shared circle … what was the matter with him? Was he so distracted by some malevolent piece of shit on the internet that he was about to miss the truly life-altering and entirely real person on the other side of the table? This dinner was not, as he’d simply assumed, a rote acknowledgment of their six-month anniversary, it was the end of some private trial period for Anna. And Jake was blowing it. Or already had blown it. Or surely would blow it if he didn’t … what?

He asked her to marry him.

It took mere seconds for her to begin grinning, mere seconds more for him to grin back, a minute at most before the idea of it, of getting married to Anna Williams of Idaho, Seattle, Whidbey Island, Seattle again, and now New York, had lost all of its unfamiliarity and become an exciting, cheerful, and above all settled thing. And then they were holding hands beside their still steaming plates.

“Wow,” said Anna.

“Wow,” Jake agreed. “I don’t have a ring.”

“Well, that’s okay. I mean, can we get a ring?”

“Absolutely.”

An hour later, having dispatched several additional caipirinhas and never once returning to their previous topic of conversation, they left the restaurant an inebriated and very much engaged couple.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Only Place Left to Go

Anna wasn’t interested in anything elaborate, and neither of them saw any point in waiting. They went to the diamond district and she chose something called an “estate” ring (which meant “secondhand” with a nicer name, though it did look very pretty on her finger), and less than a week after that they were at city hall, waiting on the hard benches with all of the other couples. After a bespectacled official named Rayna pronounced them married, they walked a few blocks to Chinatown for what would serve as their wedding party. (On Jake’s side: his parents and a couple of cousins, and two or three of his Wesleyan and MFA friends. On Anna’s: a colleague from the podcast studio and a couple of the women she’d met at yoga.) They occupied two round tables in the back of a Mott Street restaurant, each with a lazy Susan of dishes in the middle. Jake and Anna brought champagne.

The following week, Matilda took them out to the new Union Square Cafe to celebrate, and Jake arrived a few minutes late to find his agent and his new wife with their heads together, gossiping over pink-salt-rimmed margaritas as if they’d known each other for years. “Oh my god,” he heard one of them say as he sat beside Anna in the booth. He wasn’t even sure which one had spoken.

“What?”

“Jake!” said his agent with unprecedented reprove, “you didn’t tell me your wife worked for Randy Johnson.”

“Uh … no,” he confirmed. “Why?”

“Randy Johnson! Soundtrack of my adolescence. You know I grew up in Bellevue!”

Did he know that? He didn’t, actually.

“I met him once,” Matilda went on. “I went on his show with a friend of mine, because we were organizing a fun run for some worthy cause. Actually the worthy cause was probably getting-the-two-of-us-into-Ivy-League-schools, but never mind about that. My dad drove us to the station. I don’t think it was the one he’s at now.”

“Probably KAZK,” said Anna.

“Yeah, maybe. Anyway, he hit on the both of us, one after the other. On the air! We were sixteen!”

“Well-known lech,” Anna observed.

“My dad was right there in the studio!” She held up her beautifully manicured hands in shock. She had buttery blond hair, expensively tended, and looked every inch the busy, accomplished, and well-compensated Manhattan woman she was. Beside her, Anna, with her silver braid, unpainted nails, and casual work sweater, seemed notably younger and immeasurably less sophisticated.

“He wouldn’t do it today, probably,” Anna was saying. “He’d wait till the dad was in the bathroom.”

“Like, how has this guy not been Me Too’d out of his misery yet?”

“Well, I think it’s come up. I know it has, actually. Even while I was there, there was some issue with an intern. But she denied it and he kind of slithered through. And anyway, he’s an institution. Sorry, Jake. You have to forgive us, cackling away.”

“I just met your wife,” said Matilda, “and I want to cackle away with her in perpetuity.”

“That’s so kind,” said Anna. “And I’ve always been told you’re a no-nonsense kind of person.”

“Oh, I am!” Matilda said, as Jake asked the waiter for whatever they were having. “But only in the office. That’s my secret. They’d call me the Jackal, but the nickname’s already taken. It’s not that I love to fight, per se; I just love to fight for my clients. Because I love my clients. And in this case, I’m happy to say, I also love their brand-new spouses.” She lifted her glass to the two of them. “I am so delighted, Anna. I don’t know where you came from, but I’m glad you’re here.”

The two of them clinked. Jake lifted his water to join them.

“She comes from Idaho,” he said helpfully. “A small town—”

“Yeah, very boring,” said Anna, touching his leg under the table. “I wish I’d grown up in Seattle, like you. The minute I got there, for college, I was just so … Yes. All that tech stuff coming in, and the energy with it.”

“And the food.”

“And the coffee.”

“Not to mention the music, if you were into that,” Matilda said. “Which I wasn’t. I could never rock a flannel shirt. But there was real excitement around it.”

“And the water. And the ferries. And the sunsets over the harbor.”

The two of them looked at each other, evidently sharing a single rapturous moment.

“Tell me about you, Anna,” Jake’s agent said, and for most of the evening they talked about her years on Whidbey, and then at the radio station, where she’d made it her mission to get some cultural content—literature, performing arts, ideas—into Randy Johnson’s malodorous studio. They talked about the books Anna liked to read and the wines she preferred, and what she had already accomplished in her first months in New York. Matilda, Jake was not at all surprised to discover, followed at least two of the podcasts Anna was helping to produce, and he watched his wife take out her phone to record the names of several others she should be listening to, as well as the contact information for another of Matilda’s clients who’d been making noises about a podcast of his own, and who was going to need a very smart, very strong-willed producer to help him.

“I’ll get in touch with him tomorrow,” Anna confirmed. “I’ve been reading his books since college. This is a thrill.”

“He’d be unbelievably lucky to get you. And you won’t put up with his mansplaining.”

Anna grinned. “Thanks to Randy Johnson, king of mansplainers, I will not.”

It was not unpleasant, listening to the two of them, but it was also novel. This dinner was the first time since he’d met Matilda, three years earlier, that the sole or at least disproportionately dominant topic of their conversation wasn’t Jacob Finch Bonner. Only when it was time for dessert did Matilda appear to remember he was there, and she marked this recognition by asking when revisions on the new novel would be done.

“Soon,” said Jake, immediately wishing they could go back to talking about Seattle.

“He’s working his tail off,” Anna said. “I can tell, every day when I get home. He’s so stressed out.”

“Well, given everything, I’m not surprised,” said Matilda.

Anna turned to him with a quizzical expression.