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  Another feeling set in then—one of regret. Amanda shouldn’t have had to do it all on her own. She should have had someone there to be her partner and raise the child with her. That’s why Brian was so angry at the asshole who knocked up his sister and left her alone. Law school was hard enough when you only had yourself to look after. I couldn’t imagine how hard it must have been for her trying to raise a kid and study for the bar exam at the same time. What Amanda had done in the time that we’d been apart was nothing short of amazing.

  But all of these thoughts were tainted with more than a little bit of anger. How could she have kept something this huge from me for this long? If I had a child in the world, didn’t I have a right to know about it? And why wouldn’t she tell me about it? When we parted ways, we had both agreed that it was for the best—both because we didn’t know how Brian might react to the idea of the two of us dating, and because she was returning to Chicago, and we’d be hundreds of miles apart anyway. But we were never angry. We never fought or yelled or had any animosity for one another. So why would she keep something like this from someone who she knew cared about her? Unless she didn’t. Unless I had somehow failed to let her know how special she was to me.

  Unless the child wasn’t mine at all.

  It was possible, I realized, that my entire evening of fretting over the possibility that I was responsible for putting a life on this earth and then effectively abandoning it was completely unfounded. It was possible that Amanda had met someone else when she went back to Chicago at the end of that summer. I judged Brian for always thinking that the whole world revolved around him, and that he was the center of everyone’s universe, but hadn’t I been doing the same most of the day? There were plenty of men on the planet. What were the chances that I was the one who had gotten Amanda pregnant? One in three billion? No. Amanda was probably the kind of girl who could count the number of men she’d slept with in her life on one hand. As much as it might be convenient to deny it, my chances were probably something more like one in three.

  One thing was certain, I needed to talk to Amanda. And I needed to do it when Brian wasn’t around, because any answers I could come up with on my own would be pure speculation, and I knew as well as anyone that speculation wouldn’t do either of us any good. It was going to be a long week, but I was simply going to have to wait until I saw her on Saturday.

  Eight

  Amanda

  The first week at any new job sucks. The first week at the law firm where your older brother is a managing partner, however, is a whole new kind of awful.

  He had me working on the third floor, where most of the associates were focused on tax law—which, in the legal world, is probably the most boring kind of work there is. There is no litigation, only paperwork; paperwork that contained lots of stupid numbers that were tedious to add. This was definitely not why I went to law school.

  But, it also wasn’t what made my first week so awful.

  While there might be a few perks to having a brother at the top of the career ladder, it seemed like there were far more downsides. For one, it quickly became immensely clear that all of the other lawyers I was working with despised me. They would never say so out loud, but their exclusionary attitudes and backbiting comments made their opinions of me perfectly clear.

  To be fair, I was almost certain that it had nothing to do with me personally. Brian was kind of an asshole to everyone, and it didn’t help matters that I had been hired out of nowhere to fill a position that probably wasn’t even necessary. I wasn’t worried; I’d win them over. I just wasn’t sure how long it would take.

  Still, by the time Friday rolled around, I’d definitely had my fill. I was determined to work harder and stay later than everyone else in my department to prove myself, but it turned out not to be that hard. The dozen or so associates who worked in tax law all promptly left at 6 o’clock every day. So, I stayed until 6:30 and called it a night, grateful for the after-school program at Aaron’s school, but unsurprised when he was one of only two kids left there when I was finally able to show up.

  “How was your day?” I asked him.

  “It was okay.”

  “Did you make any new friends?”

  “No,” Aaron answered, giving me a look that let me know I was stupid for even asking.

  “Me neither,” I said.

  I told myself it had only been a week, but as I watched Aaron read his book on the bus ride back to our little apartment, there was a part of me that worried that I had made a huge mistake uprooting him from his whole life, and all of his friends, in Chicago to move to a huge city where he didn’t know anyone. I didn’t want to admit it, but it was possible that my mother had been right.

  She didn’t want me to go to law school in the first place. Neither did Brian. They both said that it would cost way too much, which it did, and that I would never make the kind of money that I needed to make in order to make it worthwhile. When Brian realized that I was resolved in my decision to follow in his footsteps and study law, he stopped talking to me entirely. In our last conversation before I called asking for a job, he had even gone so far as to call me a bad mother. He said that the law would suck up all of my time and leave none of it for Aaron. I hadn’t been able to argue with him. All I knew was that I wanted what he had. I wanted to give my child every opportunity in the world. Now that he was a parent too, certainly he could respect that. I think that’s why he finally came around—at least enough to hook me up with a decent job. He knew I’d be a better mom for Aaron if I were employed, than if I were unemployed.

  Even so, he had demanded to know who Aaron’s father was. He wanted us to “go after the bastard for child support” and possibly even “hunt him down to show him what a real man is.” The rhetoric had terrified me enough to make me lie and tell him it could be several guys, some of whom I could not remember. The fact is, I’d rather my brother think I was promiscuous than have him kill his best friend over me.

  I was only 18 when I met Matt, and maybe I was stupid to believe that I was special to him, I don’t know. All I knew was that the summer I interned at the law firm was the best summer of my life. Brian was almost thirty, and my brother’s best friend, but none of that mattered to me. When he looked at me, I felt alive.

  Brian had been in some kind of meeting when I arrived in the city, and had sent Matt to pick me up from the airport. He was standing there in a tailored black suit, looking young and awkward, holding up a little sheet of paper that he had scrawled my last name on in his notoriously messy handwriting.

  I had heard my brother talk about Matt before, but I had never seen him. They went to college together back in Chicago, but when my parents and I went there for Brian’s graduation, he had been out of the country. So, when I saw him at the airport, I didn’t realize who he was. I simply assumed he was Brian’s assistant or another intern or something.

  Because here’s the thing… I had met thirty-year-old men before, and Matt did not look like any thirty-year-old man I had ever met. First of all, he was in shape. Exceptionally so. With broad shoulders and a tapered waist that made his suit fit him just right in all the right places. And second of all, he didn’t have that world-weary, beaten-down look that so many men his age possessed. He looked young and alive, and upon first glance, I put his age at maybe twenty-four, tops.

  “Your sign has my name written all over it,” I said coquettishly. I was already flirting, and we hadn’t even taken two steps toward baggage claim yet.

  He smiled. “You’re Amanda?”

  “Last time I checked,” I smiled. Then I added, “Let me guess, my brother was too busy to pick me up himself?”

  “It’s a good thing I’m here to save the day,” he smirked.

  Somehow, he immediately made me feel at ease. It also didn’t hurt that the car he picked me up in was gorgeous. It was June, and he was driving his white Audi A3 with the top down. For a recent Midwestern high school graduate, the whole thing made me feel chic and grown up
. So, when he suggested we stop at his favorite sushi restaurant before heading straight to the firm, there was no way I could turn down the offer.

  In my mind, I knew that I wasn’t on a date, but I had been on enough dates with nervous boys to know what a date felt like, and my first afternoon with Matt Dawson definitely felt like a date. We talked about everything under the sun—the law, my parents, his parents, the city—and before I even realized who he was, I was his. By the time we got to the office to see Brian, my body was aching for Matt in ways that I didn’t even quite understand yet. While I had gone on plenty of dates—mostly to rock concerts with boys who had enough tattoos and piercings to freak out my father—I hadn’t actually experienced the kind of attraction that would have led to sex before. I was eager to change that. Maybe I was too eager, even? I was already so into him that I didn’t care that he was more than a decade older than me, and I definitely didn’t give a damn that he was Brian’s best friend.

  Which is why when Matt called me later that night, long after Brian and his wife Megan had gone to sleep and I lay restless on their couch fantasizing about him, I was all too happy to talk to him for the next few hours in a hushed voice.

  It was more than physical attraction. Every inch of me was attracted to him, but he also listened to me and talked to me in a way that no one ever had before. Looking back, if one of us was acting inappropriately, it was probably Matt. I was mature for my age, but I was still so young and unaware of the way that the world worked. I had never done much with men in the sexual department, and I certainly hadn’t slept with anyone yet. But if he was just looking to get laid, I had determined that he was working pretty hard at it. For a guy like him—too sexy for words, with a good job, a fast car and sexy tattoos—it would have been easy to find women who would readily do whatever he wanted.

  We had both just come hard, our cries pouring out into the night from the safety of the bed in his tiny apartment, and he was still inside of me while we basked in the afterglow. As our heavy breathing subsided and I was drifting off to sleep, he said to me, “You’re incredible. Do you know that? I wish I could spend forever with you.”

  My heart plummeted at the words, but I didn’t let it show on my face. I really liked him, but did he like me for more than simply sex? “I have to go home next week,” I responded.

  “I know,” he conceded, “just let me pretend for a while.”

  And I did, because I felt exactly the same way. The last thing I wanted was to leave him, as I had never felt a connection to someone as strong as I felt with him. He may have been the first man I had sex with, but it was so much more than that.

  It wasn’t until a couple of months into my first semester at Northwestern that I realized I was pregnant. Shock overtook me, and I didn’t go to any of my classes for a week. I hadn’t been with anyone but Matt. I hadn’t even dated anyone since coming back home. But there it was. Somehow, I made it through that semester, and the spring semester, and then right after finals, Aaron was born.

  Now I was going to have to explain why I never told Matt about it. Only, I wasn’t entirely certain myself.

  Nine

  Matt

  Amanda’s apartment was in an old building about a block from the one I lived in when I first moved to the city. It wasn’t a great part of town, but as long as you didn’t have a car that could get broken into, and you had a few strong locks on your door, it was probably okay. Still, when I arrived there to pick her up for our night out, I couldn’t help but think that it wasn’t the greatest place for her and her son to live. I wondered what their plan was for the long term, but I was afraid to ask for fear that I might offend her and incur her wrath. Amanda was small, but mighty.

  I parked my Audi on the curb near the end of the block and put the top up in a vain attempt to make it look less sexy and tempting to would-be car thieves. It was no use. The car was helplessly hot. I traded in an older Audi for it just three years ago, and it was a significant upgrade, with a complete blackout paint job and leather interiors. If I were a car thief, the Audi was precisely the kind of car I’d steal.

  Amanda lived a few floors above a Chinese restaurant. I’d been there before. They served a decent Mongolian beef dish, but it wasn’t so good that I wanted to smell it every day like those who lived in the building had to endure. The smell was everywhere, filling the air like some kind of awful third world air freshener, and permeating the wallpaper and the carpets until it was so constant you might forget it was there. There was a part of me that had become quite a snob since rising to the rank of managing partner at the firm, and that part of me held my breath as I ascended the stairs, and prayed that the smell didn’t cling to my clothing. I was sure that I would walk through fire to have Amanda in my life again, but the stench of week-old moo goo gai pan was an entirely different story altogether.

  Even through the on-street parking and the smell, I was a little surprised at how nervous I was at the prospect of seeing Amanda. The four flights of stairs to her door were made longer and more challenging by the fact that I still had no idea what I might say once I was face to face with her. I had been effectively avoiding the third floor of the office since our lunch on Monday, and managed to stay busy enough that I may not have noticed even if we did accidentally bump into each other. We finalized our plans for the night in short, clipped, tense sentences over text message, so I imagined that she may be feeling every bit as uncomfortable as I was. But tonight, it seemed as if the question of her child would hang over our heads like a grey cloud until one of us brought it up. It was both the first and last thing I wanted to talk about with Amanda. I wished we could have had the conversation nine years ago, of course, but that was no longer an option. She had effectively made that choice for the both of us, and I was simply forced to live with whatever she decided.

  I knocked on the door to her apartment; it was a heavy wooden door with several big steel locks along the edge that did a little to reassure me of the safety of the neighborhood, and I was pleased to see that no one was going to be breaking in any time soon—not without an arsenal of power tools at their disposal. I told myself that my instinctive urge to protect Amanda was merely a typical friendly response to the situation that I saw her in, but if I was completely honest with myself, I knew that it was much more than that. I waited, listening as light footsteps moved slowly across a hardwood floor, and then one after another, each of the six locks on the apartment door clicked and released.

  When the door finally opened to reveal Amanda, standing there, backlit by a large window behind her and looking an angel, I was in awe. She looked… incredible. Gone was the conservative skirt suit that I had seen her wear just days earlier. In its place, she wore a black dress with a loose, low-slung neckline that plunged nearly to her abdomen, but she still managed to maintain the class and sophistication that I would expect from her by leaving plenty to the imagination. Her heels made her nearly reach my eye level too, though to kiss her, I’d still have to bend a bit—

  I stopped myself the moment such thoughts entered my brain, and reminded myself, for something like the fiftieth time that day, that this was not a date.

  It looked like a date.

  It felt like a date.

  I wanted it to be a date.

  But it was not.

  For all of the same reasons we had both known we couldn’t be together all those years ago—and some reasons that had newly emerged since then, this could not be a date. Therefore, I scraped my jaw off the floor, and resisted the urge to ogle Amanda’s incredible body. My mission was to show my best friend’s sister a good time; it was not to seduce the woman that had once filled my every waking thought.

  For some reason, my brain did not let my mouth in on this plan.

  “You look absolutely incredible,” I heard myself saying.

  She smiled and thanked me, then looked down to the ground, embarrassed. Did she wish this was a date too? I watched her closely, looking for some clue that might let me know
how she felt, but found none. Part of me felt relieved, while another, bigger part couldn’t help but feel disappointed. The cognitive dissonance associated with holding two such conflicting emotions inside of me at the same time threatened to rip me open from the inside, but I stood resolved to allow Amanda to take the lead.

  “Would you like to come in?” she asked, her big brown eyes staring into mine innocently as she asked the least innocent question that she could have in that moment. Though judging by her expression, it was more of a courtesy than a sexual invitation. But would I? Should I? Absolutely not. Luckily, I had a built-in excuse.

  “I don’t want to be late for our reservation,” I told her, making certain that my voice sounded disappointed, without being overly so. There were so many uncomfortable lines that I was trying not to cross even though I wanted to so badly. I was glad I only had to restrain myself for an evening; any longer would be impossible and exhausting.

  But I wasn’t lying. I had made a reservation at a new restaurant. It was a swanky place in Midtown that had a waiting list a mile long, but the owner was a client of mine, so he bumped me to the top as a favor. I secretly hoped that it would impress Amanda. I wanted her to be impressed with me, as well as with the way life in New York could be. I wanted her to stay this time. Even if I couldn’t actually be with her in the way that I wanted, just knowing that she was in the same city made me feel better about my place in the world. That was probably selfish of me, but I honestly didn’t care.