The money helped. She signed a lease on an apartment in Harlem with two friends and once there, spent the summer applying for internships and entry-level jobs. She bought some cute interview clothes, shoes made of supple leather that molded to her feet. She procured a summer internship with a literary agent, an elderly woman who rolled her own cigarettes, ate sardines, and hated all of her clients, and then in the fall, landed an entry-level assistant publicist job at one of the most esteemed publishing houses in the country. The assistants from the various departments went once a week to happy-hour tapas at a bar in Union Square and Elisa would spend too much money on sangria and whatever slider or oyster everyone else ordered. And at night, she would sit on her bed, on the sheets she bought at a discount store, tiny lightning bolts across them, and she would feel overwhelmed with it, that she had so easily, so simply gotten the life that she wanted.

He knew nothing, Ben, but he couldn't help it. He had known no heartache, had excelled in school, gone straight to medical school. He knew work and reward, work and reward, nothing complicated, nothing tragic. A piece of her floated away from him that night, or had been floating for a while, but she said yes, as she always knew she would, if he asked.

[...] They were young, still in their early twenties. They had decades to figure it out. She wanted to edit books. To have an office with floor to ceiling bookcases, a vase of fresh flowers near a wall of thank-you notes from famous authors. She wanted conversations at restaurants that made her blood course faster, that gave her brain the spins. She wanted to be at the edge of things, to feel the feeling a book gave to you when it did something new and lively, when it bent the conversation away from itself, away from its expected course, and made new air. Was it a kind of mother-instinct to want this? Maybe, and maybe it would be enough for her. This future pulled at her. She wanted to use her mind. Her mind was a restless things. It had a clock of its own. [...]