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.
“Second novels,” he said shortly. “I mean, fourth novels, technically, but since no one ever heard of me before Crib, it’s sort of my second act. It’s terrifying.”
“No, no,” Matilda said, wordlessly accepting her coffee from the waiter. “Don’t think about that. If I could only get my clients to stop worrying about their careers they’d write twice as many books and be a lot happier in general. You wouldn’t believe how much therapy there is in these relationships,” she said, directing this to Anna as if Jake—the subject of the theoretical therapy—were not right there at the table with them. “I’m not licensed! I took Intro Psych at Princeton, and I kid you not, that was the extent of my training. But the fragile egos I’m apparently responsible for! I mean, not your husband, but some of them … if they send me something to read and I don’t get back to them for a few days because it’s five hundred pages long or it’s the weekend or I happen to have other clients who are in the middle of auctions or winning the National Book Award or leaving their spouses and running off with their research assistants, God forbid! They’re on the phone to me with a knife at the wrist. Of course,” she said, perhaps hearing herself, “I adore my clients. Every one of them, even the tough ones, but some people make things so hard for themselves. Why?”
Anna nodded sagely. “I know how tough it must have been in the beginning, for Jake. Before you were involved and Crib became such a success. It takes courage to keep going. I’m so proud of him.”
“Thanks, honey,” said Jake. He felt as if he was interrupting them.
“I’m proud of him too. Especially these last months.”
Again, Anna turned to him with a confused look.
“Oh, it’s all fine,” he heard himself say. “It’ll pass.”
“I told you so,” Matilda said.
“I’ll get the book done. And then I’ll write another book.”
“And another!” she declared.
“Because that’s what writers do, right?”
“That’s what you do. And thank god for it!”
He noticed, when they left the restaurant, that she gave Anna an even longer hug than the one she gave him, but he was so relieved that he’d managed to block TalentedTom from invading their dinner that it was impossible to see the evening as anything but a win. His agent, it was obvious, really liked his new wife, and in this she had a lot of company.
In practical terms, Jake’s post-marriage life didn’t change all that much. Anna had opted for a modified modification, officially becoming Anna Williams-Bonner after filling out the required twenty or thirty forms and waiting on various lines at various agencies to acquire a new driver’s license and passport. They merged bank accounts and credit cards and health insurance policies and saw an attorney about their wills. Anna dispatched the last of Jake’s collegiate and post-collegiate furnishings—a reclining chair of faux leather, a framed Phish poster, a shag rug from Bed Bath & Beyond, circa 2002—to their just rewards, and repainted the living room. They went for an abbreviated honeymoon to New Orleans, where they gorged themselves on oysters and listened to jazz (which Anna liked) and blues (which Jake liked) and zydeco (which neither of them liked) at night.
On the night they returned to the city, Anna went to deliver a box of pralines to a neighbor who’d fed the cat while they were gone, and Jake let himself into the apartment, dropping an armload of mail onto the kitchen counter. His eye found it right away: an unremarkable envelope slipping out onto the granite countertop between Anna’s copy of Real Simple and his own Poets & Writers, which, nonetheless, gave him the deepest chill of his life.
Front and center, his address. More accurately, their address.
And in the upper left-hand corner, the name Talented Tom.
He looked at it for a long, terrible moment.
Then he snatched it up and rushed with it into the bathroom, turning on the water in the sink and locking the door behind him. He slit open the envelope and extracted the single sheet of paper inside with shaking hands.
You know what you did. I know what you did. Are you ready for everyone to know what you did? I hope so, because I’m getting ready to tell the world. Have fun with your career after that.
So this, he thought, listening to the din of his own breath over the running water, was what worse felt like. This person had come through the screen into the actual, tactile world, and now Jake was holding in his hands an object TalentedTom, too, had held. There was a new and sharp horror in that, as if the paper itself held all of the malevolence, all of the outrage Jake did not deserve. The cumulative weight of it took his breath away and rendered him incapable of movement, and he stayed where he was for so long that Anna came to the bathroom door and asked if he was feeling all right.