The waitress marched back up to the table. “Excusez-moi, what would you like to eat—?”

“We’re not ready to order yet, so sorry!” Amara said. The waitress glared and huffed away. “And sure,” Amara continued, leaning forward, “I go to playgroup and drink wine, and sometimes it’s quite nice, but sometimes I’m freaking out that the other perfect, beautiful moms are judging Charlie for being difficult and judging me for not controlling him well enough or for not being rich enough to buy thousand-dollar succulents for all my windowsills, and sometimes I’d love nothing more than to skip it, but if I do, then Charlie won’t get the socialization he needs, and he’ll never understand how to form healthy friendships or some bullshit like that. And on top of that, I feel like I can’t complain or can’t be unhappy, because I’m so fucking privileged to get to do all this. And my brain feels like it’s withering inside my skull.” She paused. “And sometimes I just want to crawl into an old bog and die.”

She and Daniel stared at each other in silence for a moment. Then he let out a long, low breath. “Wow,” he said. “I . . . Okay. I was not aware of how strongly you felt.”

“I wish we could do a Freaky Friday. You’d see it’s not a walk in the park. Even though often it does literally involve walking in the park.” She bit her lip as her eyes began to tear up. “And I’d probably have a better appreciation for how hard you’re working to sustain our situation. Because I know you are working very hard.”

Daniel reached across the table and grabbed onto her hand. “So neither one of us is particularly happy right now,” he said. “What can we do to fix that?”

“Well, I was looking forward to tonight, for starters,” Amara said. “But I think I ruined it now.”

“You didn’t ruin anything,” Daniel said. “We can start over and make it romantic.”

“Oh, yeah? How?”

“I can run out and buy you a dozen roses.”

Amara cleared her throat. “I could give you a hand job under the table.”

Daniel’s dark brown eyes lit up, and she laughed. “Oh,” he said. “Was that not a serious offer? Because it’s mean to play with my heart that way!”

Amara looked around the room and lowered her voice. “I think everyone in this restaurant hates us now. The tables are too close together, and that couple over there was definitely listening in on our conversation.”

Daniel raised his hand in the air and signaled the waitress, who rolled her eyes and came back, a long, drawn-out Fiiiiinally clearly reverberating in her mind. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “But could we get the check?”

They drained the bottle of wine and, hand in hand, ran to a dingy diner a few blocks away, one of the last remaining dingy diners in the neighborhood and maybe all of Manhattan. They ordered greasy hamburgers and Greek salads with big blocks of feta cheese, watery lettuce, and slightly too ripe tomatoes. They’d never been good at fancy date nights anyway, Amara thought, as the burger juice ran down Daniel’s chin. They’d never even really had a first date.

* * *

—

Amara met Daniel at business school. It had been a momentary life-path mistake that she’d made with heavy encouragement from her parents, and she’d realized within her first month that she was not interested. People partied like they were back in college, except with an even greater urgency, because they’d experienced the real world and knew what it was like. More than classes or grades, the important thing at business school was the schmoozing. The university gave its students endless opportunities to get drunk on free alcohol with the underlying understanding that you were supposed to Always! Be! Networking! So even if the person you were talking to was so drunk that he couldn’t touch his finger to his nose, he was still sizing you up: Was your uncle’s friend’s sister in charge of hiring at McKinsey? Did you have a trust fund and a desire to invest in an exciting new venture that would revolutionize the way people sent out their laundry? Amara was happy to use people, sure, but she wanted some pure things in her life.

One night, at a particularly raucous event, she sat at the bar, nursing a gin and tonic and planning her escape while a bunch of her classmates stained their button-downs with beer, roaring with laughter. These boys and occasional girls were paragons of good breeding, their pale foreheads glistening with sweat.

“So,” the guy sitting a couple of stools away asked, “which one of them do you think will be our generation’s Bernie Madoff?”

She turned, surprised. Daniel was one of the quieter, more bookwormy ones in the class who often seemed overwhelmed by the boisterous men around him and who, like Amara, tended to leave these sorts of things early. He’d never spoken to her directly before.

“Hmm,” she’d said, cocking her head to the side, swishing a sip of gin in her mouth and studying the crowd. Then she pointed at one of the red-faced men, his arm thrown around a buddy, beer belly beginning to strain his shirt. “Eric.”

“Really?” Daniel asked, squinting. “I would’ve gone with James.”

“James is too obviously a shifty ass. To be a successful Madoff, I think you’ve got to have a good facade. Eric, final answer.”

Daniel nodded, serious. “Okay. I can see it. I guess we’ll have to check back in with each other in forty years to see if you’re right.”

“Deal,” Amara said, and smiled, signaling the bartender for another drink.

They talked for another two hours that night as, one by one, their other classmates straggled out. He was from Massachusetts, where he’d been one of only two black kids in his grade. He had a bit of a socialist streak and wanted to change the business world from the inside. His father was a local judge, and when Daniel and his two brothers were small, they’d all sit around the dinner table on Sunday nights and air their grievances for the week (for example, Daniel’s older brother had punched him but only because Daniel was being annoying) while their father very thoughtfully and seriously adjudicated the disputes. She had never heard anything more charming in her life.

At a certain point, she put down her drink, stood up, and said, “All right, then, let’s go.”

“What?” he asked.

“Well, do you want to fuck me or what?”

They’d carried on for a week before she decided to drop out of business school and move to New York to see if she could get a job, any job, at one of the late-night shows that had been keeping her sane recently. She wasn’t going to stay someplace she hated just because of a fling, even if Daniel was extremely kind and funny and pretty damn good in bed to boot.

And she didn’t believe in anything as sentimental as fate, but four years later, she ran into him in a coffee shop in the West Village. They were both casually dating other people, but they picked right back up where they’d left off.