the other hand, her twenty-eight-year-old body was awash in hormones raining from an invisible emptiness inside her, just begging to procreate.
She wondered what Orlando would say if she brought it up. He’d probably bolt for the nearest exit. They were still too new, key or no key. He had told her long ago that he wanted to postpone having kids. There would be plenty of time for that unspecified “someday.”
As far as she was concerned, nothing could dampen her spirits today. She had the ultimate good news to share, and she was about to share it with the two people who would totally get how cool it was.
She’d been racing around madly all day, trying to get ready for this new chapter in her life. A Hartstone Fellowship. She, Sonnet Romano, from the tiny town of Avalon on Willow Lake, had been chosen for the honor. People who won the Hartstone Fellowship tended to change the world. She’d always been eager to measure up to her father’s expectations. Personal accomplishments were so important to her father. She could understand that. They validated you, told the world you did things that mattered.
As usual, she was in a hurry. It was her normal mode. She had hurried through school, graduating with a 4.0 GPA and zooming ahead to her dream school, American University. From there she’d pursued a double major in French and international studies, then raced ahead to grad school. Sometimes she asked herself what the hurry was, but mostly, she didn’t slow down long enough to wonder.
And it was working well for her. The letter in her satchel was proof of that, for sure.
As she hurried down the stairs to catch the train—she was on the verge of being late, an unforgivable offense in her father’s book—her phone chimed, signaling an incoming text message, sneaking in just before she lost the signal underground. At the same time, she heard the train rattling into the station. She rushed to slip her pass through the turnstile and proceed into the fecund heat of the underground station.
The train’s moon-yellow headlights were filmed with the ever-present dirt of the subway, and its brakes gave a tired-sounding squeal. The doors clanked apart, disgorging streams of passengers. Just as quickly, people on the platform boarded. She paused and bent down to help a woman with a stroller over the gap between the platform and the train car.
At the same time, she thought about the text message that had come in. She didn’t know what made her grab for her phone just in that moment; she got text messages all the time. Habit, probably. Or it could be Daisy’s cryptic comment about checking in with her mom.
As Sonnet stepped across the gap and took out her phone. someone jostled her from behind. Both the phone and the key dropped from her hand. She saw a coppery flash as the key disappeared onto the tracks, and her heart sank along with it. The phone screen stayed lit momentarily. Before it slipped from her hand, she saw the name of the sender of the incoming message: Zach Alger.
A crush of passengers pressed in from behind. The doors clanked shut, and the train lurched away.
Sonnet grabbed a safety pole and clenched her jaw. Her stomach turned to a ball of ice. You made me drop the key, she silently seethed. Prepare to die.
His name on the screen reminded her that she should have taken him off her contact list months ago. Unfortunately, that didn’t mean she could erase him from her mind. She used to look forward with pleasure to his text messages, but now the thought of him made her shudder.
Given where she was now, her relationship with Orlando moving ahead, Zach could ruin everything. Having sex with him the night of Daisy’s wedding had been the ultimate boneheaded move on both their parts, and she bloody well knew it. As soon as she’d floated back down to earth, as soon as the pink cloud of champagne and wedding bliss wore off, she had felt a terrible twist of foreboding in the pit of her stomach. In one foolish act, they had changed their friendship irrevocably, and not for the better. Her father had just introduced her to Mr. Wonderful; she needed to focus on Orlando, not get drunk with Zach Alger.
She hadn’t spoken to him since. He’d called a bunch at first, sent text messages, and she finally texted him back and said, Don’t call me. Don’t text me. Can we just leave it at that?
His calls had stopped, and she told herself she was relieved. There was nothing to say. What were they going to say? Sorry I screwed up a beautiful friendship? Have a nice life?
Willfully she pulled her mind away from the lost phone and focused on the more immediate problem. The missing key. Now, there was a boneheaded move for you. When your boyfriend finally gives you a key to his amazing midtown east apartment, losing it immediately is a bad move. Sure, it was an accident, but the symbolism was hard to ignore.
On top of that, she was going to be late. Both her father and Orlando were sticklers for promptness, yet somehow she’d fallen behind. And now she didn’t even have a way to send Orlando a text.
Her stomach clenching, she found a vacant seat and sat down. Across from her sat a teenage girl and her mother. Sonnet studied their reflection in the window glass of the subway car. The two of them looked alike, except for the way the mother’s Nordic coloring and blond hair contrasted sharply with the girl’s nappy hair and café-au-lait skin. She wore her mixed heritage like an ill-fitting garment. Sonnet related to that kind of discomfort because once, not so long ago, she’d been that girl—biracial and wondering just where she belonged.
The girl had her iPhone turned up too loud, and through the earbuds, Sonnet recognized the thud and angry tones of Jezebel, the latest hip-hop sensation. The chart-topping song was called “Don’t Make a Ho into a Housewife” or some such nonsense. Though she was no fan of the genre, Sonnet was aware of Jezebel from the scandal blogs and magazines. She was the latest of many to be doing time for something or other.
The girl listening to the music looked angry, too. Maybe she was having a bad day. Maybe she was ticked off at her mom. Maybe she was wondering why her dad only got in touch with her on Christmas and on her birthday, and half the time he forgot the birthday. Maybe she was trying to figure out what she was supposed to do in order to get his attention.
In the window glass, her gaze met the girl’s. Both glanced quickly away, perhaps recognizing in each other a kindred spirit.
You’ll be fine, Sonnet wanted to reassure the girl. Just like I’m fine. Fine.
As she approached her stop on the subway, Sonnet tried to come up with something plausible to tell Orlando about the key. Saying she’d dropped it on the subway sounded so…so careless. And she did care. Having access to his apartment, his private space, was a huge step for them as a couple. It meant something, something big.
The very thought of it made her heart skip a beat. To Sonnet, this was not a pleasant sensation.
* * *
Zach Alger stared down at the screen of his iPhone. He shouldn’t have sent that text to Sonnet. He really, really shouldn’t have sent it. What was he thinking? He wasn’t thinking.
Maybe being in church affected his judgment. Although he wasn’t in church, attending services. He was doing wedding prep work at Heart of the Mountains Church, getting ready for a big video job here. So at the moment, it didn’t count.
He wrote down a couple of measurements—they were cramming too many people into the sanctuary, but he’d deal—and then paused to check his phone. Good, no reply. He scrolled to email, and his queue was full of work stuff. Endless work stuff, sandwiched between a few notes from women. Yeah, he was “dating.” In a town like this, with a population that couldn’t fill a high school stadium, that simply meant he was keeping his options open. On the menu today—he could go to the climbing gym with Lannie, and there were worse things than staring at her cute butt while holding the belaying rope. Or, he could go to Viv’s for dinner. She was a sous-chef at the Apple Tree Inn, and she had trained at the Cordon Bleu. Third option—an open invitation from Shakti, who practiced a form of yoga she liked to call Yoga Sutra.
His buddies on his mountain biking team envied him the attention from women. And hell yeah, he loved women. He loved their soft hair and their curvy bodies, the flowery scent of them and the lilt