Things Could Happened

Nara Lim had a rule: never trust a Tuesday.

Mondays were honest. Everyone knew a Monday was going to be terrible, and it showed up and was terrible, and you respected it for that. But Tuesday pretended to be neutral, and then it jumped out of a bush and ruined your life.

She was thinking about this at 6:47 a.m., standing in the lobby of Halloway & Pierce with a coffee in one hand and a stack of printed slides in the other, when she tripped over absolutely nothing and sent forty-two pages of the Q3 Market Analysis fluttering across the marble floor like very boring doves.

“Morning, Nara,” said Gary from security, not even looking up.

“Morning, Gary,” she said from the floor.

This was the routine. Gary had stopped asking if she was okay somewhere around month three.

She gathered the pages, re-sorted them, and rode the elevator up to the fourteenth floor, where she would spend the next eleven hours doing the work of what the company called an Analyst and what Nara called “three people in a trench coat.”

Here was the situation, in case anyone asked, and nobody ever did: Nara was twenty-seven years old, born and raised in Jakarta, and she had moved to London four years ago with two suitcases, one very ugly umbrella, and a work visa that was tied to her job. Not to herskills. Not to herpotential. To her job. If Halloway & Pierce decided they didn’t want her, she had twenty-eight days to pack her life into those same two suitcases and go home.

And on Friday, Margaret Voss was going to decide.

“The promotion letter,” Margaret had said three weeks ago, in the tone of a woman who had never once been late for anything. “Senior Analyst. It’s between you and Calloway. I’ll make my decision on Friday after the client presentation.”

Calloway had gone to Oxford. Calloway had asailing hobby. Calloway said “synergy” without any visible shame.

Nara had a spreadsheet with forty-one tabs and a dream.

So she worked. She worked through lunch, which was a banana. She worked through the afternoon, which was mostly a headache. She fixed Calloway’s slide deck when nobody was looking, then felt briefly guilty, then decided it wasprofessional courtesy. At 8:15 p.m. she finally saved the presentation, backed it up in three places, and kissed her laptop on the lid like a mother sending a child to war.

Her phone buzzed. It was Priya.

Priya: you alive

Nara: barely. Friday is going to kill me

Priya: friday will be fine. u have been working on this for like 3 yrs

Nara: three weeks

Priya: it FEELS like 3 yrs. go home. go see ur man. have a normal night

Her man. Toby.

Toby had been her boyfriend for fourteen months. He was a graphic designer with soft brown hair and a nice laugh, and he was the kind of person who remembered the name of your childhood cat. Lately he had been distant, and Nara had decided that was becauseshehad been distant, because she’d been working so much, and wasn’t that the grown-up thing to do? Blame yourself first, apologize second, investigate never.

But tonight she had a plan. She had bought a little cake from the bakery near the station, a lemon one, his favorite. She had even put on lipstick, which at 9 p.m. after a fourteen-hour day was like putting a hat on a scarecrow, but still. An effort was an effort.

She let herself into his flat with the spare key.

The lights were low. There was music playing, something with a saxophone. There were two wine glasses on the coffee table, and Nara thought, with a warm little rush:he’s planned something for me.

She took one step toward the bedroom door, which was open about four inches.

She stopped.

Here’s the thing about life-changing moments. They don’t come with dramatic music. They come with the sound of a stranger laughing.

It was a woman’s laugh. High and breathless. And then Toby’s voice, saying something low that Nara couldn’t catch, and then a silence that was very, very specific.

She pushed the door open with the lemon cake.

They were on the bed. Not doingeverything, thank God, but doing enough. The woman, blonde, with a tattoo of a tiny swallow on her shoulder, shrieked and grabbed the duvet. Toby sat up so fast that he hit his head on the headboard, which Nara would later admit gave her a small, ugly, deeply satisfying flash of joy.

“Nara,” said Toby. “It’s not—”

“If you saywhat it looks like,I will throw this cake.”

“It’s not what it looks like.”

She threw the cake.

It was a good throw, honestly. Her aim had never been great, and that was the one time in her life it had been perfect. The lemon cake hit him square in the chest and slid down slowly, leaving a yellow trail, and the blonde woman made a sound like a kettle.

“Are youserious?” Toby said, wiping frosting off his stomach. “Do you know how much this duvet cost?”

Nara stared at him. She had imagined a lot of things in this moment, in the dark and silly corners of her brain where all of us imagine our worst nights. She had imagined him begging. Crying. SayingI’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I never meant for it to happen.

She had not imagined the duvet.

“Fourteen months,” she said. Her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to. “Fourteen months, Toby.”

“Look, you’re neveraround," he said, and now he sounded annoyed, as ifshehad walked in onhimby accident. “You’re always at work. You’re always tired. It’s like dating a ghost.”

“I’m trying to keep my visa!”

“That is not my problem.”

It was such a small sentence. Five words. But it landed somewhere deep, a place she hadn’t known was soft until someone stepped on it.

“Okay, you know what? Just go,” Toby said. He waved a hand, tired, bored, as if she were a waiter who had stayed too long at the table. “Seriously. Go. This is embarrassing for everyone.”

So she went.

She didn’t remember the stairs. She didn’t remember the front door. She remembered the cold air hitting her wet face on the pavement, and a bus passing with an ad on the side for a perfume with a half-naked man on it, and the very strange thought:My lipstick is still perfect.

She walked. She had no idea where. Her feet picked a direction and she let them.

Eventually she found herself outside a small bar with a green neon sign that saidTHE LAST RESORT, which felt like an insult, and she went in anyway.

“What can I get you, love?” said the bartender, a large man with a very gentle face.

Nara looked at the menu. She looked at the ceiling. She looked at her own reflection in the mirror behind the bottles: black hair coming loose from its bun, black eyes already swollen, and one smear of lemon frosting on her sleeve.

“Whatever you’d give someone,” she said, “who just got dumpedandfired from a relationship in the same minute.”

The bartender nodded slowly, with great respect.

“Right,” he said. “Vodka it is.”

By the fourth drink, she had told him the whole story. By the sixth, she had told it again, with sound effects. By the eighth, she had stopped being sad, which she thought was a good sign, and started beingangry,which was a much better look on her.

“AndFriday," she announced, to the bar in general, “is going to be perfect. I’m going to get that letter. I’m going to nail that presentation. And Toby can lie in hislemon bedforever.”

“Hear, hear,” said an old man in the corner, raising his pint.

“Thank you, sir.”

She paid, left a very generous tip she would regret later, and walked out into the night, where the streets had gone soft and wobbly at the edges, and the lamps were doing a little dance for her.

The park was across the road. She didn’t remember deciding to go there.

Larkfield Park was quiet at that hour, all dark trees and silver-blue paths. There was a pond in the middle with a single sleepy duck, and a bench beside it, and the bench looked so incrediblyinviting.

She sat. She stared at the duck. The duck stared back, unimpressed.

“I’m a good person,” she told it.

The duck said nothing.

“I’m very hardworking,” she said.

The duck turned its back to her.

“Fine,” said Nara, and lay down on the bench, and the sky spun slowly overhead, and the last thing she thought before her eyes closed was: My makeup is definitely ruined now.

She was right.

She had no idea that on the other side of the park, a very famous man was stumbling toward the same pond.