When We're Thirty, Casey Dembowski [best reads of all time txt] 📗

but she would settle on one for now. “Why do you need to get married?”

“Always so on point,” he said, tapping his nose twice. He sat down again and took a sip of his coffee.

“I mean, that’s why you want to initiate the pact, right? There’s a reason you need to be married,” Hannah said lightly. She knew she was being pointed, but he was wasting time if his reasons were less than noble.

“It’s not anything...” His eyes scanned the kitchen before landing on her. “Can we do this anywhere but here?”

It was an odd request, but then again, sitting at a table figuring out the details of a sudden marriage was an odd thing to do on a Sunday morning. They had always done their best talking while walking. “Where do you want to go?”

THIRTY MINUTES AND a subway ride later, they were almost to the High Line. When Hannah needed quiet on loud days in the office—and there were many loud days—she sometimes came here or to Madison Square Park. She’d sit and people watch, imagining the lives of whoever caught her eye, practicing her profiling skills as if she were writing a feature story that started with that very meeting. Sitting on a New York City park bench, the man illegally feeds a pigeon... It was weird being here with Will—or with anyone. The only person she’d ever walked the High Line with was Stephanie, on the morning before her wedding as her sister had a panic attack about becoming a wife and stepmother at twenty-four. In a city where it was impossible to ever be alone, it was important to find havens.

“Four, almost five months ago now, I found out my girlfriend was cheating on me,” Will said between beats and without inflection. Hannah paused where she stood, expecting him to say more, but he kept walking, his stride never breaking. “My dad, he likes to throw this big kickoff-to-summer party at our place in the Hamptons. It happened there in a very public manner. Life got messy after that.”

Empathetic phrases bounced around Hannah’s head, but none seemed quite right, and she knew from experience that those well-meaning words did little. They usually made it worse. Hearing that his emotional anguish was commonplace wouldn’t help alleviate Will’s pain. “What happened?”

“I tried to go back to work to keep up appearances, but after something like that, I just wasn’t there, you know?” he said as they sidestepped a couple and their two dogs. “I work as in-house counsel for my family’s real estate development company. There’s a lot of red tape at the start of a project. We hire consultants to do impact and site assessments and basically to tell us if the land is going to be a pain in the ass. During due diligence, I missed something. I missed it.”

Hannah could tell that the mistake still haunted him and maybe always would, but it would also make him better at his job. Will didn’t make the same mistake twice. She remembered the night during junior year he told her that straight off a broken heart.

“We lost in court,” he continued. “We didn’t get the permits. It cost the company a lot of money and delayed the project indefinitely.”

They walked in silence for a few minutes, stopping to take in the latest art and enjoy the view of the city whenever they caught a break in the crowd. It was nice walking the High Line with Will; he understood its pull. There was no chatter like there would have been with anyone else. Comfortable silence had always been one of the great things about their friendship. They could sprawl out on the floor of her dorm, heads touching, sharing a pair of earbuds. Hannah would be studying, with Will reading when he should’ve been studying. All of it, nearly every moment, had been set to Wilderness Weekend. They took a seat on a nearby bench with a view of the river.

“Things have been really bad at work since then, obviously. My dad wanted me fired,” he said, worrying at that thumbnail again.

Hannah couldn’t imagine ever working for either of her parents but tried to picture an instance where they pressed to have her fired. It sounded like Will had failed epically at his job, though given the circumstances and that he worked for his own family, maybe that was exactly why his dad wanted him fired. He still had to be accountable. Nepotism only went so far. Hannah didn’t know enough of Will’s family to say.

“My uncle—he’s the CEO—convinced my dad and the board to give me another chance. But I need to prove to them that I have my act together, that I’m serious about my job. The thing is, I’ve been showing up in a full suit and working twelve-hour days. Nothing is working. I have practically memorized the last three reports that came in—I’m like Mike friggin’ Ross right now, minus the whole fraud thing.”

While Hannah was always one for a good pop culture reference, Will had done a very good job of circumventing the point. A relationship gone wrong leading to a giant mistake at work didn’t add up to marriage. If anything, Hannah thought, that would make him seem impetuous, which wasn’t a word usually associated with lawyer.

“I need them to take me seriously,” he continued.

“But I don’t see how—”

He held up a hand to stop her train of thought. “I know doing something crazy to make them see me as serious seems counterproductive, but at this company, only age or marriage gets you a seat at the table. At thirty, I was supposed to get a spot on the board. My dad did, my uncle did, and so did my older brother. They haven’t invited me to a meeting yet.”

Will turned had thirty in April, apparently just before everything in his life had broken down. Hannah’s mind churned, going over his words again and again. For the first