Part One
Chapter 1
Dorothy “Dot” Clark sat looking out her office window in Rockefeller Center west toward the Hudson River. She rested her elbow on the desk and had her chin in her palm. She twirled a piece of her long blond hair with the manicured index finger of her other hand. The late-October sun was setting in the early evening, and she felt herself fading with the light.
She took a deep breath and sighed. It had been a long day.
The deck for a new pitch glared from her computer screen. Dot worked at a large public relations firm that specialized in tech, and they were going for a new healthcare software account. The potential client wanted a PR company to get them media attention; unfortunately, her presentation was as flat as their brand. She needed to add some pizzazz, or they’d never land the account.
Dot’s eyes drifted to the arrangement of sunflowers and coral roses sent that morning by her boyfriend, Ryan Montgomery. “Just because,” the card read. It was signed “Ryan” and had “xoxo” right below his name. She wondered if that washisdoing or the florist thinking his message was a bit basic.
The entry-level staffers in their cubicles swooned as she carried them from the reception area back to her small office. She’d been given that coveted private space—a room with a door—when she’d been the first to raise her hand to work in the office five days a week. She blushed as she carried the flowers and playfully rolled her eyes at them. They had no idea that her relationship with Ryan was on the rocks.
Then again, neither did he.
She’d met Ryan six months before on a “respectable” dating app. He was half a foot taller than Dot at six feet even and considered a very good-looking guy—the kind you’d take home to Mom for dinner and show off to friends on Instagram. She was toned from running and Pilates. They made a good-looking couple.
He resembled a young, more put together Harry Styles—his brown hair had that tousled look she’d liked since her preteen years. His eyes were as deep a brown as hers were a light blue, and his chin was strong and smooth. He said he couldn’t grow a beard if he tried, which suited her. Facial hair on a guy? Hard pass. If a guy’s profile pic included a mustache, she’d swipe left in a second.
Ryan was athletic, though on the thin side of fit, and had broad shoulders and a flat stomach. He’d played lacrosse at his high school on Long Island, and his team made it to the national prep championship—they’d come in second. “It still hurts,” he’d said on their first date. Back then, hopelessly attracted to him, she’d thought that was sweet.
His economics degree was from Boston College, and he’d landed a finance job in the city right after graduation at the firm where he’d interned. Ryan was smart but not as widely read as Dot. He read only the sports section of theNew York Postin his office’s cafeteria when one of the older guys had left their copy behind. She was more the news and opinion inThe New York Timestype. He preferred video games at night. She loved to read a novel before bed.
His typical outfit was what Dot called the finance broniform—khaki golf pants, a white or light blue button-down, and a navy company-branded vest, no matter the weather. It was a good thing he was tall, or she might not be able to pick him out of the crowd at P.J. Clarke’s on a Thursday night.
They’d matched because she said she was looking for someone who loved New York, liked travel and good conversation, and wanted a long-term relationship. She’d tried to tone down the specifics of her life plan—married by thirty-two, two kids by thirty-six, and a second home for weekends away from the city—because she was afraid the details were scaring off potential matches. To seem more carefree, she’d added photos of herself skiing in Colorado and having drinks with friends at the Frying Pan on the Hudson River.
Immediately after, she matched with Ryan. His profile said that he was great on a road trip (a detail that gave her adventurous but responsible vibes), wanted to get a dog and have at least two children, and was looking for a lifelong commitment. Dot took that as a good sign that he was up for marriage... eventually, of course.
On their first date, Dot thought he was smart and handsome. She’d even described him as “hot” to her girlfriends. By their second date, they asked for proof beyond his dating profile pic. No one trustedthosephotos anyway.
Asking for a selfie seemed too eager, so she’d snuck a photo of him by pretending to read a message while she walked back to their table after visiting the ladies’ room. Her friends and sister gave him a solid score. As a bonus, he wasn’t a total creep like other guys she’d dated.
She really liked that he was self-assured but not cocky. Her dates since graduating college three years before had varied from the totally aimless to the ridiculously arrogant. Ryan seemed just the right mix of humble and confident. She believed he’d be a loyal partner and, jumping ahead as she tended to do, that together they would send their kids to private schools, take fabulous summer and winter vacations, and own a place in Sag Harbor for the weekends in between. She could picture it when she let her mind wander far ahead into the future.
But there was a slight catch. Politically, they weren’t totally aligned. Well, he wasn’t aligned at all. He wasn’t even registered to vote. At least he wasn’t a Republican, she’d reasoned. And while his disinterest in politics was a red flag, she thought she could live with that at first and convince him to vote at some point. For the Democrats, of course.
Overall, after tossing aside a few bad pancakes, she liked that Ryan had a life plan and was strictly sticking to it. Order and decisiveness had always spoken to her.
Or at least they had.
Having everything planned out was Dot’s go-to move since she was a little girl. But now she was realizing that half her plans weren’t panning out and the other half were hemming her in. She fretted that she’d mapped out the wrong life.
And life was coming at her fast.
In some ways, Ryan was very different from his peers. He lived by a regimented schedule, planning out his days, months, and years. One of Ryan’s plans was to be married by the time he was twenty-eight, the age his happily married parents had wed. He’d just turned twenty-seven. His clock was ticking. And to Dot, it had started to sound more like a bomb.
Her intuition was firing, and she’d developed a feeling he was going to propose. And she wasn’t sure she wanted him to pop the question.
Lately, the air was seeping out of the Ryan balloon. Whereas the first few months had been exciting, and she was caught up seeing how it could all work out perfectly, she was now trying to avoid him.
The problem wasn’t so much him, but her. He hadn’t changed—he was still the same guy—andthathad become the problem. She realized he had no interests except making money and playing golf. He didn’t have any curiosity outside of those interests. And while she’d tried for a while to get him talking about things that mattered to her, she had fallen short.
The truth was, she was getting bored by him. And it was starting to show.
At first it was little things like not immediately replying to his texts and not bothering to like his Instagram posts about Scottish golf courses. But it had grown into making excuses not to go for drinks after work and strategically scheduling brunch or walks with her girlfriends so that she’d have something on her calendar that conflicted with his.
She knew Ryan had noticed her distancing but supposed he’d chalked it up to her being overwhelmed at work. And he wasn’t wrong about that. Public relations was always on lists of the top five most stressful jobs in America, and she was under the gun. The business was changing, or maybe even ending—artificial intelligence threatened everyone’s jobs. Plus, clients thought a PR company could just make a product go viral by using some sort of messaging mind trick on a TV show host or influencer. It didn’t work that way, and the pressure was rising on everyone in the industry.