On my very first day at my new job, I saw a photo of my husband sitting on my coworker’s desk. The office was doing what offices do on a Monday morning: keyboards clicking in the background, phones vibrating at irregular intervals, someone’s espresso going cold while they took a call they had not planned to take. TechSphere occupied two full floors of a Madison Avenue building with floor-to-ceiling windows and the kind of deliberate minimalism that costs a great deal to achieve.
My badge was still warm from the printer. I had rehearsed the route from the elevator to my desk the night before, because that is the kind of person I am, the kind who prepares for things, who runs through contingencies quietly and does not show the work. I was standing beside my new colleague’s workspace, trying to appear comfortable in that careful way of a person who does not yet know which chair in the break room belongs to whom, when the photograph stopped me.
It sat in a silver frame beside a small succulent and a blush-colored planner, angled slightly toward the center of the room as if it had been placed there for maximum visibility. A man in a navy polo shirt, one shoulder turned toward the camera, his smile caught in that specific half-second before a smile becomes performance. I knew that smile with the precision of someone who had slept beside it for seven years.
I forced my face into something neutral and pointed at the frame. “Who’s that?”
The woman whose desk it was lit up. Her name was Maya Jenkins and she was twenty-six or twenty-seven with dark brown hair and the particular warmth of someone who has not yet been given a reason to keep people at a distance.
“That’s the man I’m going to marry,” she said. She said it the way people say things they are still slightly amazed to get to say. The office kept moving around me.
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