This, this, THIS is what I hate, this weakness, this feeling of vulnerability. I swore I’d never let this happen again, but I did. I kept my guard up for nearly two decades after you laid waste to me, but the moment I saw you on Michigan Avenue, I tore down that wall and exposed myself all over again.

Maybe I’m making too much of this. Maybe all the other crap going on—my job prospects suddenly in the dumpster and my marriage just a friendship—is clouding my brain. Maybe I’m not thinking clearly and everything is fine.

Don’t you realize getting texts like those—we have to talk, better in person—is pure torture? Now I have to wait until tomorrow morning before you even turn on your damn cell phone again. And it’s not like I can just run over there, is it? Thanks, Lauren. Thanks so much for turning me inside out yet again.

I knew this would happen. I knew it.

31

Simon

I met Lauren Lemoyne on my first day working at my father’s law firm.

I’d graduated high school and was getting ready for college. High school had been easy for me academically but difficult socially. I’d had a late growth spurt, shooting up to five feet eleven my senior year, which I realize is not much more than average male height, but when you start as a freshman at five feet two, and people call you “Mini-Me” and things like that, five feet eleven feels like Paul Bunyan.

I spent most of high school a bookish, small, not very confident boy. I ended a bookish, taller, but only slightly confident boy.

I needed some money before college, so Dad said I could be a gofer at his law firm. Times were good financially because Dad had just rung the bell (as he liked to say) with that enormous verdict in the electrical-injury case. The Law Offices of Theodore Dobias had three partners, five associates, ten assistants, and four paralegals.

One of those paralegals was Lauren Lemoyne. I was introduced to everyone by one of the partners (my father didn’t want to do it himself, wanted me to learn my own way), and I first saw Lauren bent over a banker’s box of files, wearing a tight miniskirt and showing a lot of leg. It felt like my own personal porn movie, though she quickly righted herself and pulled down her skirt and greeted me in a friendly but perfunctory fashion.

It wasn’t perfunctory to me, though. I was immediately taken but intimidated. She would be my pinup girl, gorgeous and exotic, whom I could admire from afar, but well beyond my reach, way out of my league. I stammered a return hello, trying to sound easy and cool and pretty sure I had failed miserably.

It wasn’t until the second week of work that our paths crossed again. I was in the firm’s kitchen, or at least that’s what we called it, where there was a sink and fridge and coffee maker. I was washing my hands because I’d just brought back some filings from the courthouse and the box was dirty.

“So you’re Ted’s boy.”

I saw her and tried to act nonchalant but, again, failed miserably. I turned away from the sink, my hands dripping, and straightened my posture.

“I’m Lauren,” she said. “You’ve probably learned a lot of names all at once.”

She was right, I’d had to learn a lot of names right away, which wasn’t my strong suit. But Lauren’s, I hadn’t forgotten.

“Nice to meet you,” I said, even though we’d already met. I’d even managed to steal a few nuggets of information from the office manager—Lauren was from the north side of Chicago, age twenty, still lived at home, saving up money for college, huge Cubs fan. I didn’t want to ask the office manager too many questions and be too obvious, as if he didn’t already know why I was asking. It didn’t need to be spoken. Lauren was that kind of untouchable gorgeous.

“So I hear you’re starting at U of C this fall,” she said. “I also heard you were valedictorian of your high school class. And an all-state cross-country runner.” Her smile lit up my soul. “Your dad likes to brag about you.”

“It was all luck, I swear.”