The River House

After her shower, she’d put on clean clothes, including socks and shoes, dried her hair—Gabe had actually owned a decent hair dryer—and hung up her towel on a peg next to his threadbare towel. He had pegs, not towel racks. She didn’t know why she’d noticed that or what it said about either of them. Probably nothing. When she’d emerged from the bathroom, she’d felt more in control of herself, but Gabe was gone.

That was when she’d found his note on the counter where he kept his recycling schedule, take-out menus, pens, stamps, paper clips, notepad and phone charger. There was a clear block with a photograph of the covered bridge in their hometown, a mile up the river from where he’d grown up with his brother and their unreliable but otherwise wonderful parents. They’d had dogs, cats, gerbils, hamsters and at least one cow. And chickens. Felicity was positive she remembered chickens.

After dashing off her response, she’d returned the Sharpie she’d borrowed to its mates. She wiped crumbs off the couch, folded the throws she’d used during her stay, fluffed the cushions, ran the vacuum and took her dirty dishes and various leftovers into the kitchen. She’d loaded the dishwasher, run the garbage disposal and taken out the trash, including her pizza boxes. She’d packed up her meager belongings, folded her blankets, put her sheets and towels in the wash—of course he had an in-unit washer and dryer—and gathered up her garbage. Twenty minutes later, she was on her way in the February cold.

By the end of the week, she had a job with a successful event planner in Boston. She’d meant it to be a temporary job—an ultra-temporary job, for that matter—to make ends meet and get herself on firmer financial footing. She wasn’t going back to Gabe’s couch, or moving in with her parents. But a few weeks turned into a few months, and then it was summer...and fall...and finally she’d realized she’d found a career she truly enjoyed and was good at. Serendipity, desperation, strategic thinking, accident—whatever it had been, she’d never looked back to emerging markets, municipal bonds and any of the rest of it.