The disgraced CEO sat alone at a table in a coffee shop, playing a game on his phone. Samantha Becker spotted him after grabbing her coffee and side-stepping back through the crowded establishment. She knew he played a game by the way his index finger swooped and jabbed at the screen. And she knew it was him because, until a few months ago, she’d worked at the same company. Though, if asked, he’d probably say they’d never crossed paths, she’d actually hosted several client meetings in the conference room just beyond his glass office in the executive suite and, thus, it could be said she’d crossed his path all the time. Even now, with latte foam dissipating on his upper lip, his unfocused gaze lowered to a tiny screen, chin doubling like some average middle-aged guy, completely unobtrusive in his new life— still, she recognized him easily. She hurried from the coffee shop and down the street, watching her reflection travel the storefront windows. She was a woman in stylish workout clothes who never went to the gym. In sunglasses she appeared much younger than she was—she was thirty-eight, in fact, and the severance package she’d received three months before was running out.

In her pocket, her cell phone stayed silent. No alerts, nothing incoming, nothing arrived. Not from old friends back in New York, not from recruiters. Her most frequent correspondence was a reminder email from Groupon about the skydiving deal she’d drunkenly purchased months before, alone and late on the night of her birthday, now soon expiring.

She paused on the sidewalk in front of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and watched, from several yards away, as a Doberman squatted down and released an enormous shit. The falling and landing of it made her feel some kind of way, like mesmerized and safe. She called the skydiving company again.

“Ma’am,” the guy on the other end said, “you’re already at the top of the cancellation list—we’ll let you know the second there’s a spot available.”

The next morning at the same crowded coffee shop, the disgraced CEO was again at a table, alone, with another latte. This time, Samantha felt no disbelief at the sight of him out in the ordinary world. Rather, she realized that they were in the midst of similar routines—daily survival outside of one’s desired context.

“Keith Gelson,” she said to him, sitting and popping the lid off her cup. She kind of smiled, blew on her coffee, pretended preoccupation with the billowing steam.

He pulled his arms off the table and tucked them under his chest. She acknowledged, silently, the contrast in the raggedy long-sleeved T-shirt he wore—faded half-marathon screen print, stick figure in a running pose—and the Cartier watch on his wrist. He was clean-shaven. She felt like telling him to go ahead and grow a beard.

“We used to work together,” she said. “I was in Accounts.” When this didn’t move him, she specified, “I was Account Manager on Lipton.”

His arms loosened. “Oh.” He reached for his mug. “How are you?”

“Yeah,” Samantha said. “Don’t worry. No harm done.”

“Right.”

“I’m doing great.”

“Excellent.” He sipped, checked his watch.

“How about you?” she asked, wanting to know what words he might use to explain that he’d recently been forced to resign from his position as CEO of the third largest advertising agency in the southeast. She wanted to know if he would mention it at all, if her pretended ignorance would give him license to also pretend ignorance, and if then they would agree to dance around the silently known thing while their eyes had a totally parallel conversation about his active complicity in a series of escalating sexual harassment payoffs in the Creative Department that had briefly, due to the current climate of “gender reckoning”—his words, later recanted as “misconstrued”— made the national news. She also wanted to make him admit that he didn’t know her name.

Instead, he said, “I’m sorry about what happened with Lipton. It was a rough review process. After losing the account, retaining staff was about numbers, not—”

“Performance,” Samantha finished.

“Right. Exactly.”

The conversation lulled, the silence between them overtaken by chattering people at other tables. He’d chosen the chair that was backed up against the wall, on the inside. Samantha watched him as more people entered the cramped coffee shop, his eyes flitting over her head to the faces behind her, each swallow in his throat looking nervous. He would not, she knew, be able to get out of his seat without having to awkwardly squeeze past her, and, further, around the line of customers that stretched to the door. He was trapped. Samantha thought she could say anything and take her time doing it. After all, neither had anywhere to be anymore. The layers of voices around them, the laughter, the steamer on the espresso machine, the music coming from somewhere, insistent ‘90s pop, because all the young people liked the idea of that decade lately. She looked down at her lap, stroked the back of one hand, the skin pliable and shifting from collagen loss. From age. They were both trapped.

“Was I nice?” He leaned in, eyes trained on her. “When I—was I nice to you? When I told you that you were losing your job.”

Samantha pretended a delay. “Oh,” she said, “it’s okay? I’m not—I really was just asking how you were doing.” She lied because she hadn’t expected him to ask an honest question, but then she spotted, immediately, that parallel conversation in his eyes—a faintly seeking beacon, signaling that he was onto her, and her backpedaling had been his intention. She scooted her chair forward. “The CEO doesn’t fire people at my level.”

“That’s right.”

“So, why are you fucking pretending that you did?”

“Why are you?”

Her phone buzzed in her jacket pocket. She reached for it, saw the New York City area code and abruptly stood. The line of people shifted as she forced her way toward the door. Back at the table, Keith Gelson watched the disruption ripple through the coffee shop, a series of nudges producing frowns and over-the-shoulder bewilderment. When things settled, a young man asked to take the empty chair at Keith’s table. Keith wagged both hands, like immediately, yes, take the chair. He finished his latte, politely excused his way through the crowd and, once outside, waved to the woman who’d wanted him to apologize for the way her life was unfolding. She stood several feet away, deep into what appeared to be a disappointing phone conversation, probably with a recruiter, he guessed, based on the semi-agonized desperation that was prematurely aging her face. To his wave, she gave him the finger.

That evening at the gym, on the treadmill, Keith walked almost faster than he was capable. He huffed, leaning into the railing, vaguely wondering if he might die and the suggestion itself spurring him on. Then he thought about his teenage daughter and turned off the machine. She took days to respond to his texts but he was certain things would change when she was less embarrassed by what people thought of him—when people stopped lumping proximity to sexual harassment and perpetrator of sexual harassment together. Heart rate tumbling back down, he waited his turn behind a beefy weightlifter at the drinking fountain. He thought about how he’d chosen not to correct the woman at the coffee shop when she’d referred to them as having “worked together,” which wasn’t accurate, considering the vastly different spheres occupied by a chief executive and an account manager. He changed places with the weightlifter and filled his reusable bottle. When he turned around, the bottle flew from his hands and clattered over by the free weights, water glugging onto the hard blue mat. The unwanted attention of onlookers burned into him. He looked down at his hands as if they could have acted alone.

It was the weightlifter. “My sister didn’t deserve your shit,” he said, already walking in the direction of the locker room.

On his drive home, Keith said to the dark two-lane road extending only as far as his headlights, “It wasn’t me—you want the Creative Director.” He rolled down the window and shouted, “YOUUU WANT THE CREE-A-TIVE DIRR-EC-TORRRRR!” His voice clipped itself in the fast air, sounding staccato and cartoonish, and he rolled the window back up with wind tears in his eyes. At home, he stripped off his sweaty gym clothes and ate naked, over the sink, finishing the rotisserie chicken he’d bought for lunch. The divorce proceedings hadn’t been an unexpected development, but the bad press, at least from his wife’s perspective, had been a fortuitous moment to pull the trigger after seventeen years, the last six particularly broken and overwrought. The housekeeper had left a note on the kitchen counter: Buy laundry detergent and sponges. He eyed the words, wondering how those things were the only things important enough to write down.

The next day, at the coffee shop, Keith had taken only a sip before the woman returned. She left her tote bag on his table as she swept by to wait in the still-reasonable line of customers. Keith stared at the stained canvas thing, overstuffed, it seemed, with pointed and angular items. He wondered if she’d been inadequate about negotiating salary, because this was not a purse reflective of a woman who demonstrated her worth. His phone rang then, and his focus leapt at his daughter’s name—ZOEY—popping up on the screen. But the phone darkened again before he had the chance to answer. One ring. He tried to call back but she didn’t pick up. Sorry didn’t mean to, she texted.

The woman sat down and blew on her coffee, same as the previous day, expecting him to speak first. He wasn’t in charge anymore, yet people still expected him to have answers.  

“I can’t offer you remorse,” he told her. “Because I just don’t have it.”

She looked up.

“For the layoff,” he clarified. “I assume that’s what we’re talking about.”

“We’re not talking about anything,” she said. “I just got here.” The way she said it and shrugged, like he was an idiot, made him want to flip the table. Her knee-jerk dismissal gave him the same feeling as every other random encounter he’d had these past two months, the same feeling as the guy at the gym the previous night, as his daughter’s inadvertent phone call just now, as if he kept accidentally entering the wrong room and he was powerless in the face of his own disorientation. He tucked his phone in his back pocket.

“Do you have kids?”

“No.”

He glanced at her left hand. “And you’re not married.”

“I was married,” the woman said. “In my twenties.”

Keith assessed her face, the clustered lines around her eyes. “I’m going through a divorce right now,” he said. “And my daughter—she’s fifteen—won’t give me the time of day.”

“She’s mad about it?”

“I guess,” he said, though he was thinking of the sexual harassment stuff, the settlements he’d helped to keep quiet. He wished she were still four or five and didn’t have awareness of things like the internet or feminism.

“She’ll come back around,” the woman said.

They considered each other, then:

“What did you mean about remorse?”

“How old are you?”

The two questions overlapped in the moment. They both delayed, until Samantha pushed back, “How old are you?”

“Forty-nine.” He broadened his shoulders, tightened his trunk area. When she squinted, he added, “I went gray in my twenties. I don’t lie about my goddamn age.” He looked around at the tables of people chatting, the shining teeth emerging from eager smiles, the ease of other conversations compared to the one currently happening to him. “I’m taking some time,” he told the woman. “Before my next move.”

She shrugged again, like what else was he going to say in his situation. “I’ve been trying to get out of here,” she said. “Back to New York. This is why people don’t leave—it’s impossible to get back. Everyone moves on, you’re forgotten, or you’re out of touch all of a sudden. It’s bullshit.”

“I never did the New York thing.”

“That probably helped. When the shit hit the fan? No big-name recognition.”

He had considered this fact himself, but didn’t like admitting the regionality of his success. Apart from an internship and a couple of stints at small agencies, he’d spent the whole of his adult life working his way up in the same company, twenty-six years of ambition invested in one place. He kept a drawer full of clippings in his desk at home, various local news outlets and a few major industry publications, recounting his wunderkind rise and announcing his promotion to the top job. Two years ago now, but a lifetime. During the scandal, his professional story had been used to more broadly question the promotion practices in an industry historically run by old white men—a damning description, and suddenly alleged everywhere, it seemed. The suggestion that he was unqualified had rankled him, but the suggestion that he was old had been mean; he was only in his forties, for fuck’s sake. He’d done as much as he could as quickly as possible in his career, pursued by a pragmatic awareness in the back of his mind that the future wasn’t promised.

Absently, he touched his chest, felt the swelling of his breath.

“My favorite thing,” the woman said, catching his eye, “the thing I miss the most, is managing people. Setting expectations and watching people strive to meet them.”

“That’s honest,” he said, though he meant earnest.

“Watching people scramble, I mean.”

Less earnest, he thought. “Uh-huh.”

“I had a team of fourteen people under me. My favorite thing to do was send several requests in a row, let a few days pass, then find the one thing that’d been forgotten. And I’d email, like question mark, question mark, question mark?”

Keith grinned. “I had 427 people under me. There were some afternoons . . . all I did was send question marks.”

They considered each other. Neither stared out the window or searched the room or pretended to be distracted. Keith wondered at her face, the stoic expression that also spoke knowingly behind her eyes. For the first time, he tried to place her in his memory of the long hallways, of management meetings he might have poked his head into for the sake of causing a ripple, of any quarterly agency-wide presentations on the status of clients and new business. Had she stood on the 24-inch riser in the atrium, in front of the giant screen, and gestured confidently toward stats and projections? What was her name?

“I hate this part of town,” she said. “But Starbucks is dangerous. I ran into my former assistant at the one on Robinson.”

Keith offered a continuous nod, like yes, yes, yes, and Samantha found herself encouraged by the way he closed his eyes, as if he were grateful for a type of reciprocation. She remembered, then, moments at the office where she’d watched him hustle down a hallway, as if any meeting would ever begin without him; or, bound up to the front of a conference room, gaze out at the faces and take a cleansing breath, as if the moment were long anticipated. She’d seen him, from a distance, sneak off to the second-floor balcony with a few other executives who only smoked cigarettes late in the day before a tough, impending announcement—like the loss of an account or its resulting layoffs. Of course, Samantha couldn’t really know what they discussed, but she’d spent enough years in her career observing similarly tight circles of executives. In this moment, looking at Keith, she saw nothing particular about him. She never had, except for his position. Here they were, a sameness between them now, each waiting for their next chapter.

“Listen,” she said. “I’m waiting for a phone call. Several. About jobs.” She shifted closer, her voice lowered. “But that’s all I’ve got on my plate.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m not interested in making smart decisions today. I just need to kill some time. And you seem to be doing that, too.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Let’s get a drink.”

“I don’t drink.”

“We can stay sober.”

“You’ll forgive me for being clumsy about this,” Keith said, “but I wouldn’t want to assume the wrong thing, based on accusations I’ve recently experienced, so I’m wondering—”

“All I’m saying is, let’s waste some fucking time together, okay?”

As Samantha moved to push her chair back, a young man approached and asked if they were giving up the table. She looked to Keith, who hesitated but nodded, and they moved through the crowd toward the door, emerging onto the sidewalk, suddenly alone together in the open world, or feeling like it. Samantha assessed the man she’d persuaded to leave with her—his medium-wash boot-cut jeans, another old half-marathon T-shirt unnecessarily tucked in, the inclusion of a brown leather belt, also unnecessary. She wiggled her toes in her sneakers, antsy about what she was doing. In her black leggings, she felt the mid-morning sun on the backs of her legs, and the cool stillness on her front side. She wasn’t sure how to transition this situation she’d created, and it was only on a lower frequency that she felt herself wanting to sleep with him, but she didn’t want to have to convince him. The feelings she had were about boredom and triumph. Or maybe not. She couldn’t tell. She lived in an interim space all the time lately, trying to move on to the next thing, but the interviews were mostly mediocre. Maybe, she thought, this thing that I’m doing is what people mean when they talk about nihilism.

Quietly, she suggested, “There’s a dog park. There’s the art museum.”

“I was on the board there,” Keith said. “Rather not.” They walked past several stores, then he half-turned, said, “I usually get a rotisserie chicken for lunch. From the grocery store. I’m parked over here…”

They walked back in the opposite direction. At the coffee shop, they both glanced through the big front windows as their reflections passed among the crowd inside. At his Audi, Samantha heard the automatic beep of the doors being unlocked, and she pulled the handle and slid onto the leather seats like it was not the first time. At the grocery store, she watched him decide between three rotisserie chickens. He picked one up, put it down again. The muscles across his upper back looked tense, and his hands kept falling to his sides and clenching briefly into fists. He was nervous, she could tell. But back in the car, on the long, winding, two-lane road that headed out to the West End, the warm chicken smell was strong and calming, and the silence merely felt a part of it. Somewhere near the country club, in a neighborhood Samantha had never been before, Keith turned the car up the sloping drive of a colonial revival. Three stories of white painted brick with slender columns that framed a covered entry and dark red door. As Keith pulled the car into the unattached garage, Samantha closed her eyes, anxious, and waited for the engine to shut off. When it did, she exited. She squeezed past three bicycles leaning against the wall, knocking one over. When she tried to right it, it went down again.

“Forget it,” he told her. “My daughter never even rides the fucking thing.”

In the house, Samantha looked toward the ceilings, faraway and framed by thick crown molding. She glanced through doorways as they passed, saw more doorways, saw white expanse and the dark shine of walnut floors, saw order and open space and symmetry. Or the suggestion of a former symmetry—here and there, things missing, a gap in a line of photos hung above a secretary, indents in a rug where a sofa must have been, a solitary coffee mug beside the kitchen sink. He offered her water. The water was very clear, or the glass was very clean. She didn’t know what to say if she wasn’t going to acknowledge the house and the wealth, so she said, “It’s a beautiful space,” and he put his own glass of water down, casually setting it aside, as he embarked on his way to kiss her. But she saw the tremble in his wrist, heard the stutter of the glass set down shakily against the marble countertop, so when he kissed her and then pulled back in hesitation immediately, she didn’t miss a beat. She pretended she knew what she was doing and closed the space his hesitation had caused.

Upstairs, they undressed partially. She produced a condom from her purse and bent over the side of the four-poster bed but found herself preoccupied with the vastness of the king-size mattress spread out before her, immense and available. She crawled atop it. In the middle of the vastness, she turned back to him. He took off his shoes and finally stepped out of his jeans and boxer briefs, until then bunched low on his hairy shins. “Take off your shirt,” she said, and he did, and she did, too. As he came toward her, she saw his focus on her breasts, but she also saw, as he crawled closer, the curled scar over his left pectoral. An inch long, like an eye winked shut. They both reached for his cock and knocked hands, apologized, then she laid back and accepted the summarized oral sex before he led himself inside of her.

She was there in the moment, under the weight.

He felt her legs tighten around his waist, leverage as her hips directed a rhythm.

They both had coffee breath.

He had always hated missionary, the pressure on his knees, demands of arm strength.

She quickly tired, listening instead for what he might be feeling.

He shouted twice.

“Sorry,” he said, after, between breaths. “I know you didn’t—just give me a minute.”

“Are you really forty-nine?” she asked, and when he scowled, she pointed to the scar on his chest. “Have you had heart surgery?”

His face softened. “Pacemaker. I get a new one every seven years, since I was fourteen.”

“Holy shit.”

His shoulders rustled against the feathery duvet.

“I thought,” Samantha said, rolling onto her side to face him, “you were some kind of runner. All the T-shirts about half-marathons.”

“My wife runs. She never liked the participation T-shirts you get with races, so she always got them in my size.” His hand rested on his chest, which rose and fell, slower and slower. “That sounds like an intentional thing, my wearing these T-shirts, but honestly I just don’t have any normal clothes. All ties and business casual.”

Samantha considered his profile, soft and sloping, spotted untrimmed hair along his earlobes, and thought, Yeah, you’re almost fifty. She pulled at the skin under her arm absently, checking the tautness, and said, “I’ve been here a year and haven’t made any friends. Sometimes I thought maybe, like around the second drink at happy hour. But the next day, at work, I could see I made people uncomfortable. I have all this experience, I’m not married, no kids, and it looks desperate or something. The men on my team didn’t like it. The younger women wanted a mentor, which was worse. Like being stripped for parts. I’ve done stints at eight agencies back in New York. Eight.”

Keith nodded in appreciation.

“I did what you’re supposed to do. I leveraged and moved around and got promoted. Moving here seemed like the only way to get to the next level without sucking someone off.”

Keith seemed to take this information in, glancing briefly at her, twice.

“What?” she asked.

“I don’t know your name.”

She smiled. “I know.”

“Is it too late?”

“Samantha Becker,” she said and sat up. “I need to check my phone.”

He watched her perch on the edge of the bed, naked, hunched over her phone, and he thought, Samantha Becker, Samantha Becker, but she really wasn’t there in his memory. He recalled the smudge of an identity, like a name attached to an organizational chart, just enough to know that he wasn’t being put on, though this had always been his downfall as a leader—names and faces, the particularity of people below the executive level, a problem only made worse once he was at the front of the room and center of attention.

“Fuck,” she said to her phone. “I bought a Groupon months ago. It’s expiring.”

“Who buys Groupons?”

She turned. “It’s for skydiving. I really want to throw myself from a plane.”

They ate the chicken in bed and watched two episodes of The Crown. Then they rolled toward each other and tried to have sex again. A slower affair, intentionally less urgent, and full of attempted passion which was, it turned out, an intense amount of work. Keith had to give up when a cramp twisted his side, but Samantha waved off the apology, petting her stomach and saying, “I don’t think I can be, like, jostled right now. That chicken.” When they woke from a nap, they pretended to agree about how good it felt to sleep in the middle of the day.

Samantha’s phone rang and she loped from bed to take the call in the walk-in closet. Keith watched the door shut, heard her muffled voice. When she emerged, he pretended to have been considering the ceiling.

“No second interview,” she said, tossing the phone on the bed on her way to the bathroom. Keith watched as she now closed that door. He knew she had moved further into the bathroom, into the water closet, because he heard that door close as well, then the fan, high-pitched white noise. After five minutes, he felt he shouldn’t wait like this, so he put on a robe and took the half-eaten chicken back down to the kitchen. When he returned, she was still in the bathroom, and he started to wonder if he should knock, then if she’d even hear him if he knocked, considering the fan and the extra door to the water closet. She came out and he felt caught, standing in the middle of the room, doing nothing. She was wrapped in a towel, face blotched. He felt stupid for assuming she’d been taking a shit when in fact she was clearly crying.

“Maybe you need a new recruiter,” he offered.

“I wish you hadn’t covered up all those sexual harassment settlements,” she said. “I wish you’d outed that fucker, and the company, for harming women and keeping them silent. You could’ve been the guy who did that, and I could, right now, ask you to be a reference for me. But you didn’t do anything, so I can’t, and now I can’t get back to New York. And I’m thirty-eight and everyone else is a decade younger and willing to work for some bullshit salary. I’m not going to go backward. I shouldn’t have to. I was good at my job, you dick.”

Keith slid his hands into the deep, soft pockets of his robe. In terms of being cornered and blamed, he’d been here before, and recently. “Is there anything else?” he asked.

“Please drive me home.”

They dressed in front of each other, the first steps of which required him to remove his robe and her to drop her towel, and this fresh nudity silenced the room as they worked at getting their clothes back on without catching each other’s gaze.

In the car, reversing out of the driveway, he said, “You can have that coffee shop.”

“I just wanted to fuck,” she said.

“Yes,” was all he could think to say to that.

They drove in silence. The meandering road back to the city was maddening in its prolonged sameness, its repetition of trees and mailboxes, the large brick homes set back from the road, dormer windows giving a thousand-yard stare, and Keith could feel the tension between the two of them growing more aggravated. Maybe it was his conscience. Maybe it was the way she bounced one foot nonstop. He nearly mentioned it, but then she held up her phone and shouted, “RING PLEASE FUCK!” And then it rang, and he couldn’t believe it, and they looked at each other, not believing it together.

“Holy shit,” she breathed.

“Answer it.”

She did and he listened to the whole thing, because the volume on her phone was up too high. As the recruiter conveyed interview feedback—“Self-assured, but you also seemed even-keeled and likeable”—he gripped the steering wheel tighter, nodding along as a date and time was set for the second interview. When she hung up, he offered a low-five across the console, without thinking, and she accepted it, slapping hard enough to bang the back of his hand against the gear shift.

“Oh, sorry, sorry,” she said, but gazed out the window, grinning, slouched with visible relief.

They waited at the first stoplight upon entering the city, the strip ahead of them leading back through the shopping district. Keith wondered at the way things suddenly felt lighter in the car, unrelated to anything he himself did or did not do, nothing he could be blamed for, and how unanticipated that was, hopeful, too. He would probably be able to think back on this day without having first tried to forget about it.

The light turned green and he pressed the gas. Several blocks down was the coffee shop where they’d begun the morning. It was mid-afternoon now, enough of the day gone, enough of the day ahead. He was thinking that he needed to look up a different gym location, call his daughter, his lawyer, maybe his own recruiter. Then Samantha’s words broke through in a kind of rewind and replay. He had not heard her phone ring but another call had come through.

“Perfect. I can’t even tell you—this is perfect! And—there’s two of us, actually? Is that okay?” When she hung up, eyes bright and intense, she turned to Keith and explained, “They had a cancellation. We have to hurry, though—they were just going to close early.”

“What?”

“I’ve been on the cancellation list for weeks—”

“For what?”

“Skydiving. Remember?”

“Oh.”

“What? Not a thrill-seeker?”

“I tend to keep my head down and stick to what I know can’t kill me.”

She laughed. “Do you, though? I mean, really?” She gestured inside the car as if it were representative of the whole predicament in which his life had currently stagnated. As if his problems could be boiled down to an erroneous belief in himself as one kind of person over another.

“That’s reductive,” he said as they passed the coffee shop from earlier in the day. He didn’t say anything else. Inside he felt a rising anger, her presumption so casual and conclusive, but he did not want to be responsible for another shift in mood between them. This moment was in his control and he didn’t want to lose what he’d already decided had been gained—an ease of sorts, an acquiescence, good feelings they could ride to the end of their meeting. He would not go backward. He touched his chest, then reached to program the GPS on his dash. “What’s the address?” he asked. “Where are we going?”

Forty-five minutes east of the city, they pulled into an empty parking lot next to a small regional airport and followed the waving arms of two guys summoning them to the plane hangar. Samantha showed the Groupon on her phone for one of the guys to scan, offering him a proud smile about achieving the discount. Instructions took a half hour. Paperwork was a series of quick signatures that took five minutes. In the plane, she was strapped to the guy who’d had nothing to do with the paperwork, instead was serious about the actual jumping. Several times he’d hollered at them, call and response style, about the number of seconds you had to count before pulling the chute. But now, watching out the window as the plane left the ground—as the plane left the ground in her stomach, too—Samantha was terrified of accidental death, and the second interview, scheduled in her phone’s calendar, now felt meaningless. Echoing beneath that meaninglessness was all the effort she’d put into wanting it to happen. She turned to check on Keith, strapped to the paperwork guy. They both gave her a thumbs up. Keith offered a stiff smile, too, before turning to his own window.

Inside the plane, the sound was a tornado.

Samantha watched the pilot. She could see his right shoulder and part of his profile; he was very still, and she freaked herself out by thinking that maybe he was a mannequin. She thought about her friends in New York and how they might read about her death with genuine interest and regret, but that didn’t change the fact that they’d made a paltry effort to remain connected. She thought about her ex-husband, who had three kids now, one of whom was in high school—a fact which made her incredulous about all she still didn’t know of what she wanted. She thought about her mother and remembered, with an exhausted pang, that she’d forgotten, again, to call her back. She thought about her dad, already dead. At least he’d be there, waiting, if there was a there at all. She looked again at Keith, still turned away from her. If she died jumping out of a plane, then he was the last person she slept with and she hadn’t even had an orgasm, didn’t even fight for one.

It was time.

How her legs managed to hold her, she didn’t know, but she stepped out of a door into the open rushing nothing, and, immediately, shut her eyes.

Keith gazed out the door of the plane and saw her. Then he was outside, too.

They tumbled, with men on their backs.

In the cold. In the air. The plummet mystifying, a quality of stillness, levitation.

The land beneath them was brown, segmented, shifting. Keith found that if he focused on the horizon, he could not actually sense the ground growing closer, that the falling was both happening and not. It was okay. It would be okay. Rapidly, then, and against his better judgment, he felt something like perpetuity or God or the laws of science, all of it the same, exhilaration caught in his chest, tight and growing tighter. In his thoughts, his daughter’s name: Zoey, Zoey. The memory of being small came to him, of watching the last moon mission on television. Lying on the orange brocade couch, sagging toward the opposite end where his mother studied not the astronauts but her own hands swiftly crocheting, and beyond her, in the chair beneath the mounted deer head, his father sat, the light from the moon on the screen shrunken down to pinpoints in his barely open eyes. Plummeting, returning, Keith thought, This is how astronauts feel. In the sky below him, he saw Samantha’s parachute burst open—vibrant rounded rainbow—but the sky was darkening fast, like a shade being pulled across the only window in the room, glowing weakly around the edges. Keith felt one hard jerk in the sudden pitch black, and, afterward, an ease.

Sailing below, eyes still shut, Samantha heard the wind shift to a lower tone and sensed the ground would soon be underfoot. She summoned the courage to open her eyes, and squinted painfully against the low sun, bright, if not the brightest she’d ever seen it in her life. The angle of her descent kept her, somehow, continuously in line with it, and the dull brown field below shone as if golden instead. The whole world felt open to her, even attractive. In the final moments she and the sun lost their alignment, and Samantha kicked her feet toward the rising ground. The guy on her back steered them, negotiating between the wind caught in the parachute and the momentum with which they fell. When her feet touched down, she was surprised by the abrupt grace of the landing, her instinctual ability to put one foot in front of the other.

The instructor unhooked their tandem harness and elbowed away from her. Samantha tripped to her knees, crying out at his brusqueness.

“What the hell—” Perplexed and indignant, mouth agape, she watched him run off until her attention shifted from his departing figure in the foreground to the two figures in the background several yards away. She saw the other instructor bent over Keith on the ground. She recognized the movements of chest compression, mouth to mouth, and her own pulse threaded faster.

She stood to get a clearer view, but was spun wildly, dropped onto her ass and yanked hard across the dirt. The cords of the parachute dug into her leg—a simple loop into which she’d stepped, without realizing, was now locked around her ankle and pulled taut from the wind. She rolled onto her stomach, hands scrambling at the ground, dirt spraying up into her mouth. Gagging, she flipped again onto her back, watched the sky move overhead as she was dragged. She tried kicking her legs, one last time, spastically, but the parachute wanted her, and the wind wanted the parachute, and she couldn’t believe what was happening back there to Keith, didn’t want to believe it. She was willing to be dragged forever. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear the instructor shouting at her, the wobble of his voice as he ran after her, telling her that she only had to sit up and reach for the straps.