Page 106 of Cut Off
I don’t like feeling anonymous.
The women on my left finish their wedding talk. The man on my right hangs up. Nobody looks at me. Nobody’s going to look at me. I am, in this room, invisible.
My eyes go hot, but I don’t let them do anything else because I refuse to cry in a ramen shop. I’m a professional woman with a glass-walled office and a succulent. I tip well and I leave.
It happens at the corner of Pike and First.
I’m walking back toward the hotel when I see a small boy on the opposite corner in a blue raincoat. He has the hood up. His hand is in his mother’s, and he’s jumping in a puddle with dedicated focus.
For a full second, all I see is Eli.
Of course it isn’t Eli. Eli is in Idaho, in an unfamiliar house. This boy’s shorter, and his hair’s the wrong color where it pokes out under the hood, and his mother is right there, alive, holding his hand.
The light changes. I cross the street and walk past them, not looking at the boy’s face.
I make it to the hotel lobby before I have to stop and stand by the elevator and breathe very deliberately for a minute.
In my room, I sit cross-legged on the bed with the curtains open. The city is doing the night version of itself now—lit up, soft-edged, rain-blurred—and from twelve stories up, it looks the way Seattle is supposed to look in a montage.
I call Maddie.
“Zo!” She picks up on the second ring, a noise behind her. “Hold on, I’m at—give me one second—” The noise gets quieter. A door closes. “Okay. Hi. Hi. How is it? Tell me everything.”
“It’s great.”
There’s a long pause.
“Zoe,” Maddie says.
I open my mouth to defend the great. I close it. “Okay,” I say. “It’s a lot.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a really nice newsroom.”
“Yeah.”
“And Mel is great. And the work is exactly what I wanted. What I think I wanted.”
“Yeah.”
“And nobody knows me, Mads.”
“I know.”
“Like, nobody. The security guard knows my name because he was briefed. A plant sits on my desk because Mel is a good person. Otherwise, I am, in this entire city of seven hundred thousand people, completely and totally—” I wave a hand at the window, even though she cannot see it. “Anonymous. I’m the most anonymous I have ever been.”
“And?”
“And I hate it.”
She lets out a breath, very gentle. “Yeah.”
“I miss my barista. I miss the mailman.”
“You don’t have a mailman.”
“I had a mailman at—” I can’t say his name. “I had a mailman.”
