At least at the country club, I didn’t have to worry about the quality of the white wine. Especially since I was a glass and a half in before the tuxedoed waitress came to take our salad plates away.

“I’ve got one more year of law school, and then a year of clerking,” Jeffrey was saying as he sawed into a piece of roast beef from the roast beef station.

“What’s clerking?” I asked. I’d ordered the fish, which was taking its sweet time showing up. Half an hour for entrees, another twenty minutes for dessert and coffee, and then the ride home. An hour. I could do another hour. I could brainstorm titles. It wasn’t like I actually had to pay really close attention to this conversation. So far, it had just been Jeffrey pontificating about his law school curriculum, like he was applying for a job rather than hanging out with a girl.

“It’s basically like being an assistant for a judge,” Jeffrey explained. “It really helps your resume to work for the court for a year or two.”

“Oh,” I said. Actually, now that I thought of it, I’d heard terms like “clerk of the court” and stuff before. “Which judge will you be working for?” Judge, Judgment…there was something there, maybe? Nah, too much like Terminator 2.

“I don’t know, yet. I have to apply to positions.”

“So you don’t know if you’ll get the job yet?”

He looked up at me. “Well, I mean, of course I’m going to get the job. I’m at Yale Law.”

“Oh.” The waitress appeared with my food. Thank God.

Jeffrey frowned at my dish. “Are you sure you don’t want the roast beef? It’s terrific here.”

I speared a forkful of fish with possibly more force than strictly necessary. “I’ve had it before, thanks.” I’d been eating roast beef here since I was six. The Line. Down the Line.

“So, you have one year left at Canton, right?” he asked, as soon as I’d taken a mouthful.

I swallowed my bite of broiled rockfish and patted my mouth with a napkin. “Technically one and a half. I took off last semester and traveled around Europe.”

“How cosmopolitan of you.” He nodded in what could only be construed as approval. “That was probably a good choice. I often wonder if I should have deferred law school for a year and traveled, since I won’t really have another chance.”

He was only twenty-four. “You’ll definitely have another chance,” I said. “Why don’t you defer…clerking or whatever for a year and do it then?”

“It doesn’t work that way, Hannah,” he scoffed. “You have to strike while the iron’s hot if you want your career to be on the right path.”

I put a piece of broccoli in my mouth and started chewing. My not-career was on no path that I could determine. Had I already made a huge mistake? Did I need to know exactly what I wanted to do like Jeffrey and Dylan and Tess did?

“I have a whole schedule,” Jeffrey said, “but I don’t want to bore you with that.”

I bit my lip to hold back a snicker. “Don’t worry, Jeffrey,” I replied. “You won’t bore me with that.” Not in comparison to everything else he’d already said.

His eyes lit with delight. “Really? I mean, I thought it was kind of early, but if you’re interested—”

“Sure.” I shrugged. “Why not?” He could tell me all about his five-year career plan or whatever. He could talk, I could eat my dinner as quickly as was socially acceptable for Hannah Swift, and we could be back home by 8:30.

He laid his palms on the table. “Great!” I hadn’t seen him so animated this entire evening. “So, we have about a month and a half before I have to go back to New Haven, which is kind of pushing it, but you know, there are weekends and holidays and stuff so I’m sure there will be plenty of time.”

“Plenty of time for what?” I asked, amused. “To tell me about your schedule?”

“And then some time next summer, after I graduate, of course. Though it’ll really depend on where I end up clerking and what my judge wants my start date to be.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. Had I missed a sentence while cutting up a piece of fish? “What will depend on that?”

“So some judges want to start in the fall and some want you right away in the summertime,” he said. “Which is a pain if you want to use that time to study for the bar, but there’s always the next summer.”

“Oh.”

“Which would probably be better anyway,” he said. “Since we’ll be settled by then.”

Suddenly, the hair on my arms was standing on end and all thoughts of titles had fled. Who was we?

“And you’ll still be at Canton for another semester,” he went on, blithely. “Which is actually pretty perfect. You can spend half the year finishing up your degree and then the other half you won’t have anything getting in the way of wedding planning. You want a big wedding, right?”

Halfway down my throat, the fish came back to life and started fighting its descent.

“We could even have it here at the country club. That would be kind of romantic. The location of our first date? We could put it in the announcement.”

I coughed, choked, and probably turned magenta. My eyes watered, but I could see Jeffrey looking at me, his face awash in concern.

“Do you need water?”

“I need a minute,” I managed to get out, covering my mouth with my napkin and hacking away.

“Was it a bone?” Jeffrey asked, his nose wrinkled. “I can’t deal with seafood. The bones, and the…smell…”

I took a big gulp of my chardonnay, though there was nothing else blocking my esophagus. He. Was. Planning. Our. Wedding. And he was picking the location based on what would look best in the newspaper!

I swallowed thickly then took a deep breath. “Maybe we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves.”

“You’re right,” Jeffrey said, and slumped back in his seat. “We should wait and see where I propose to you, first. It could be even better.”

I stared at him, agog. “That’s not what I—”

“It’s just that I really think this is the right fit, you know?”

No. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that at all.

“It’s rare these days to find someone with the same goals as you, don’t you think?”

“I don’t want to be a lawyer,” I blurted.

“Of course not!” He laughed, a big, jolly belly laugh that instantly grated on my nerves. “Who wants you to be a lawyer! Trust me, Hannah, if I wanted to marry a lawyer, I could have found one at Yale. Place is crawling with career women.”

Career women? My dinner sat forgotten on my plate. I wasn’t sure I could trust myself with food right now. Or utensils and their lovely, sharp, pointy edges.

“No, I wanted an undergrad. Preferably a senior so she’d have a whole year to plan the wedding and help set up our house while I study for the bar, but you look pretty sensible. I bet you could do it in six months.”

I didn’t know where to start. I wasn’t sure which statement to tackle first. “Jeffrey, I think there’s been some sort of misunderstanding.”

He frowned. “I’m sorry. I was given to understand that you didn’t…wait, do you have a career in mind?”

Actually, no, not as such.

“Because there’s nothing wrong with doing that, at least for a few years. You’re only twenty-one, after all. We can wait to have our first kid if you’d feel better about working a while first. Say, twenty-six?”

“I—” I had lost the power of speech.

“I can tell you right now, I want four kids. I know you come from a small family, but I think big looks better. In campaign photos and such.”

“Campaign photos?” I managed to croak.

“For when I run for office. You know, the politician, his smiling wife. The four adorable kids…”

I felt hot, then cold. “This is all a little overwhelming,” I said. “I thought our moms were just setting us up on a date.”

“Well, yeah,” he said. “I told my mom I needed a pretty girl with a good family name who hadn’t bought into the whole feminist myth about her career. I’ve been burned by that before.”

“You have?” I was on autopilot right now, my guts churning as I tried to retain an appropriately country-club facade of pleasant, ladylike charm. Feminist myth about her career. Holy hell.

“Yes.” He sighed. “There are a lot of women who waste all this time on school or trying to have a career only to give it up when they realize someone has to keep the house and raise their husband’s children.”

“‘Their husband’s children?’”

“But your mother told mine that you have no aspirations.”

My stomach stopped spinning. It felt like the whole Earth had stopped spinning.

“Can you excuse me for a minute?” said whatever final shreds remained of my cotillion etiquette. “I think you were right that the fish was a bad choice.” I dashed from the table and walked as quickly as decency would allow to the ladies’ room. The country club ladies’ room, where the long, mirrored table was fronted with a row of plush pink velvet cushions, upon which the country club ladies would sit and fix their lipstick and powder their noses and make themselves perfect before they returned to their country club husbands and their country club lives. Maybe they’d gotten married there, too.

When I was young, I used to stand in this room and watch while my mother powdered her nose. I used to think one day, I’d grow up and be just like her.

And apparently, I had.

She’d said I had no aspirations. She’d offered me up like a fatted lamb to be slaughtered by that pompous prick and his slimy schedule. This wasn’t a date, it was a business merger. The photogenic, unambitious, no doubt fertile Swift girl with her inoffensive Canton B.A. who could be married off to a young man with a…

A sob rose in my throat. A good major, a good career, and a good bank account. Everything neat and orderly and planned out like clockwork. One more year of law school, a year of clerking, a wedding, a house, four kids, and a political career. Just needed to find the smiling blonde wife to slot into the role.

And Mom was so excited about tonight. So pleased to find a place for me. So eager to tell a total stranger that her daughter had no aspirations.

In what incredibly fucked up world was that a plus?

Unbelievable. Unendurable. I plopped down on the velvet cushions and let my head fall into my hands. And also unavoidable. I’d done this to myself. Because Mom and Jeffrey were right. I had no aspirations. I had no plan. I wasn’t a career woman like Tess, who awed and inspired Dylan in their work. The two of them were this perfect scientist pair, like some sick reincarnation of Pierre and Marie Curie sent to make me feel bad about myself. What did I have to offer a guy, other than to mold myself into a puzzle piece to finish off his grandly-imagined plan?

One tear dropped onto the marble countertop, and then another. Great, now I was messing up my face. I reached into my purse to grab my tissue and tried to dab at my eyes without smudging the mascara. There. I took a deep breath. Stop crying, Hannah. Stop crying. Just humor this guy until you get home.

And then humor your mother.

My eyes watered up again.

I could not go home. I grabbed my phone and opened the message app, typing:

Boone replied in seconds:

Well, almost was better than entirely given up. I typed back.

I groaned through gritted teeth.

A sound burst from my lips, not quite a sigh, not quite a sob, but a little of both. It echoed around the empty bathroom, and I clutched the phone to my chest in relief.

Ten minutes. Ten minutes to my rescue. I could put up with Jeffrey for ten minutes.

I took my sweet time in the bathroom (five minutes) then finally emerged and walked in a slow, stately manner back to the table (one minute). Our plates were cleared, and Jeffrey was consulting his phone.

“Hey there,” he said brightly when I arrived. “All better?”

“All better,” I replied. I sat down. I unfolded my napkin. I could do this.

“Great.” He shook his head. “It was probably the fish. I never eat fish.”

“So you said.”

“Anyway, I ordered dessert, if you’re up for it. The pecan pie here is great.”

I looked at him for a moment, a sort of strange, hysterical laughter bubbling through my chest. No, I could not do this. “Are you kidding me? You just…ordered dessert for me?”

“You were in the bathroom.”

“I’m allergic to nuts.”

He blinked stupidly at me. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” I set down my purse and my phone and leaned my elbows on the table, pillowing my chin in my hands. My cotillion instructor would be so appalled. “I hope that isn’t a problem. A genetic flaw introduced into your bloodline.” Ooh, Bloodline. Nice. I could totally work with that.

“Well…”

“Oh, and I should probably mention that I also have a thyroid disorder. I have to take a daily medication.” I shrugged. “But it could have been worse. For about a week last year before we figured out what it was, I was afraid it was cancer. Cancer would probably be a deal breaker, huh?”

It was Jeffrey’s turn to gape at me.

“It’s good we’re getting to know each other like this, don’t you think, Jeff? Do you go by Jeff?”

“Not usually, no.”

“That’s fine. It can be a little pet name.” He could order me nuts, and I could call him whatever I damn well pleased.

“I—”

“So let me tell you a few things about myself, Jeff. No, I don’t have a major yet. No, I don’t have a boyfriend, either, owing to the fact that my last boyfriend left me for possibly the worst person in the world that you can leave someone for.”

“Another man?”

Of course he would go there. I leaned forward and dropped my voice to a whisper. “Worse.”

“I can’t—”

“And I took it really hard. And I went off to Europe, and I really planned badly because that’s apparently what I do, is plan badly. We have that in common, I think. You, also, plan badly. I mean, you have plans, but they’re awful.”

“Hey!”

“So you know what? Screw plans. I’d rather have no plan at all than just be a part of yours.”

My phone buzzed. I looked down at the screen and saw Boone’s gorgeous smile shining up at me.

“That’s my ride.” I stood. “Thanks for dinner, Jeffrey. I assume you’ll be putting it on your parents’ membership?”

He nodded wordlessly.

“Fantastic. See you.” See you never. I turned and marched out of the clubhouse, head held high.

Boone’s pickup was idling in front of the valet stand.

“We really have to stop meeting like this,” he said as I climbed in the passenger side. “Rescuing you from fancy clubs.”

“Very funny.” I slumped in the seat.

“So. Where to?”

I shook my head and looked out the window. “Away from here.”

Boone chuckled and shifted into gear. “You got it, babe.”