What if Josh didn't pick Liza up that night after babysitting?

"Are you sure you're 26?"

Liza laughed when she heard it, sitting casually on a couch in the audacious living room of her very rich, very tall, very smart and very handsome boss. Or boss's boss.

She had been pretending to be 26 for a few months now and didn't know if she had it down. Every move felt like a trap. Every time she spoke, she thought she'd be found out. Right now, though, she felt like her old self.

The whiskey had gone down smooth and warm and she wondered if Charles was surprised she readily took it. What did millennials drink — rose? Something fruity? When she was the age she was pretending to be now, she had a toddler but still drank whiskey a few times a year, at weddings or on the really bad days after Caitlin went to sleep.

The drink loosened her up, always, and tonight it made her feel nice. But she wasn't so far gone to tell herself to change the subject away from age before she blew her own lie up, one drink in.

"This house, it's beautiful," she said. "Nicole gave me a brief tour. How long have you lived here?"

Charles looked around the formal living room.

"Oh, this?," he laughed. Nice, Liza thought. At least he's self aware.

"I actually grew up here. Parents got it for a steal," he said, laughing under his breath. He took another sip.

"I — we moved in a few years after Nicole was born," he said. "My dad passed away a few years before and my mom wanted something smaller."

"Is she -" Liza began, and Charles shook his head.

"She died a few years ago," he said. "I'm an only child. My parents got together a bit older. She was actually - "

He paused, and he looked away from Liza.

"- She worked at Empirical. An editor. Very successful in her own right, she'd want me to say. She was focused on her career, and always said she didn't want to get married. But then she met my father, and after a bit of avoiding it I guess you can say..."

"The heart won out," Liza said, and smiled. Charles smiled back.

"My mom continued working, and later left to write her own books. Historical nonfiction. A cookbook. A travel guide. Anita Brooks, the trailblazer. Her best friend was Belinda La Croix — she was her editor, actually," he said.

Liza's face lit up. "The queen of the romance novel!"

"So you know her!," he said, shocked. "She does well for us still but I never know how the ...younger generation takes to her."

"She's a classic," she said. "And still relevant. Strong powerful women having good sex!" She blushed. Charles eyes widened.

"Belinda certainly has a way with romance," he said. "She was always the best-dressed woman in the room, and as a kid I thought she was some sort of princess. Always in pink. Stood out amongst the really stuffy people."

He paused.

"I always feel a bit silly around all this...wealth," he said. "My parents made sure I knew there was life beyond our little world. But it's easy to forget."

"This doesn't seem like such a bad world," Liza said. "It's better than the suburbs."

Charles laughed. "Is that where you're from?"

It had been so long since someone asked Liza about her life - about her real life, her childhood and the stuff besides her age - that she paused.

"Me? Yes. New Jersey. Not so bad," she said. "But not New York."

"Nothing is," he said. "I like New Jersey. Did you ... did you always want to work in publishing?"

After he said this he stood up and grabbed the carafe of whiskey.

"Are you anticipating you'll need more of that to listen as I describe my path into the world of books?"

"No," he said. "You might need it so I get the true story."

He leaned in and poured nearly to the top of her glass and Liza felt her face get hot. This was the closest she had been to him, and she she suddenly realized what he smelled like. Clean, if that made sense. So now this beautiful man had a smell associated with him, and Liza looked away.

"I, uh, I think I always wanted to work in books, once I figured out that I could," she said. "I used to think books were just imagined. My mom told me I could write my own books one day, or work on them, and then I'd always be around them."

"You didn't want to be a librarian?" he asked.

"The pay is probably the same," she said, but then regretted it. Would Charles think she was calling his company cheap?

"If you were a librarian, you wouldn't get the honor of working with the even-keeled and always amenable Diana Trout," he said, and then she really laughed.

"Oh, I'm not going there..." she said, and leaned back a bit. She was getting more comfortable on boss's boss's couch, now laughing at a joke he made about her boss.

"She's the best in the business, but I know she can be a bit much," he said. "She seems to really like you, though - and you've lasted much longer than all the others."

"Oh yea?"

"I think they average 3 weeks," he said. "But I take it you don't want to stay in marketing."

"I'm actually very happy just being around it all," she said "I didn't think I'd ever get back -"

Liza caught herself. What she wanted to say was that she didn't think she'd ever get back into publishing after taking nearly two decades off to raise her daughter, after going bankrupt through her husband's love of gambling. How with every interview she had to re-explain her absence, and the reactions from the people interviewing her seemed to get worse every time. How just being around it all felt like a life preserver in what had started to feel liked a deeper and darker ocean.

" - into the swing of things, after ... college," she said.

"Well I'm glad you got back into the... swing of things," Charles said. "I can tell you're a very smart young woman."

"Thank you," she said, looking away and tracing the rim of her glass.

"When you're not reading romance novels, what else do you like to read?," Charles asked.

As a teenager, Liza vowed to marry a man who always asked her about books. She knew even then it was rare; the high school boys didn't seem interested, and even at Dartmouth, where she studied literature, the boys there weren't really interested in what she read. They would just ask so they could quickly talk about what *they* liked.

Liza leaned back on the couch, her head rising up to the ceiling.

"That is a hard question," she said. "I loved 'Americanah,' and anything Zadie Smith. Irish literature — Bram Stoker is my favorite. But I can't leave out the classics. I read so much Hemingway in college I wanted to move to Paris."

"Hemingway, huh?," Charles said.

He paused, and looked at Liza.

"Can I, can I show you something?" He asked. He stood up. "Wait here."

Liza suddenly realized how late it was, although she didn't know for sure. She hadn't checked her phone in what felt like hours.

Charles stood up and tentatively put his glass down on the table. He made a left turn into a room Nicole had shown her - a study, or office - and emerged holding a large folder.

He sat down next next to Liza now and laid the folder out on the coffee table in front of them.

"My father had a pretty big collection of letters from authors," he said. "He collected a lot of things, and I've gotten rid of a lot. No sense in keeping it all.

But I kept this set. Hemingway and Marlena Dietrich's love letters," he said. "The 20th century version of sexting."

"They were a thing?" Liza asked, her eyes opening up.

"Not exactly," Charles said. "They said they were victims of ... unsynchronized passion. Could never match up. But the letters are very ... well, now that I think of it, maybe I shouldn't have brought them out."

Liza laughed.

"Oh, I've read worse, and I've said worse, too," she said. They looked at each other for a beat too long.

"Do you hear - " Liza said. There were tiny footsteps on the stairs.

"Daddy?" It was Bianca. "Daddy I looked for you -"

When she turned the corner her face lit up when she saw Liza.

"You're still here!" she said, and ran quickly over to hug Liza.

"Yea, I got ... tied up a bit talking to your dad," she said.

"What am I, chopped liver?," Charles joked, and she ran to him. "What are you doing out of bed?"

"Daddy, I had a bad dream," she said, looking down. "I saw mommy in my dream."

Charles looked quickly at Liza — who felt like she was suddenly intruding on her boss's boss's private life, and like she wanted to run or collapse into the couch. But she was stuck.

"I know you miss mommy," he said, pulling Bianca closer into his chest. He kissed the top of her head, and Liza nearly melted at the sight of it. She was in trouble, she thought.

"I miss her too. What did she say in the dream?"

"She said she was never coming back," she said.

"Bianca, mommy is coming back, but we just don't know when. She's studying, remember?"

Bianca clung to Charles's neck, burying herself into it. He glanced at Liza, and she pointed towards the door.

"I should -" she mouthed.

"Wait - " he whispered.

"Bianca," he said. "Liza is going home now. Can we say goodbye, and then I'll tuck you in?"

Bianca smiled. "Can you read me two stories?"

"I will read you as many stories as you want, love," he said. She jumped off his lap and then ran to hug Liza, who was just standing up.

"Good night Liza," she said. "Will you come back soon to babysit?"

"I uh - I would be happy to," she said.

"You can hang out with daddy after," Bianca replied - and Liza and Charles both looked at each other, guilty.

"Oh, I, I would like that," Liza said, overstepping, she thought, but she was tired and why not?

"Here -," Charles said, too quickly, and gave her his cell phone. "Put your address in and I'll get you an Uber."

He walked with her downstairs while they wait. It would arrive in 5 minutes, but Liza wished it would take longer.

"I'm, I'm sorry for that upstairs," he said. "She's been waking up a few nights a week with dreams like that. Sometimes she comes into my bed and - I don't even know how hard this is on them, and every night I just ... I don't know if I'm ever doing the right thing."

"You're a great dad, I can tell," Liza said.

Charles's face dropped as he looked at her. "Thank you, Liza. That means a lot, really," he said.

"I know when you're a parent you think everything you do is wrong. And then you're thrown into a situation like this, I'm sure you felt completely blindsided by your wife. And questioned everything. But you had to ... keep it all together for the girls," she said. "You're doing a great job."

Charles - still wearing half of his tux, and smelling faintly of whiskey - rushed in to hug Liza.

"Thank you," he whispered

Liza's phone buzzed as the Uber pulled up.

"My ride's here," she said, and they pulled away.

"Oh, right, well - uh, get home safe," Charles said.

Liza got into the backseat of the Uber and smiled the whole ride back to Brooklyn.