Every Reason to Stay

Chapter Content: By the end of sophomore year, people had stopped saying "Amara and Daniel" and started saying "AmaraandDaniel," one breath, one word, the way you name something that has always existed. Amara Okafor knew this because she heard it everywhere. She heard it in the dining hall, where a girl from her journalism seminar stopped at their table to say, "You two are the reason I still believe in this stuff." She heard it at the bagel cart on Sixth Avenue, where the vendor slid an extra cinnamon-raisin across the counter and said, "For the lovebirds." She heard it now, in Washington Square Park, on the last warm Sunday of September, from a stranger walking a dachshund in a tiny raincoat, who took one look at Daniel's arm around her shoulders and said, "Don't ever change." "We won't," Daniel called back, grinning, and pressed a kiss into her hair. Amara laughed and leaned into him, and for a moment it was easy to believe it. The chess hustlers were shouting at their tables. A saxophone near the fountain was murdering an old jazz standard. Daniel smelled like cedar soap and dry-erase markers from his economics study group, and his hand fit into hers as though they had been cut from the same pattern. Two years and ten months, since the campus tour where he'd asked a question about the meal plan just to hear her answer. She had told her mother about him within a week, which was how her mother knew it was serious. Amara did not tell her mother things. And still, tucked into the pocket of her happiness like a coin she couldn't spend, was the thing she had never told him. In April, a week before the deadline, she had opened an email that began We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected as a finalist. The Lisbon Fellowship: a year of reporting in a newsroom across the Atlantic, fully funded, the kind of opportunity people in her program whispered about in hallways. Amara had read the email four times. Then she had logged into the portal and pressed Withdraw, and told herself she was choosing her life instead of losing it. Only one person alive knew. She had told Joseph at Zoe's birthday in May, two glasses of wine deep, and made him swear on his mother's jollof rice never to repeat it. "Your secret's safe," he'd said. Then, gently: "Does Daniel know?" "No," she'd said. "And he never will." "Coffee," said a voice now, and there was Joseph, materializing at the edge of the bench with a cardboard tray. Joseph Hale had been Daniel's best friend since freshman orientation, when they'd been paired for the same terrible icebreaker. He had an easy, crooked smile and a way of listening as though you were the only person who had said anything interesting all week. "Oat milk, one sugar," he told Amara, handing her a cup. "Black for the future economist." "You remembered," Amara said. "I remember everything," said Joseph lightly. "It's my only real talent." Daniel's phone buzzed on the bench between them. He glanced at the screen and, in one smooth motion, turned it face-down. Amara noticed. She noticed the way she noticed everything, the way she had learned to as a twelve-year-old reading her mother's shoulders when she came in from a double shift, or the silence in the apartment after her father left. She noticed, and she let it go. That night she stayed at Daniel's apartment, the one near Astor Place with the radiator that clanked like a ghost in chains. He went to shower. She curled up on his bed with her laptop, half-reading an article on media ethics, half-listening to the water run. His phone lit up on the nightstand. She did not mean to look. But the screen was bright in the dark room, and the preview was short enough to read at a glance. Joseph: Don't tell her yet. Get through the interview first. The water kept running in the next room. The screen dimmed, then went black, and Amara saw her own face reflected in it, small and pale. Don't tell her yet. Tell her what?