Mary snapped her head up quickly, causing her to cough and choke for a few seconds before she could speak. “No,” she final y said. “I’m not a smoker. I’m quitting.”

“Oh,” he said. “Okay.” He pul ed out an unopened pack of cigarettes and hit them against the heel of his hand, then unwrapped the plastic and crumpled it into a bal , never looking away from her. “I’ve been quitting for years.” He raised his eyebrows and took a cigarette out of his pack, held it in his teeth, and smiled.

Mary gave a weak laugh and held her cigarette low. “I real y thought I would’ve quit by now,” she said. “But it’s been a harder adjustment than I planned on.”

“Because I make you nervous?” Brian asked.

“What? No!” Mary said. She sounded too forceful. She’d meant to sound calm, but it came out in a little yel .

Brian laughed. “It’s okay,” he said. “I mean, when I first started, even the secretaries made me nervous. Everyone knew more than I did.”

“Oh,” Mary said. She realized that he had meant something very different, and she made herself laugh again. “Yeah, wel . I guess it goes away eventual y, right?”

“That it does,” Brian said. He blew circles in the air.

Brian and Mary started smoking together at night. She always hoped she’d see him and she always felt sick when she did. She should not be doing this, she told herself. He was a partner. He was her boss. But she looked forward to their conversations al day. When two days in a row passed without them running into each other on the roof, she felt desperate. When he returned on the third day, she almost jumped off the bench.

Every piece of information she got about him felt like a gift. She gathered al that she knew and went over it in her head. He had two brothers, he was the youngest, he liked gherkins and sour Altoids but hated any kind of soda. He was a Yankees fan, cal ed his grandfather “Oompa,” and looked best in light pink shirts.

They talked about col ege, and she found out that he’d played lacrosse. “Wel ,” she said, “that’s no surprise.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked her.

“Just that, you know, you kind of look like a lacrosse player,” Mary said.

“Real y?” Brian asked. “How do you mean?”

“I mean, you just look like you went to prep school and played lacrosse. I don’t know.” Mary took a drag of her cigarette and tried to sound not stupid. “Al the boarding school boys at my col ege, they al played lacrosse and just had a look.”

“Wel , I did go to prep school,” Brian said. “But I didn’t go to boarding school. My roommate did, though, and he was weird.” Brian stopped talking and Mary wasn’t sure if he was done. Then he flicked his cigarette and continued. “I’d never send my kids to boarding school,” he final y said. “It fucks them up.”

Everything she learned in these five-minute conversations just made Mary like Brian more. And once when she was assigned to his case in a big meeting, he winked at her, and she thought that maybe she didn’t have control of her brain anymore. With each day, there was a greater chance that she was actual y going to act on one of her total y absurd thoughts. There was no going back.

Mary told her friends that there was a cute lawyer at the firm, but that’s as far as she let herself go. They were out for drinks one night and she just wanted to say his name, so she said, “There’s this guy at my firm, Brian, who’s pretty cute. He’s a partner, though.” Then, because she regretted saying his name, she said, “I’m not interested in him or anything. Maybe he’s not even that cute. I can’t tel anymore.”

Lauren nodded and said, “It’s probably the cutest-boy-in-the-class syndrome.”

“The what?” Mary asked.

“Cutest-boy-in-the-class syndrome,” Lauren repeated. “You know, when you spend al your time in a class and it’s boring and you get a crush on a guy, who looks super cute in the class but then when you go out in the real world, he’s not. It’s just that you were only comparing him to that smal group, so there was a curve.”

“Huh,” Isabel a said. “I never thought about it like that.”

“I mean, that’s just the name, but it applies to al sorts of things. Like why camp boyfriends always turned out to be nerds. Or how a work crush can happen on a guy that’s real y not al that great.” She shrugged and tried to look modest, as though she were the one to discover this phenomenon.

“It’s good to remind yourself of it, though,” she said. “So you don’t end up sleeping with a bartender who’s a total life loser, or something like that.”

“Or something like that,” Isabel a said. Mary nodded, as though they had figured it out, but she knew Brian didn’t fal into that category. She didn’t know where he fel , but it wasn’t there.

They kissed one night in her office, late, after everyone else had gone home. The two of them had ordered Thai food, and Mary had eaten very little, afraid that her skirts were going to stop fitting soon, and sure that when Brian looked at her, al he saw was a big ass.

He came into her office and stood behind her so that she couldn’t breathe. When she got up to go get a piece of paper from the other side of the room, she turned and was facing him, their mouths close. And then they were kissing, and she tasted the curry he’d eaten that day. It made her dizzy, but it al seemed a little unreal, like walking outside in pajamas.

When she got home, it was hard to remember if it had happened or not. She barely slept, and when her alarm went off she was happy to get up.

She laughed in the shower as she got ready; giddy and tired, she lathered her hair and laughed.

She didn’t see Brian al day. He wasn’t on the roof that night, and she knew something was wrong. Two more days passed and the only time she saw him was from down the hal as he went into a meeting. She was such an idiot. He was her boss. This was not something she would ever do, and she decided that she would clear it up as soon as she got the chance.

A few nights later, she was in her office and he walked by. Before she knew it, she was cal ing out his name. He looked surprised, but just raised his eyebrows and stepped inside. “Yes?” he said.

“Hi,” Mary said. “So, I just wanted to apologize for the other night. It wasn’t professional, and I regret it.”

“Okay,” Brian said.

“Okay,” Mary said. He looked like he was going to leave, but Mary wanted to say more. “I mean, if there were different circumstances, maybe. But you’re my boss, and we work together.”

“That’s the least of it,” Brian said.

“What?” Mary asked. “What do you mean?”

“Mary,” Brian said, “I’m engaged. You knew that.”

“I didn’t know that,” Mary said. “How could I have known that?”

Brian laughed. He sounded a little evil. “You knew,” he said.

“I didn’t know,” Mary said. Her voice sounded like she wasn’t sure if she believed herself or not.

“Of course you knew,” Brian said. He sounded impatient. “Remember the week after you started when everyone had cake in the big conference room? It was for my engagement. Carla arranged it.” Mary vaguely remembered standing with plastic plates, eating white frosted cake that wasn’t good but was better than sitting at her desk.

“No,” she said. She shook her head. “No, I don’t remember.”

Brian laughed meanly again, and Mary realized that he was maybe the kind of guy who contained the potential to be very cruel, the kind of guy who believed the lies he told. “Look,” he said. “Whatever you need to tel yourself. Just don’t repeat it around here.”

“I wouldn’t tel anyone. Don’t you tel anyone.” This came out sounding stupid, like a child deflecting an insult by repeating it.

Brian just nodded. “Okay,” he said. He turned and walked out of her office.

Mary sat at her desk for a while, not knowing what to do. She’d never done anything this bad in her life. She’d never cheated on anyone, never stolen a friend’s boyfriend, never kissed a guy who was taken. Engaged. The word was weighted.

Had she known? She didn’t think so, but maybe she was just trying to make herself feel better. She considered going to confession and then decided against it. She’d always hated confession, ever since the first time she went, when she told the priest that she was afraid of the albino janitor who cleaned the school.

“I’m afraid of Andy the janitor,” she’d said. “Because he’s an albino.”

“That’s not a sin, Mary,” Father Kel y had said. He’d sounded annoyed, like she didn’t understand what it was she was supposed to tel him. But Father Kel y was wrong. Mary knew that it was a sin to be afraid of Andy the albino. She didn’t want to look down when she saw him, didn’t want to go to the other side of the hal when they passed each other. He always smiled at her, like he understood, and that made the whole thing worse.

She wanted to cry when he did that. She didn’t want to be afraid of him, but she couldn’t help it and it made her feel awful, like she was the worst person in the world. And no matter what Father Kel y said, it was a sin. She knew that much.

Mary turned back to her computer as if she was going to do more work, and then she decided against it. She had to get out of the office. She walked al the way home, even though it was so cold that she couldn’t feel her toes after the first block. She didn’t want to stop for anything, didn’t want to wait for the train to come. She just wanted to keep moving, and so she did. She walked forty blocks to her apartment, and by the time she got there, her nose was running and her eyes were watering, spil ing down her face. She wasn’t crying, though she wished she were. It was just the cold.

She went up to her apartment and started running a bath, which she’d never done the whole time she’d lived there. She had trouble unbuttoning her blouse because her fingers were numb, but she managed, and got into the bath, which was so hot it burned her skin for the first few minutes.