The Second Home by Christina Clancy

Author:Christina Clancy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

TWENTY

Ann

Ann pounded along the Salt and Pepper Bridge and made her way from the Back Bay to the MIT campus. She loved the view of the Boston skyline. She and Noah had moved here when Noah was eleven, almost five years ago. Yet she still felt like a newcomer in the city, still in awe of the old brick buildings, bay windows, turrets, and history, still proud she was able to insert herself, a single mom, into the bustle and flow of the intimidating Northeast, proud she’d found a life here. She could have easily never left Milwaukee, but Boston had always been part of her “Ann with a Plan” vision; it was where she’d always imagined her adult life taking shape. The city had seemed almost mythical to her, especially after her plans to study there had changed so abruptly. It was a city she’d always wanted to live in, near the Cape she loved. She was close, yes, but she always came up with excuses to not make the drive. Now she wished she could have refused to let that single memory of Anthony prevent her from spending more time with her parents.

Instead, she worked. As soon as she finished her MBA at Marquette, she secured a job at BNN, a strategic consulting firm in the Back Bay. Now she was in management, in charge of “top of funnel” channel messaging for an online housewares site. Lately, she was on youth and nursery, one of the “life stages.” She analyzed search data—“industrial chic” was out, “boho” was in, and “glam” was on the rise. She selected pregnant celebrities who were social media influencers to promote their products, reaching out to offer them exclusive contracts and other product-for-publicity arrangements. Her work made her long to have another baby herself and participate in all the shallow consumer excitement that went along with it. When she had Noah, her parents hauled her own crib up from the basement, a crib that would be recalled for a thousand reasons today.

She was good at her job, and had a particularly shrewd eye for data analysis, but all of the management changes her coworkers whispered about had her feeling nervous. As a single mom, the prospect of losing her job terrified her. That evening, she tried to leave her concerns about conversion rates and job security at the office. She didn’t think about her pace or the distance she’d gone, which was unusual, because Ann liked to measure things. She wore a GPS heart rate monitor on her wrist that was as big as a blood pressure cuff. She could upload data from her workouts to her computer and keep track of every step, interval, and heartbeat. Instead of a journal, she kept a training log and tracked it religiously, desperate to see improvement in her speed and endurance. She believed she could always improve.

It was getting dark. She’d meant to head back to the Cape and tackle the list of chores the Realtor

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