Rebecca Serle - In Five Years

David begins working at a hedge fund started by his ex-boss at Tishman. I get promoted to senior associate.

Four and a half years pass. Winters and falls and summers. Everything goes according to plan. Everything. Except that David and I don’t get married. We never set a date. We say we’re busy, which we are. We say we don’t need to until we want kids. We say we want to travel. We say we’ll do it when the time is right—and it never is. His dad has heart trouble one year, we move the next. There are always reasons, and good ones, too, but none of them are why. The truth is that every time we get close, I think about that night, that hour, that dream, that man. And the memory of it stops me before I’ve started.

After that night, I went to therapy. I couldn’t stop thinking about that hour. The memory was real, like I had, in fact, lived it. I felt like I was going crazy and because of that, I didn’t want to talk to anyone, not even Bella. What would I say? I woke up in the future? Where I had sex with a stranger? The worst thing is, Bella would probably believe me.

I know that therapists are supposed to help you figure out whatever insanity is lingering in your brain, and then help you get rid of it. So the following week I went to someone on the Upper West Side. Highly recommended. In New York, all the best shrinks are on the Upper West Side.

Her office was bright and friendly, if not a little sterile. There was one giant plant. I couldn’t figure out if it was fake or not. I never touched it. It was on the other side of the sofa, behind her chair, and it would have been impossible to get to.

Dr. Christine. One of those professionals who uses their first name with their title to seem more relatable. She didn’t. She wore swaths of Eileen Fisher—linens and silks and cottons spun so excessively I had no idea what her shape even was. She was sixty, maybe.

“What brings you in today?” she asked me.

I had been in therapy once, after my brother died. A fatal drunk driving accident fifteen years ago that had the police show up at our house at 1:37 in the morning. He wasn’t the one at the wheel. He was in the passenger seat. What I heard first were my mother’s screams.

My therapist had me talk about him, our relationship, and then draw what I thought the accident might have looked like, which seemed condescending for a twelve year old. I went for a month, maybe more. I don’t remember much, except that afterward my mom and I would stop for ice cream, like I was seven and not nearly thirteen. I often didn’t want any, but I always got two scoops of mint chocolate chip. It felt important to play along then, and for a long time after.

“I had a strange dream,” I said. “I mean, something strange happened to me.”

She nodded. Some of the silk slipped. “Would you like to tell me about it?”

I did. I expressed to her that David and I had gotten engaged, that I’d had too much champagne, that I’d fallen asleep, and that I’d woken up in 2025 in a strange apartment with a man I’d never met before. I left out that I slept with him.

She looked at me for a long time once I stopped talking. It made me uncomfortable.

“Tell me more about your fiancé.”

I was immediately relieved. I knew where she was headed with this. I was unsure about David, and therefore my subconscious was projecting a kind of alternative reality where I was not subject to the burdens of what I had just committed to in getting engaged.

“He’s great,” I said. “We’ve been together for over two years. He’s very driven and kind. He’s a good match.”

She smiled then, Dr. Christine. “That’s wonderful,” she said. “What do you think he’d say about this experience you’re ­describing?”

I didn’t tell David. I couldn’t, obviously. What would I possibly say? He’d think I was crazy, and he’d be right.

“He’d probably say it was a dream and that I’m stressed out about work?”

“Would that be true?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

“It seems to me,” she said. “That you’re unwilling to say this was just a dream, but you’re not sure what it would mean if it wasn’t.”

“What else could it possibly be?” I genuinely wanted to know where she was going with this.

She sat back in her chair. “A premonition, maybe. A psychosomatic trip.”

“Those are just other words for dreams.”

She laughed. She had a nice one. The silk slipped again. “Sometimes unexplainable things happen.”

“Like what?”

She looked at me. Our time was up.

After our session, I felt strangely better. Like in going in there I could see the whole thing for what it was: crazy. I could give the whole weird dream to her. It was her problem now. Not mine. She could file it with all her divorces, sexual incompatibilities, and mother issues. And for four and a half years, I left it there.

Chapter Six

It’s a Saturday in June, and I’m going to meet Bella for brunch. We haven’t seen each other in almost two months, which is the longest we’ve ever gone, including her London sojourn of 2015, when she “moved” to Notting Hill for six weeks to paint. I’ve been buried in work. The job is great, and impossible. Not hard, impossible. There is a week’s worth of work in every day. I’m always behind. I see David for five minutes, maybe, every day when one of us wakes up sleepily to great the other. At least we’re on the same schedule. We’re both working toward a life we want, and will have. Thank god we understand each other.

Today it’s raining. It’s been a wet spring, this one of 2025, so this is not out of the ordinary, but I ordered some new dresses and I was hoping to wear one. Bella is always calling my style “conservative,” because ninety percent of the time I’m in a suit, and I thought I’d surprise her with something unexpected today. No luck. Instead, I tug on jeans, a white Madewell T-shirt, and my Burberry trench and ankle rain boots. Temperature says sixty-five degrees. Enough to sweat with a top layer but be freezing without one.

We’re meeting at Buvette, a tiny French café in the West Village we’ve been going to for years. They have the best eggs and croque monsieur on the planet—and their coffee is strong and rich. Right now, I need a quart.

Also, it’s one of Bella’s favorite spots. She knows all the waiters. When we were in our twenties, she’d go there to sketch.

I end up taking a cab because I don’t want to be late, even though I know Bella will be running fifteen minutes behind. Bella is chronically fifteen to twenty minutes late everywhere she goes.

But when I arrive she’s already there, seated in the window at the two-top.

She’s dressed in a long, flowing floral dress that’s wet at the edges—at five-foot-three she’s not tall enough for it—and a crimson velvet blazer. Her hair is down and falls around her in tufts, like spools of wool. She’s beautiful. Every time I see her I’m reminded just how much.

“This cannot possibly be happening,” I say. “You beat me here?”

She shrugs, her gold hoops bouncing against her neck. “I couldn’t wait to see you.” She gets out of her chair and pulls me into a tight hug. She smells like her. Tea tree and lavender, a hint of cinnamon.

“I’m wet,” I yelp, but I don’t let go. It feels good. “I missed you, too.”

I tuck my umbrella under my chair and loop my raincoat over the back. Inside it’s chillier than I thought it would be. I rub my hands together.

“You look older,” she says.

“Gee, thanks.”

“That’s not what I mean. Coffee?”

I nod.

She holds her cup up to the waiter. She comes here far more often than I do. Her place is three blocks away on the corner of Bleecker and Charles, a floor-through level of a brownstone her dad bought for her two years ago. It’s three bedrooms, impeccably decorated in her colorful, bohemian, I-didn’t-even-think-about-this-but-it-looks-gorgeous perfect style.