Updated Apr 9, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 9: Exit Strategy
Kennedy
Iris from the third-grade hallway had been telling Kennedy about the app for two months.
*You’ll love it*, she’d said, in the particular tone of someone who’d found a system and was invested in its replication. *It’s curated. Not like the other ones. You fill out this whole personality profile and it matches you with compatible people and you actually have things in common.*
Kennedy had downloaded it on a Sunday in a moment of what she’d classified, afterward, as optimism. She’d filled out the personality profile with the same attention she gave her students’ assessments. She had three matches in forty-eight hours, two of whom she’d traded four messages with before concluding they were practicing their small talk more than conducting it, and one — Daniel, 29, graphic designer, three mutual interests including hiking and cooking — who had asked her to dinner in a complete sentence with correct punctuation.
She’d said yes because Tatum’s question was still in her head — *can you actually stop* — and the only honest answer was *I don’t know*, and the way to find out was to try.
The restaurant was Italian, which was good. The restaurant was also in a neighborhood she didn’t know, which was how she ended up in the wrong Italian restaurant for twelve minutes before the right one materialized on her phone’s GPS, which meant she arrived seven minutes late with the particular composure of someone who was performing having it together.
Daniel was already at the table. He stood when she arrived, which she noted positively. He was taller than his photos, which she also noted positively. He said *you made it* in a tone that landed somewhere between warm and the mildest imaginable reproach, which she noted less positively but filed as a small thing.
“Traffic,” she said, sitting down.
“I didn’t have any trouble,” he said pleasantly.
She picked up the menu.
By the time the appetizers arrived she had learned the following:
That Daniel’s previous relationship had ended because she’d been “too focused on her career” to give their relationship the attention it deserved. That this was, in his view, a quality issue in women of her generation generally — *not you specifically, obviously* — which required clarification because he’d just applied it to her specifically. That his opinions about the education system were extensive and pre-formed, and the fact that she worked in it was an opportunity for him to present them rather than a reason to ask her anything.
She ate two pieces of bruschetta and thought about exit strategies.
The problem with exit strategies was that she’d been raised by a woman who’d called rudeness a form of cowardice, and she’d internalized this to a degree that made her extremely competent at finding graceful exits and extremely reluctant to use them. She would sit here for another forty-five minutes eating pasta she didn’t want and smiling at the pauses that required a smile and leave feeling tired in a way that had nothing to do with the time of day.
Unless.
She picked up her phone. She opened a message thread. She stared at it for a moment and then typed: *If I texted you an address right now would that be a strange thing to do.*
She stared at what she’d written.
She sent it.
Three minutes passed. She was listening to Daniel explain why standardized testing was underutilized as a metric — he was not wrong, technically, and also wrong in every way that mattered — when her phone lit up.
*Depends on the reason.*
She typed: *I’m on a date that’s going badly and I need a reason to leave and I’m aware this is an unreasonable thing to ask.*
Thirty seconds: *Address.*
She sent it. She put her phone face down on the table. She ate the rest of her bruschetta and smiled at a pause.
He arrived twenty-two minutes later.
She’d been watching the door in the way she hoped looked like mild distraction, and she saw him before he saw her — dark jacket, the easy unhurried way he moved, scanning the room with the particular competence of someone who assessed spaces quickly. Then he found her and crossed the restaurant in a straight line.
“Hey,” he said, stopping at the table. He looked at Daniel. “Sorry to interrupt. Kennedy, your brother called about your mom — I said I’d come get you.”
Kennedy stood up. She reached for her bag with the practiced speed of someone who had been ready for precisely this for twenty minutes.
“I’m so sorry,” she told Daniel. “Family emergency.” She meant it as a complete sentence.
He looked at Vaughn. He looked at her. He said *of course* in a tone that suggested he had questions but had arrived at a calculation about whether they were worth asking, and the calculation had gone against asking.
She was outside on the sidewalk before he finished processing.
The night was cold — mid-November now, properly cold — and she stood on the sidewalk and breathed it in and felt her shoulders drop approximately two inches.
“Thank you,” she said.
“How bad was it?”
“He told me women of my generation have a career focus problem.” She paused. “In the first fifteen minutes.”
Vaughn made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one. “I was parked two blocks over. Owen had tickets to something at the venue on Fifth.”
“Did you leave?”
“I’ll tell him a thing came up.”
She looked at him. He was standing on the sidewalk in the November dark with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking entirely untroubled by the fact that he’d left whatever he’d been doing to come to an Italian restaurant on forty minutes’ notice because she’d sent him an address.
“Vaughn,” she said.
“Kennedy,” he said.
“This is —” She stopped. She didn’t finish the sentence.
“I know,” he said.
They stood there on the sidewalk with the city doing its cold November thing around them, and she thought about Tatum’s question, and the four days since the bench on Fletcher, and the fact that she’d opened his message thread out of all the other possible threads she could have opened.
“Walk me home?” she said.
He fell into step beside her without a word.
They were half a block away before she laughed — a real one, the kind she couldn’t have managed an hour ago. “He had notes about standardized testing.”
“Educational policy on a first date.”
“He’d thought about it a great deal.”
“Second date material, maybe.”
“There will not be a second date.”
He looked sideways at her, and she caught the corner of it — the slight curve, the warmth — and looked at the sidewalk ahead of them.
They walked four blocks in the November cold, their breath visible and the city amber around them, and by the time her building came into view she’d stopped thinking about Daniel entirely, which was itself a kind of answer to the question she’d been asking.
She stopped at her front steps.
“Thank you,” she said. “For real.”
“Anytime.” He said it simply, which made it worse.
She looked at him in the dark. She thought about Tatum’s warning and her father’s affair and the eight months of guilt he’d carried and the forty minutes on the bench and all the reasons this was complicated and all the reasons she was standing here anyway.
“I’ll see you,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “You will.”
She went inside. She did not look back, but she heard him standing there for a moment before his footsteps moved away down the block, and she stood in her lobby with her coat still on for a full minute before she took the stairs.
She was not going to be able to stop.
She’d been trying to find that out. Now she knew.
Reader Reactions