You Should Have Known Read Online Free PDF Page B

count on that ‘you just know,’ and they dismiss people they don’t respond to right away. I actually think there are lots of good matches for each person, and they cross our paths all the time, but we’re so wedded to the idea of love at first sight that we can miss the really great people who don’t come with a thunderbolt attached.”
    â€œCan you look over this way?” Rebecca said.
    Can you shut up, in other words? Grace thought. She looked at Rebecca, who was seated in Grace’s own chair, at Grace’s own desk. To compensate for this unpleasant fact, she felt herself smile broadly. That was even more unpleasant.
    But there was another thing, too, and as she sat, uncomfortably angled, uncomfortably twisted, that other thing began to move up through the situational distraction of being photographed for Vogue (in whose pages, she was quite sure, not a single reader would mistake her for a supermodel) and the displacement of being on her own couch, until it had set itself indisputably before her. That thing was the unalterable fact that she—like Ron the photographer, like any number of patients in this very room, like an unknowable portion of the future readers of her book—had absolutely just known , the first time she had laid eyes on Jonathan Sachs, that she would marry and love him for the rest of her life. It was a truth she had hidden from Sarabeth the agent and Maud the editor and J. Colton the publicist, just as she was now hiding it from Rebecca the about-to-be-married writer and Ron, who, like her, had just known that he had met the woman he was supposed to marry. That night she had crossed the Charles River in the first trill of autumn, with her friend Vita and Vita’s boyfriend, to go to a Halloween party in some ghoulish cavern in the medical school. The others had gone in first, but she had wanted the bathroom and gotten herself lost in the basement, turning like a mouse through underground corridors, losing herself, growing increasingly irritated, increasingly afraid. And then, very suddenly, she was not only not alone, but in the presence of—the company of—a man she recognized instantly, though she was quite sure she had never seen him before. He was a scrawny guy with neglected hair and several days’ growth of inelegant beard. He wore a Johns Hopkins T-shirt and carried a plastic tub of dirty clothes with a book about the Klondike wobbling on top, and when he saw her, he smiled: an earth-on-its-axis-halting smile that had lit up the grimy hallway, making her stop on a dime, changing her life. Before Grace had taken her next breath, this still-unnamed man had become the most trusted, valued, and desired person in her life. She just knew. So she had chosen him, and now, as a result, she was having the right life, with the right husband, the right child, the right home, the right work. For her, it really had happened that way. But she couldn’t say that. Especially not now.
    â€œHey, can we do a few close-ups? You mind?” said Ron.
    Should she mind? Grace thought. Did she get a vote?
    â€œAll right,” said Rebecca, confirming that the question was not for her.
    Grace leaned forward. The lens seemed so close, only inches away. She wondered if she could look through it and see his eye on the other side; she peered deep into it, but there was only the glassy dark surface and the thunderous clicking noise: no one was in there. Then she wondered if she would feel the same if it were Jonathan holding the camera, but she actually couldn’t remember a single time when Jonathan had held a camera, Click , let alone a camera this close to her face. She was the default photographer in her family, though with none of the bells and whistles currently on display in her little office, and with none of Ron’s evident skill, and with no passion at all for the form. She was the one who took the birthday pictures and the camp visiting-weekend