Here at Last

Chapter 1

David
and I had been together for
four
years when I left him.  We had discussed marriage and kids and whether or not we wanted to spend the rest of our lives in Morristown, New Jersey.
With our families there and our love for New York City, we couldn’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else.

We
’d
met in high scho
ol during our freshman year.
I ha
d been into sports and science, and he was
more interested in
history
and English. Moving in different circles,
we knew one another
but
never
hung
out together
until our
fifteen-year
high school
reunion
at the
Hyatt
Morristown
.
We first saw each other at the bar and tried to talk, but the music was so loud that we couldn’t hear one another.
W
hen w
e walked out into the hotel lobby
,
we
found some overstuffed chairs and spent the next two hours talking about the directions that our lives had taken.

David ha
d gone on to Yale to study English literature
and had worked as a high school English teacher for a few years prior to getting his masters and taking a job at a local community college where he’d been ever since.

I’d stayed closer to home, double majoring in math and physics at Princeton.
Fascinated by astrophysics, I’d spent three summers conducting research at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.
Alt
hough I’d had the idea that I would eventually pursue a doctorate and end up teaching, I
’d
got
ten
as far as a master’s degree in physics before acknowledging my mounti
ng student loan debt and deciding
to take a break from school to earn an income.

I had taken a job as a physicist at Hastings
-Magritte
International, a scientific consulting firm that did its own in-house research
for
a number of government agencies and private companies around the world. Although Hastings was based in New York, my job involved a lot of travel, and I was on the road about twenty out of every thirty days – home just long enough to do laundry, run a few errands, and have lunch with my sister, friends, or parents.

It went on like that for about six years until I saw a job opening at ECM International, another reputable scientific consulting firm located in New York.
At ECM,
I worked on a research team supervised by Grant Carroll, a big-name physi
cist who took me under his wing and encouraged
me to get my doctorate in physics
at the company’s expense.
When Grant died suddenly of a heart attack, the company replaced him with one of his scientific rivals, who
already
had his own
research team and let all of us go
.

O
ut of a job after nearly eight years
at ECM
,
Hastings asked me to consider coming back.
Although
it would mean a return to a lot of traveling, it wouldn’t be the same grueling schedule that I’d had before. Instead, I
was told that
, unless I was on a special work assignment,
I
would
work from the New York office and could telecommute a day or two each week
.
By the time I’d
seen
David
at the reunion
, I was home enough to actually date someone.

Despite our different interests and backgrounds, my relationship with David
was
surprisingly
easy. 
I loved his
calm and steady
nature and his p
ractical
approach to
our relationship
. When he finally moved in with me
during
our second year together
, i
t worked
out
perfectly.
I was away enough that
he had plenty of time to read and
spend
with friends.
When I was home, we were
more than
content.
Our
rela
tionship was solid and peaceful, and
many of our friends admired and commented on
it
. “
David
will make such a great father!” or “You and
David
are such a great couple
– when are you getting married?
”

After a few years, we beg
a
n to discuss marriage more seriously and whether or not we wanted to have kids. He
wanted
them
, and I was on the fence.
Already in my late 30s, I realized that i
f I was going to
have children,
I’d better do it soon. Though
David
didn’t push the issue, I began to feel pressure to make up my mind one way or the other. But that’s not what tore us apart.