Maybe Baby by Kim Golden

I'm meeting Eddy for a drink."
    " Ah. Well, give my regards to your lovely cousin."
    " Are we going out for dinner tonight?"
    " No, Jeppe's coming over, so I thought we could go out some other time."
    " Maybe I'll have dinner with Eddy, then. Give you two some time alone."
    " Laney, I'd like it if you were here with us." Niklas finally lowered his tablet. He leveled a stern look at me. "You haven't seen Jesper in two weeks."
    " I thought you'd want some father-son time, alone," I said, blanketing my irritation with a falsely bright smile. A part of me said I ought to be there. At least his son and I got along when Siri wasn't around. "I'll be back by around six-thirty or seven," I told him. "Are we eating here or going out?"
    Monday was usually our Date Night, the one night a week when we let someone else cook for us, or we walked to the Grand on Sveavägen to catch a film and then have a drink afterwards. We'd agreed on it after the hiccup with Karolina. It was supposed to be our way of reconnecting, and it worked for a while.
    " I'm cooking," Niklas said. "Maybe you and I can go out tomorrow."
    " All right. I'll be back in a bit."
    Then I made my escape down the birdcage-style el evator. I told myself I needed fresh air. I needed to move since I'd been stuck behind my desk all day. Really, I needed a break from the tension in the apartment. Ever since Niklas found my phone, he'd been keeping his distance in a far too obvious manner. I wasn't used to this from him. He wasn't usually the sort of person who withheld affection. And, generally, when I worked from home, he found excuses to distract me. He'd suddenly feel the need to take a nap on the IKEA sofa in my office, or he'd realize now was the time to read a book I'd recommended to him—a book that just happened to be in the bookcase behind my desk. Today, he’d stayed away, sequestered in the room he'd made into his office. I wanted the calm again. The only way I could have it back would be to forget about Mads and focus on making things better with Niklas. God, I needed advice....
    So I headed to Eddy. She was my oracle for anything to do with relationships. I didn't have a sister I could call. And moving to Sweden hadn't done much to pr eserve the friendships I'd had. I'd lost touch with so many people simply because of distance. But I'd also learned not to put much faith in holding on to acquaintances. I only had Ingrid, Anton, and Eddy as the people who were the touchstones in my life. And Eddy was pretty much the only family I had.
    I needed Eddy to guide me through this love disaster I'd created.
    *      *      *
    Sometimes, when I walked out of our apartment building, I imagined being spirited away—by my restlessness, my inability to connect with Niklas on a deeper level, by anything—and finding myself in another life. The life I had in Stockholm was nothing like my life in the United States. I'd grown up on the periphery of a rough neighborhood in West Philadelphia. My neighbors weren't bankers and artists. They were the descendants of the Great Migration, men and women who'd come north looking for work and for dreams, and were met with the realization that the whites of the north hated them just as much as their southern counterparts. And whatever dreams they'd had of a better life, of picket fences and making something of themselves, were swallowed and worn down by working two jobs to make ends meet.
    I only took Niklas there once. We were in Philadelp hia for a former classmate's wedding. We rented a car and I drove west on Lancaster Avenue, my knuckles tightening as we left behind the green oasis of Drexel University's campus. All too quickly the run-down houses and abandoned storefronts were upon us. Niklas tensed beside me. He didn't say a word when I turned left and drove along Baring Street. I stopped in front of the two-story row house where I'd grown up. A new family lived there—yuppies from the looks of it. The bricks had been