The champagne flute in Rose Callahan's hand was half-empty and she was half-drunk and she was standing on the balcony of a house she had no business being in, watching the people below dance to music she had no business enjoying.

James Worthington III was down there somewhere. She knew this the way you know the weather is going to change—the air has shifted, the lights have brightened, and there is a moment of collective excitement that tells you he has entered the room.

She took another sip of champagne. It tasted like other people's money, which is to say it tasted exactly like what it was.

"James needs someone to talk to," Daisy had told her an hour ago, with that particular New York accent that makes every sentence sound like a secret being told. "And you're the only one who doesn't seem terrified of him. Which is ridiculous, because he's a Very Good Man, and Very Good Men are the most terrifying things of all."

Rose had laughed. She was still laughing, internally, at the idea of James Worthington III being terrifying. He was the sort of man who said things like "I believe in commitment" at parties where everyone else was saying things like "I believe in nothing in particular, which is its own kind of freedom."

Then the door behind her opened and James walked out onto the balcony, and everything changed.

He was not the James she had known at parties and dinner tables. This James was wearing a suit that had been rumpled by swimming—his tuxedo was dark with water, his hair was plastered to his forehead, and he was shivering in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature.

"Rose," he said. His voice was the same—calm, measured, the voice of a man who has never raised it in his life. But his eyes were different. They were the color of a sky that has just decided to stop being gray.

"Hey," she said. "You're wet."

"I know."

"You fell in the pool."

"I know."

He leaned against the railing and looked out at the garden, at the dancers, at the life of the party that continued without him the way a ship continues without the man who fell overboard.

"Can I ask you something?" he said.

"Always."

"Who are you?"

Rose stared at him. This was not the question she had expected. She had expected: "Are you okay?" or "Do you need help?" or "Let me dry you off." Instead: "Who are you?" as though his amnesia had not wiped his own identity but had neatly spared everyone else's.

"I'm Rose," she said.

"Rose," he repeated. "Rose what?"

"Callahan. Rose Callahan."

"Rose Callahan." He said her full name the way a man reads a sign that tells him the depth of water he's about to wade into. "Do I know you, Rose Callahan?"

The honest answer was: not really. She knew his mother's charity galas. She knew he donated to the library. She knew he had been quietly, relentlessly in love with her for approximately eight months, a fact that had made her uncomfortable because she was not ready to be loved by someone who loved so quietly and so completely.

"No," she said finally. "I don't think you do."

That should have been the end of it. She should have introduced him to Daisy. She should have told him about the party, the pool, the accident. She should have been the good hostess.

Instead, she said: "Come with me."

He followed her to the city the next day, and then to the villa in Long Island that belonged to a friend of a friend, and then into a life that was not his life and not hers but was, in some way that neither of them could articulate, more real than either of them had experienced before.

In the villa, James was a blank page. He did not know who he was, which meant he did not know who he was not allowed to be. He tried things—cooking (badly), painting (terribly), reading (with an intensity that made Rose feel like she was watching a man learn to see for the first time).

He was not boring. That was the first thing she noticed. Boring is a choice. Boring is a commitment to the mediocre. James was not committed to anything except truth, and truth in 1925 was a radical act.

One night, he found her at the piano. She was not a good player—she had lessons as a child in Brooklyn, the kind of lessons mothers buy to convince themselves their daughters have culture—but she played anyway, when no one was watching, because music was the one thing in her life that had never asked her to be anyone other than what she was.

James stood in the doorway and listened. When she finished, he walked over and pressed a chord—a wrong one, deliberately wrong—and Rose laughed.

"You heard that?"

"I heard everything."

"That's not charming."

"It's honest." He sat beside her on the bench. They were close enough that their shoulders almost touched. "You play that piece like you're trying to tell me something."

"I play it because I like it."

"Then why do you look sad when you play it?"

Rose stopped. She looked at him—really looked at him—and saw something in his face that made her want to both run and stay forever. He had no agenda. He was not performing. He was simply seeing her, in the way that only someone who has forgotten everything can see someone new.

"Maybe I'm sad because I like things too much," she said.

"Maybe that's not sadness," James said. "Maybe that's the opposite."

She looked at him in the candlelight and thought: this is the man I've been running from. Not because he's boring. But because he's the only person who has ever looked at me and seen me, and I have spent my entire life making sure no one could do that.

The mirror in the bedroom told the truth that the piano would not. Rose stood before it at midnight, removing her makeup with a cloth and water, watching the woman underneath emerge layer by layer. Themakeup was careful, calculated, a masterpiece of controlled appearance. The woman underneath was tired.

She put down the cloth and spoke to the mirror, to herself, to the empty room: "What am I so afraid of?"

The mirror had no answer. But somewhere down the hall, in a room that was not his room, James Worthington III was sleeping peacefully—the way a man sleeps when he has nothing left to pretend. The next morning, Rose found herself watching James with a new kind of attention—the kind that separates observation from performance. He was making coffee in the kitchen, and the way he did it—measuring the grounds, warming the pot, humming that strange melody—was so earnest that it made her want to cry.

"You know," she said from the doorway, "most men would just use a machine."

James turned, holding the coffee pot like it was something precious. "Machines don't taste like intention."

She almost laughed. Almost. But the laugh caught somewhere behind her ribs and turned into something else—something that felt like the beginning of a feeling she had been running from for longer than she cared to admit.

Daisy called that afternoon. "So how's your mysterious stranger?"

"He's not mysterious," Rose said. "He's... amnesiac."

"Same thing," Daisy replied cheerfully. "Except amnesiacs are more honest. They don't even know they're performing."

Rose looked at James across the table, where he was attempting to read a newspaper upside down and not noticing. "Maybe that's the point."

"Rose Callahan," Daisy said, and for the first time, her voice lost its performative quality. "Are you in love with him or are you just using him as an excuse to not have to deal with James Worthington III?"

Rose put down the phone. She looked at James. He had given up on the newspaper and was now drawing little figures in the condensation on the window.

And for the first time in her life, Rose Callahan had no script, no direction, and no idea what the character was supposed to do next.

Author Note & Copyright: