WE HAD SO MUCH IN COMMON

By Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

We met a month after Boston shut down, the only way you could meet anyone during a stay-at-home order: through a screen, our features freckled with pixels. I’d stretched his profile photo with my fingertips, gravitating to his easy smile and a biog almost identical to mine. Wishing I was on an aeroplane right now.

I’d used dating apps before, but the interactions tended to feel mechanical, and I longed for an organic connection, a story to tell my kids one day.

Lockdown had turtled people into their own relationships. Friends with kids complained about Zoom school; the singles, like me, were bored and lonely. My best friend Ellie quarantined with her boyfriend Brad. She and I had a trip to Croatia booked for April, but it was rescheduled to September.

Max was easy to talk to. Messages through the app progressed to exchanging phone numbers, which led to all-day texting sessions. Max was a traveller, too, and we talked often about the places we most wanted to go to.

“Want to Facetime?” I wrote, feeling bold.

“How about a phone call?” he texted back. “I’m old-fashioned that way.”

Ellie was sceptical. “Maybe he’s using a fake picture and doesn’t want you to know. Be careful, OK?”

My single friends were optimistic.

I was in a pandemic romcom and had met someone I was falling for without ever seeing. Max and I had so much in common. We were both happiest living a nomadic lifestyle, discovering the world in unconventional ways. He loved that my Instagram was devoted to travel. He didn’t have his own social media: he really was old-fashioned that way.

I was relieved when Max’s voice matched his pixellated face. To learn that not only could we text all day, but we could talk for hours, intensely personal conversations, until my phone threatened to run out of battery life. It was a renaissance of my teenage years, spilling my soul to boyfriends on my parents’ landline. “You hang up first.” “No, you.” As things started to open again, I asked if he wanted to meet up. But he was busy with

work, so it never happened.

Ellie called me one day. “I’m engaged!” she squealed. I would be her maid of honour, of course.

I imagined bringing Max to the wedding as my date. Maybe I’d even be the next one with a ring on her finger.

But a week later, she called again, tearfully apologetic. “I can’t go to Croatia,” she said. Her excuse was practical: she and Brad were paying for their wedding and she needed the money. She hoped one of our mutual friends could take her place.

I hung up and burst into tears. My suitcase had been packed for weeks. In my spare time, I used Duolingo to learn Croatian.

“What if I went?” Max said that night. “I’ve always wanted to go there.”

My jaw went slack. Could I really take a trip with a man I hadn’t even seen face to face? It was reckless, irresponsible. It was also the most exciting thing I’d ever done.

I knew Max, and he knew me. This was my romance. It would be an incredible story to tell our kids. I said yes.

Had Max even existed – or did my brain conjure him up from loneliness?

Max matched his photo. At the airport, he waited with a duffel bag under a muscular arm. The relief was so immense that I wanted to drop my luggage and jump into those arms, but I was afraid he wouldn’t catch me. So I smiled as I approached him, watching him grin back.

“Bailey,” he said, reaching in for a hug. “It’s so great to meet you in person.”

There was a stilted formality, the acute vulnerability of people who’d said so much in more anonymous spaces. But on the flight, Max gave me a crossword puzzle book. He’d remembered.

In Dubrovnik, we drank rozulin, our limbs warm and loose. Behind the filter of alcohol, I felt safe. We shared a room with two beds, the reservation Ellie and I had made. Instead of waiting weeks to see each other bleary-eyed in the morning, we were thrust into it instantly. Max learnt that I needed black coffee to start the day. I learnt that he snored.

In Split, we were mistaken for a couple. In Hvar Town, we acted like one, Max reaching for my hand as we climbed the Spanish Fortress. On a wooden boat in the Blue Cave, he pulled me toward him. Our lips brushed ever so slightly.

That night we shared a bed, and every night after. The sex felt cosmic, like destiny. Max took photos of me: in front of the Diocletian’s Palace, on the cliffs of Dugi Otok. I posted them on Instagram. Max didn’t want to be in the pictures. I liked how he wasn’t living to make other people jealous, but actually existing in the moment. Zagreb was our last destination and I spent it in subdued denial, not wanting to come home. Max was withdrawn as well. “I wish we could keep travelling,” I said, and his smile was brief. I wondered, wildly, if he would propose to me. I wasn’t even technically his girlfriend, but nothing about our relationship was conventional. At Boston Logan, Max kissed me on the cheek and promised to call me later. My body hummed all the way home. “I miss you,” I couldn’t resist texting. He didn’t reply. I figured he was exhausted from jet lag.

He didn’t call the next day, either, and didn’t answer my phone calls or texts. I couldn’t even check on him. He had told me his apartment was in Brookline, but I didn’t actually know where he lived. “What should I do?” I asked Ellie. “Just forget about him,” she said. “He’s not worth your time.”

But I hadn’t just given him time. I’d given him Croatia, and now that would be inseparable from the memory of him. I searched in the dating app where we met, but his profile was gone.

I took Ellie’s advice. I forgot about Max. I went through the cycle of anger and bitterness, questioning my own sanity. Had Max even existed, or did my brain conjure him up from loneliness? Had I been a woman talking to herself in her apartment, travelling alone, trailed by the shadow of a romance she desperately craved? But somebody took those photos of me, the ones where I look the happiest I’ve ever been.

If Max was a missing person, maybe I’d be the prime suspect.

Ellie’s rehearsal dinner took place over Zoom, because of another stay-at-home order that restricted gatherings.

She was rightfully devastated. I knew how much energy she’d sunk into the wedding.

I wore the dress I’d bought for the occasion and applied false eyelashes. I took a photo for Instagram.

Ellie beamed as she and Brad gave a toast, the backdrop their living room curtains instead of the Rotunda at the Liberty Hotel. When I put my screen on gallery view, I saw the faces of her guests. Lipstick smiles, champagne glasses in hand, probably wearing pyjama bottoms. I noticed a few friends from college.

And on the bottom left of my screen, his arm looped around a woman I didn’t recognise, was Max. His eyes widened in panic, or maybe not – it was impossible to see nuance in thumbnail size.

My lower lip trembled. I wanted to cry, to scream, but it was Ellie’s rehearsal dinner, and I was her maid of honour.

Afterwards, I asked Ellie who he was, and struggled to describe him, the man I’d dumped all my hopes onto. Max and I had rarely talked about the future. I was afraid of scaring him off and he obviously knew I wouldn’t be in his.

“Oh, I think you mean Matt. He’s one of Brad’s friends. I’ve never met him, though. Where do you know him from?”

Laurie Elizabeth Flynn’s debut crime thriller, The Girls Are All So Nice Here, (HQ, £8.99) is out now