In Five Years

Dannie and David meet at the Rainbow Room, an exclusive restaurant that David had to pull strings to get into. She tells him that she did well in the interview. David seems distracted over dinner; Dannie knows that he’s nervous. When dessert arrives, he proposes, telling her that his love for her is more than just the alignment of their five-year plans. She accepts. Once home, she changes into comfortable clothing and falls asleep on the couch with David.

Dannie wakes on a bed in a strange apartment in Brooklyn, dressed in clothes she recognizes but wasn’t wearing that day. The apartment is decorated beautifully but not in a way Dannie would have chosen. There is an art print on the wall that will be important later; it’s an eye chart that says, “I WAS YOUNG I NEEDED THE MONEY.” An unfamiliar man’s voice calls to her; Dannie is panicked by the appearance of a man she doesn’t know into a bedroom she doesn’t remember entering. She notices the date on the TV news screen: December 15, 2025, exactly five years from the day she just lived. The man offers to make food. When Dannie goes into the closet, she realizes that this is her apartment because all of her clothes are there and organized the way she prefers. The man grabs himself some clothes, so Dannie thinks he must live here, too. She checks his wallet for his ID and discovers that his name is Aaron Gregory. After dinner, she realizes she’s wearing an engagement ring, but it’s not the one that David gave her. Dannie and David make love, and she feels a deep and intense physical connection.

Dannie awakes in her and David’s apartment on December 15, 2020. She’s disoriented; David assumes she’s overwhelmed by two big things happening in one day. Bella calls from what sounds like a nightclub or party in Paris. Dannie tries to tell her about what just happened, but it’s difficult to communicate through the noise on Bella’s end. David comes to join Dannie in bed, but she leaves to get some water and doesn’t return until after he’s fallen asleep.

Dannie gets the job at Wachtell. A year later, she and David move to a rental in the Gramercy neighborhood as they’ve planned. A year after that, they buy their own property in the neighborhood. David gets a job at a hedge fund; Dannie is promoted at her job. Four and a half years pass, and everything goes according to Dannie’s careful plan, except that she and David never get married. There are many reasons, but Dannie knows “the truth is that every time we get close, I think about that night, that hour, that dream, that man. And the memory of it stops me before I’ve started” (36). After that night Dannie went to see a therapist, Dr. Christine; she’d seen one before, after her brother died when she was 12. Dr. Christine agreed that it may have been a dream but also says that it could have been something “unexplainable,” like “a premonition” or “a psychosomatic trip” (38). Dannie departed feeling as though she’d given the problem to the therapist and left it alone for the next four and a half years.