chapter five
The housing market crashed in early 2008 and the Darling lost a third of its value. But there were still house parties, boat parties, and street parties in the Castro, fueled more now by grim resolve than exuberance.
“We’ve done this before,” Vic assured investors, regaling war wounds from the first Dotcom bust. “This is just a small correction.” As if the collecting masses on the street rightly belonged there.
Those who hadn’t yet jumped onto Barack Obama’s bandwagon of hope searched elsewhere for guides through the abyss, for yoga instructors and shamans, for a god or a growth mindset, for anyone who might offer them a shred of stability or help them climb a slightly higher hill of happiness.
After Will, Vic’s new second-in-command only had to come in to work before noon to seem competent. His fatal mistake was doing more.
“Hustle is the name of the game,” Raj announced at a team meeting. “Some of us have become too comfortable. Forgotten what it means to be hungry.”
Laurie pictured him joining the ranks outside Boogaloos with a sign. Hungry. Will make presentations for a burger.
He pushed Laurie as if she were a falcon he were coaching to flying weight. “You’re smart, but you lack ambition. You fall apart under pressure. We need to change that.” He accompanied his diagnosis with a prescription of self-help and management books. “In this new climate, you’ll need to go beyond the specific job description. Anticipate what the project needs to succeed.”
Raj took it on himself to diagnose the entire team. Then one day Laurie received a text that jolted her out of bed at 6 a.m.
I’m having trouble accessing the network. Can you contact Vic to fix it?
She should have gone back to bed, but the message was marked as read. Vic wouldn’t be awake at this hour. She should have given him Vic’s phone number and told him to sort it out.
Instead she knocked on Mal’s door.
Mal’s eyebrows danced a bit in amusement and confusion. She logged on in the dark, the screen lighting the planes of her face in cyber-chic.
“Good news, strange news,” she said. “The network isn’t down. But Vic’s sent me a message asking if I can take over some of Raj’s duties.”
A chill passed through Laurie’s chest. Their eyes met.
“He was good to you,” Mal said. It was about as much of a question as she was capable of. Pausing for an objection.
What must it be like, to feel challenge and criticism as love? To not feel a flood of relief that scrutiny had passed by? Right now, Laurie simply stared at the text from Raj and contemplated replies.
The network isn’t down. You’ve been fired.
I can’t reach Vic. Here’s his number. (Thank you and goodbye)
“Never outshine the master,” Mal said. “It’s the first law of power.”
It was too early for this. “So you’ll bite your tongue and keep your head down for Vic ?”
“Don’t you?”
Exposed. Projection was such a bitch.
They went into work to deal with the fallout.
“How long can you surf the wave without wiping out?” an engineer Laurie passed in the office kitchen asked his friend. “Whether it’s a startup or a relationship, investment is about intuition. That’s all you have to ride on.”
Two days later he was laid off, and two months after that Mal and Laurie found him performing stand-up comedy at a club in the Tenderloin. Four years later he’d be driving a Lyft car with a pink mustache to supplement his freelance income. It was a warning to those who lived too large, and torture for those who’d stumbled but couldn’t escape the orbit of the stars they’d sought.
Laurie stalked Sophia’s Facebook page in a masochistic streak, and discovered she had moved in with two of her exes. She was taking one of them to rehab and helping the other one transition to becoming a woman. Sophia called herself the ‘anchor of their polycule,’ sending Laurie on a long research journey into metamours and vees, hinges and comets, all of which left her heartsick beyond endurance.
Then there was the photographer. Kasim Ashakzai. Any time Kas came by, Mal’s face turned to him like a flower straining toward the sun. Laurie had to concede there was something magnetic about his Mona Lisa smile, about the depths of unfixable and unnameable unhappiness in his eyes. He walked tall, with an air of willful difference as dangerous as a dagger in the belt, all the while trailing a cologne that smelled like the pinecone air of untrammeled Himalayan peaks.
God, she wanted to paint him. He itched under her skin. But more than that she wanted to be rid of him, and of Mal, both of whom reminded her of her own loneliness. She could hear them laughing in the next room.
“Whatever happened to your Lollywood movie career?”
“Turns out the American who was funding my movie was actually a drug-smuggler,” Kas said. “One day ISI busted into our set and took him away, and now it’s an international incident.”
“That’s the trouble with our people, Kas,” Mal said. “Romance can’t be simple. It has to involve drug-smugglers. And global intrigue.”
“We actually ran into glycerin shortages for the sad scenes. Oh, you didn’t know? You get a tear-stick, although a Q-tip will do, dab it with glycerin, and—”
“That’s… wait, what? Fake tears?”Mal sounded delighted.
“What did you think was happening? People stabbing themselves in the thigh off-camera? Real emotion? What did you think this was, Sundance?”
“Can I buy glycerin at Walgreens?”
“Who knows. I earned mine. Girls go wild for my tear-stick.”
At Mal’s peal of laughter, Laurie put in her earphones. These days, she had to hide her love for It’s a Wonderful Life more than she needed to hide her erotica. Which Mal had found by accident when she returned too early from a business trip and handed over with, “City library books are way more interesting than suburban ones.”
So when Laurie met Adam, who said y’all and called baristas Ma’am and told her how lonely he was in San Francisco, where women expected sex on the third date or sooner, but he couldn’t make love to someone until he’d said and heard the three little words , she was smitten.He apologized for his balding head; she traced the edges of his widow’s peak and regretted ever having fallen for Cam’s young adult fantasy looks.
“I want something real,” she said.
Three months into their relationship, Mal and Kas were off somewhere, edging towards something without ever getting there, while Adam came over to spend the day. He had to work, but wanted her company while he did. They were at separate ends of the couch, each on their laptop, when she got a message from Mal.
A picture of an extremely complicated menu of a coffee shop, tagged, Remember when coffee was a beverage and not a geography quiz?
She chuckled and typed up a response.
“What’s so funny?”
She looked up. Adam was looking at her with a strange expression.
“It’s Mal.”
“What does she say?”
“Nothing important.”
Adam picked at threads on the cushion. “I don’t think she likes me very much.”
“She doesn’t like anyone very much.”
“You’re sure she isn’t jealous?”
A graceless bark of a laugh escaped her. Mal? Jealous of him?
“It’s not that strange,” he said. “When two friends have been single for a long time, one can feel jealous when the other starts dating.”
Oh, he meant Mal might be jealous of her .
“Mal doesn’t want a relationship,” she explained. “Where’s all this coming from?”
He looked away. “I just don’t think she’s invested in your happiness.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You deserve so much better. This is a rent-controlled apartment, isn’t it? You’ve been generous enough to share it with her even though she makes enough to afford her own place, and she doesn’t even acknowledge you. Does she really consider you a friend, or is she using you?”
Laurie pulled back, but he grabbed her hands and held them.
“I know so many people like her,” he went on. “You and I, we’ll never fit into their crowd. To them, we barely exist except as proof of their open-mindedness.”
A pang went through her chest, even as she shook her head in protest. She understood, of course; her coworkers were polite enough not to talk about it in front of her, but she knew they spent their weekends at wineries and Michelin star restaurants. Mal wasn’t like that. And they were friends, not just roommates.
Right?
Adam’s eyes fell on the laptop, the shiny new MacBook he’d bought her. “I knew within two days of meeting you that you needed a new laptop, and you’re telling me she lives with you and didn’t notice you kept asking to borrow hers?”
Until he said it, she’d thought the opposite, that her friendship with Mal was so strong that she didn’t even mind Laurie seeing her browser history.
That evening, Adam went back to his own place while Mal and Kas came by around eight. Laurie asked them about their day, hating that she was only doing it to see if Adam had a point, or if Mal would ask about her day too.
“Productive,” Mal said. “We spent the entire day at Ritual, writing.” She inclined her head. “Well, editing, mostly. I couldn’t get anything new onto the page. Oh!” She dashed into her room and came back out with a torn envelope, handed it over to Kas. “Here’s the rejection I was telling you about.”
“Rejection?” Laurie asked.
“Kas convinced me I should send my story out to agents. One of them was kind enough to give me a reasoned rejection.”
“ Reasoned ?” Kas asked, his beautiful dark eyes widening with wrath. “This is—I might not make it to the end of this. I’m your friend and I’m going to do my best, but you know this is not about you, right?”
Laurie tensed as Kas started pacing, holding the letter out in front of him to read.Mal leaned against the wall, entirely relaxed and amused. Laurie marveled at her calm for a moment, before she remembered—it was only to her, not Mal, that a man’s anger meant upheaval. The narrow hallway between them seemed an uncrossable chasm.
Am I your token blue-collar friend?
“Did they really ask you to read Jane Eyre to understand romance better?” Kas asked. “It’s like they’re saying, why don’t you go be a nice colonized child and read some white-people love so we can understand your story better?”
Mal grinned at Laurie, as if she’d understand, as if Mal had ever shown her any of her writing. She hadn’t known about any of this.
“Your sentence structure is unusual,” Kas went on, “so I’m guessing English isn’t your first… wow. What century are we living in that anybody is allowed to assume that about anybody else? I’m trying to finish this but—” He groaned in despair. “Your story needs more eroticism. Meaning what, sex? God forbid that intimacy and love can look different for people from different cultures, or with different values.”
“You’re sweet,” Mal said, laughing. She reached forward and plucked the letter out of his hands and gave it to Laurie. “Kas has always believed in my writing, even when the whole world stands against him.”
“Well, the world needs correction,” Kas said, folding his arms.
Shortly after, he left—so far, to Laurie’s knowledge, he’d never spent the night—and Mal landed heavily on the couch.
“How was your day?” Mal asked, and even if she was flicking through the channels as she did, something in Laurie’s chest loosened.
“Adam came by.”
“Hm.”
It could’ve just been a filler, a way to signal that she should move on. Or was it judgment?
“You don’t like Adam?”
Mal shrugged. “I don’t have an opinion about him either way.”
“He’s important to me.”
Mal looked at her, confused. “Okay…”
“We might move in together,” Laurie said, although it wasn’t true. Not even close.
“Will you go to him, or do you need me to move out?”
“I—I don’t know yet.”
Why couldn’t Mal show some modicum of emotion? Laurie’s blood slowly pulsed up through her cheeks and then down to her throat where it seemed to clot with unsaid words. She wanted Mal to be unhappy at having to move out. To react , so Laurie would exist in equal measure.
“Sure, whatever you need,” Mal said, with a smile that cracked her heart.
· · ·
On one of the first warm weekends of the year, Adam was away on a business trip, so when Mal invited her to join her and Kas on a road trip to Marin, Laurie joined in so eagerly she forgot her iPhone at home. Most people didn’t yet have smartphones, and she only had hers because Adam had bought it for her, so she counted her blessings she hadn’t forgotten sunscreen and stopped worrying about it. It wasn’t as if she was going to wander off on her own.
Mal drove (of course) taking Van Ness up to Lombard and then winding her way west towards the Golden Gate Bridge. Around them, the foghorns in San Francisco lowed the morning prayer like weird West Coast mullahs. The three of them argued about whether the bridge itself was vermilion or cadmium red or if they ought to accept that it was international orange just because the internet said so, while below them the boats of Sacramento hummed their tinny bubblegum sound. Once they got to Muir Woods, Laurie collected fallen acorns, remarking on the little x’s on their heads, as if they had been marked out for greater purpose.
It was only as they headed further north to Point Reyes to lunch that she started to wonder why they’d asked her to come along. She kept quiet, not wanting to be a third wheel, but it seemed they both wanted her as a buffer between them. When she came up close, she heard them arguing.
“How long can you keep trying to get the permission to live the life you actually want to live?” Mal was saying, a thread of unmistakable bitterness in her voice. “If you want to write, write.”
“It’s easy for you to say. You can take it or leave it, you have alternatives. A whole lucrative career you can fall back on as a consolation prize.”
“I knew my job bothered you.”
Laurie fell back, out of hearing distance. This was the most emotion she’d heard from Mal, and even now she was restrained. Everything about her was. Although she wore a summer dress, a firm belt tempered flighty folds. Her long legs were weighed down by heavy hiking boots. Lines triumphed over curves, deliberation over whimsy.
As they drove back to San Francisco, along the curves of Highway 1, the waves to their right were ten feet high and crashed against the cliffs louder than thunder. From time to time Mal cast a look at Kas that was ravenous with desire, but he looked ahead serenely, as if he wasn’t between two oceans, one on each side, each of them dark and devouring.
They dropped Kas off, then left the Zipcar in its stall and walked home. Laurie found her phone still connected to its charger, beeping urgently.
Seven missed calls from Adam.
She called him back immediately, heart pounding.
“Where have you been? I’ve been mad with worry.”
“I was out with Mal. What’s wrong?”
“The vet called. Perry needs chemo. The surgery wasn’t enough. I—I can’t think. Should I get a second opinion? Why didn’t he tell me before the surgery that chemo might still be necessary?”
“Breathe, darling. We researched this, remember? Chemo is less aggressive for cats than it is for humans.”
“I don’t know if I want to put Perry through this. My dad had chemo. It changed him, and he died anyway. In pain and miserable. Am I overthinking this? You don’t think I’m being cheap, do you? It’s about the pain, not the money.”
“Whatever you choose, I’ll support you. When do you get back? Will you need me to come over to help? Should I cancel the Tahoe trip?”
They were supposed to go away together next weekend, with a couple of his friends.
There was a moment of silence, and then Adam swore under his breath.
“I completely forgot about the Tahoe trip. Perry’s going to be vomiting. I can’t leave him alone.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Laurie said, mildly relieved. Adam had paid for all of it, and it was ridiculously expensive. “I’ll call the lodge and cancel.”
“We can’t,” Adam said. “The room was booked with a non-refundable group rate, because Miguel and Shawna are going too. It’s all such a goddamn waste.”
Laurie didn’t particularly love Perry, who was cantankerous even when he wasn’t projectile-vomiting, but he was a cat . A poor, sick cat.
Sunk cost , she remembered Mal saying, so many months ago, in a taqueria bathroom.
“What do you want to do, love?” she asked.
“I don’t know. It’s all so unfair.”
“Do you have other friends who might be willing to take our room? When I’m feeling down, it always makes me feel better to make someone else happy.”
“You’re a sweetheart. But I’m too upset to think right now. Why weren’t you answering your phone?”
“I told you. I left it at home when I went out with Mal.”
“It wasn’t on the calendar,” he said, and his tone was different now.
Oh, right. The calendar. He’d shown her how to use it on the laptop, so they could coordinate logistics more easily. They’d snuggled for an hour booking the Tahoe trip details together. But she hadn’t thought of using it for her own personal needs, and the road trip had been spontaneous…
“Laurie?”
“You know how I am with technology, love. I don’t use it unless I have to. The screens give me a headache.”
His tone grew tight with pain. “Laurie, we’ve talked about this. You know what it does to me when I don’t know where you are. Where my mind goes. You can’t seriously be doing this to me right now when I’m already going through so much shit.”
Suddenly shifting into auto-pilot, she responded in the gentlest and most apologetic of tones. “You’re right, of course. I’m sorry.”
“This isn’t about me, Laurie. You have to remember to take your phone with you. What if you got lost? Your phone is your lifeline.”
“Of course, Adam. I understand.”
· · ·
Laurie washed the dishes. She held the phone to her ear by tipping her head sideways almost into her neck. Mom was going on about the regatta at the Geneva summer festival, and she debated an appropriate way to ask, Mom, remember when I was five and we ran away from home? When did Dad first start scaring you?
As if attuned to her thoughts, Mom said, “I didn’t raise you right, Lo. You’re too independent, and you don’t need a man. It’s so tough seeing other people’s kids get married, knowing my Lo’s all alone.”
“Mom, I’m fine.”
“Just because I couldn’t make it work, you shouldn’t think—”
“I don’t.”
There was a disbelieving sniffle at the other end of the line.
Laurie sighed. “Whatever Dad did to you—“
“Not to me, Lo. Never to me. He came back from the war broken, and what was I going to do, turn him away?”
“Then… why did we leave?”
“He broke Micah’s arm—by accident! Your brother just caught him in the middle of an episode, and the PTSD… Anyway, I drove Micah to the hospital. I don’t think your father knew until then that I could drive. I’d always been letting him do it. After that, he was different.”
“But what finally made you decide to leave? I mean, you can barely hang up on telemarketers.”
Mom didn’t answer for a long time. Laurie was just about to change the subject when she said, “You know, honey, I don’t remember that day at all. I didn’t plan it or anything. Sometimes I think I’d always been planning to leave, and one day while my mind was asleep my body just woke up and drove away.”
· · ·
By the autumn of 2008, almost everyone who still had a job had a therapist too, and some, like Adam, kept a copy of the DSM-5 on their coffee table to help any visiting guests determine whether what they really needed to be happy was medication or a move to another state. Laurie kept her head down at work and tried not to pay attention to the rumors that the Unicorn might not survive the year.
“Everyone’s moving to Seattle these days, buying the dip.”
“Mark’s been living in his Prius, did you know?”
“Well, he did spend three months on a waitlist for that car.”
Adam worked eighty or even ninety-hour weeks, and even Mal grew quiet, thoughtful, although that might have been because Kas was around less too. Laurie saw on Facebook that he was traveling, and articles he’d written told her he was in L.A., in Denver, in New York and Portland.
Vic got divorced and went to Burning Man, and came back with the conviction he could commune with the dead. Nick left the company to join the Obama campaign, and Laurie finally found the strength to stop following Sophia’s Facebook feed. It felt as if they were all holding their breath, in suspended animation, unflinching in their belief that all it would take to turn the economy and their lives around was the election of one man from Illinois to the presidency.
One night in October, Mal knocked on her door. “Hey, Laurie, I—I’ve misplaced my laptop. May I use yours to buy a new one?”
Laurie startled out of bed, wondering how she was so calm. “Of course! But how? Are you all right?”
Mal gave her a tired smile that didn’t reach her eyes, and held her hands out for the laptop. “I’m fine.”
“You’re sure?”
She opened a new browser window. “I’m sure. I just need to—Laurie, what’s this?”
Mal brought the cursor to the top of the screen where a small red ticker was flashing.
“That’s Adam’s calendar application. Whenever it flashes red I need to authorize it.”
Laurie clicked on the ticker and pressed the OK button on the dialog that appeared.
A complicated suite of emotions crossed Mal’s face.
“Is everything okay?”
“Yes, thank you.” Mal closed the laptop and held her wrist. Her fingers were ice-cold and trembling. She pulled her out into the hallway without saying a word.
“Mal? It’s cold out here. And I’m in my PJ’s.”
“Laurie, that’s not a calendar application.”
Her blood turned to ice. “Then what is it?” But she already knew.
“It’s a screen recorder and camera, so he can see your face and anything that’s on your screen whenever he wants to.”
Laurie was no longer cold. She was simply numb, floating outside her body. But the admin in her was processing information faster. “We need to change the locks. Adam has a key.”
“You can’t use your phone,” Mal said. “If there’s a matching app, there’s probably a tracker on that too.”
Mal sprang the $200 for a locksmith to come overnight, and the two of them huddled together in the living room while he worked, communicating silently with paper and pen like children at a campfire. Mal searched every crevice for cameras and bugs while Laurie shivered and muttered, “He was probably too cheap for any real spyware.”
She had half a mind to call her brother Jack, who had once driven her to Walgreens in the middle of the night to buy tampons, but had also smashed her piano so she couldn’t be disappointed wanting things she couldn’t have. It was right around when his ex moved to the city and he spent a week’s paycheck at the Army Surplus store on materials to climb into a high-rise building.
You aren’t seriously going to stalk her, Jack!
I’m just worried about her, alone in New York. She’s not very street smart. I just want to teach her to be prepared.
The sky outside the window grew lighter, became a steely gray. Mal called in to work and said they’d both come down with a highly contagious cold. Adam’s call came around 8 AM.
“Hey, love,” Laurie said to Adam out of habit, and then winced.
Mal spat her coffee .
“Hey, you up for getting coffee at Ritual before I have to get to work?”
“But your office is in SoMa,” Laurie said. “We can just get dinner later.”
Mal retreated to her room, a bagel lodged in her mouth and disapproval in her eyes.
“I don’t mind,” Adam said. “I woke up missing you. I had the strangest dream.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, anyway, it would really help to see you. To hold you.”
“What kind of dream was it?”
“You’ll laugh.”
“Have I ever?”
“Melissa did, all the time,” Adam said.
Laurie sank into the couch. It was going to be that kind of conversation then. How had she not realized Adam bored her?
“I hurt you, didn’t I, bringing up Melissa?” he asked.
She went quiet, waiting for him to tantrum himself out.
“You have no idea what you do to me,” he said. “The power you have.”
Oh, this is how he keeps you in his orbit . He makes you feel that you’re the one pulling the strings.
“It was just a dream,” Adam said. “I know you wouldn’t hurt me. Especially when Perry’s dying and you know my project’s due at the end of the month.”
“What did I do in this dream?” she asked.
“You know I love you, right?” Adam said.
“Of course.”
Adam waited, as if expecting an I-love-you-too, and then said, “And I’ve told you all my secrets. I’ve only ever been with one other woman.”
“Did you want to know my past lovers?” she asked. This conversation was strange, surreal.
“I don’t need to,” Adam said. “As long as they’re in the past.”
“I’ve had a few, but only three that counted. Two men, and one woman.”
She’d admitted it voluntarily because the thought of the alternative was exhausting. He’d poke around for a while, mention that he dreamed of her leaving him, talk about the absurdity of it, demand to be reassured—better to rip the Band-aid off as fast as possible.
“Was it the girl from your Facebook photos? The one with the red hair?”
“Adam, there’s no girl with red hair in my Facebook photos.” And there wasn’t. All photos with Sophia had been deleted or untagged, so the only way he could know of their existence was if he had recorded her screen when she’d visited Sophia’s profile in moments of weakness.
From there the conversation devolved. In fifteen minutes, Adam managed to scold her for ruining his mood right before an exec meeting, accuse her of leading him on and of sleeping with him for money.
When she hung up, Laurie had a headache.
At least it’s over.
Except the thing about relationships in San Francisco was that because they were so poorly defined, so unconventional, they were often impossible to end. How, after all, could you kill something that had never really been alive?
Two hours later Laurie received a spreadsheet in her email in which Adam had carefully documented her failings as well as how much money he had spent during their relationship.
June 7, 2008: Responded to 300-word affectionate email with 1 sentence + emojis.
July 1, 2008: Bailed on Gary Danko reservation because of PMS. Reservation not refunded.
Her head spun. She revisited each of these moments, trying to remember whether there was any truth to the accusations. She wasn’t one for long emails; she’d never learned the right way to type, and two fingers stabbing at cold and cranky buttons had never been her love language. How quickly Adam had typed this all up! If she were more tech savvy, she’d know how to look at the version history on the file, to see how long he’d been keeping score.
Eventually Mal came out of her room. “We should get you a new laptop too,” she said. “No sense holding on to that thing.”
Laurie showed Mal Adam’s email without a word, waited for her outrage and fury to help her access her own. But it never came. Mal glanced at the spreadsheet with confusion. Her nostrils flared. Then she chuckled and tossed the laptop aside.
“Come,” Mal said, leaping off the sofa and offering her a hand. “Let’s go to the Apple store and pick something out. Then we won’t have to wait for shipping.”
“But—” It felt so strange to leave an email unreplied, like walking out of the house without turning off the stove.
Mal was already wearing her shoes. Laurie had never got used to it, how Mal’s healthy disregard for the impossible, when it came to work projects, transitioned smoothly to an unhealthy disdain for the inconvenient in daily life. There was no emotion she couldn’t suppress when it suited her.
Maybe hers was the better way. After all, what had Laurie’s approach gotten her? She got up and followed Mal, as if in a dream. Within two hours they were already returning home laden with large bags.
Adam was waiting for them, pacing outside the building. When he saw Mal, his face clouded over and he came to a standstill.
“I’ve been trying to reach you all day,” he said to Laurie. “I couldn’t just leave things the way they were, so I came over on my lunch break.”
If he’d tried entering, he made no mention of the fact that his keys didn’t work.
Mal placed her bag down and leaned against the metal railing, signaling that she wasn’t going to leave.
“Do you mind—?” Adam asked her with a glare.
Mal blinked innocently. “Mind what?”
“This is a private conversation,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height to tower over her. Laurie could have told him how useless it would be, how often people at work tried to intimidate Mal without success.
“Oh, I’m not familiar with the concept,” Mal said coolly. “Privacy must be a guy thing, they so rarely let us have it.”
He must have sensed he wasn’t getting anywhere with her, because he turned to Laurie. “You have to forgive me. This morning—I don’t know what came over me. I was out of my mind. Between Perry and work, I was stressed… but you have to know how you came across. The things you said—I had no idea you were capable of such cruelty.”
There was no explaining the gravitational pull of a narcissist to someone who hasn’t felt it. He had hooks into her softest, most vulnerable parts, and he pulled on them with the kind of skill he’d never shown in conversation or in bed.
“Real love looks past our worst selves,” Adam said, more gently now. “This morning, we saw the worst of each other, but I’m still here, loving you. I forgive you, Laurie. I know you just pushed me away because you got scared, but I also know that in your heart of hearts you don’t want to be alone.”
The tears in his eyes drew tears to hers. She was shaking apart right there on the pavement, dissociating from the body that was standing with a laptop on Guerrero Street.
“But she’s not alone,” Mal said.
Laurie looked at her in confusion. Mal shrugged, as if she was only pointing out an obvious fact.
“You stay out of it,” Adam said. “Haven’t you done enough, poisoning her mind against me? The last thing she needs is advice from a slut who cares about no one but herself.”
The word— slut —stung her like a slap. Short, sharp and vicious. Somehow, nothing Adam had said about her hurt the way his attack on Mal did.
“Mal, let’s go home,” she said.
“Laurie, this isn’t like you,” Adam said sternly. “I’m still processing what Melissa did to me, and the way you’re acting… it’s just very triggering.”
She started shaking, unable to think. If not answering an email felt like her house would burn down, not apologizing when people confronted her felt like that entire burning house falling on her head.
A loud peal of laughter to her right snapped her out of it.
“You know,” Mal said, still lounging against the railing nonchalantly, “if you installed spyware on this Melissa’s laptop too, it’s no wonder she left you.”
His eyes widened in realization, and then fell to their hands, to the large white bags with the Apple logo. He glared at Laurie, and it took everything she had not to flinch or piss herself.
“I was going to just throw away the laptop you gave me,” she said, “but if you stay here I’ll—I’ll take it to the police and bring up charges to get a restraining order.”
That seemed to shock him into moving. He hissed, but walked past them towards Mission Street. Laurie climbed the first step up towards their house and promptly fell down.
“Take your time,” Mal said, and sat down beside her on the stair.
There was so much she wanted to say— thank you , how did you know? I’m sorry —
“Would you like me to carry you in?”
Laurie shook her head. “Could you… hold me for a minute?”
Mal’s arm came around her shoulders and pulled her close. Hugged her until she stopped shaking. Eventually, they carried the bags into the house. Quietly, moving in synchronicity, Laurie made lunch while Mal set up both laptops.
Later, after they’d both retreated into their rooms, she blocked Adam online. With his posts gone from her Facebook feed, a post from Kas from yesterday came into view. He was standing by a boat in Central Park, with his arm around a woman’s waist. She held out a hand to the camera to show off a diamond ring.
Laurie read the caption nearly a hundred times without comprehending it. She finally leapt out of the bed and ran to Mal’s room.
“What is it?”
“Mal—I just saw—have you seen? Kas…”
A mask came over her features. “Yes, I saw it yesterday.”
“Are you all right?”
“I sensed it coming,” she said with a smile. “I think, of the two of us, you’ve had the harder twenty-four hours. You should get some rest.”
For a second Laurie almost believed her and walked away; then she remembered how much of a relief it was when your world was falling apart to help someone else put theirs back together. Somehow fate had conspired to let them have this together, as if they were running a three-legged race.
“I know how you felt about him, and—he loved you too.”
“It’s not that simple. I’m fine now, really.”
“Meaning you weren’t before?”
Mal chewed her lip, as if debating whether to say anything. Eventually, her shoulders sagged. “So, yesterday I left work early to get a coffee and waffle at Bluebottle. I wanted to sit by the Bay Bridge and write. That’s when I saw it. I didn’t take it well.”
“What happened?”
“Remember how I told you I’d misplaced my laptop? I—um, threw it into the Bay.”
Laurie’s jaw dropped. They stared at each other, and then, in the same instant, burst into hysterical laughter.