8. Genes and Heredity
GENES AND HEREDITY
*Samantha*
T he city felt several degrees colder than the week before, and I ducked my nose inside my thick scarf as I scuttled east on Seventy-Third, hands deep in my coat pockets and chin tucked low.
A fierce wind funneled straight down the cross streets, whipping at my hair and occasionally flinging it across my face like I’d pissed off some minor weather deity.
It was seven o’clock in the evening, give or take a minute, and the sky was that weird color it gets just after dark in early winter, less blue, more like a violet bruise above the city skyline. Every inhale had that metallic cold-snap taste and my breath became clouds of white with every exhale.
I passed a mother in a Canada Goose parka dragging her son by the wrist while he mewled about not wanting to go to flute lessons.
The doorman in front of Kaitlyn’s building smiled at me, an avuncular twitch of the mouth that said, You don’t live here, but I recognize you .
I smiled back. He reminded me of my grandpa, and I briefly considered calling him.
But, no. My grandfather and I hadn’t talked since he’d remarried and moved to Arizona.
Kaitlyn’s apartment building was the kind of structure you saw in movies about people who never worried about health insurance or whether one ramen serving could be stretched into two full meals with enough broccoli.
The lobby was marble, the elevator was wood-paneled, and the whole place had that subtle, permanent scent of new carpet mixed with whatever they used to clean glass.
If you let Andreas adopt you and you inherit Genetix, then you’d be able to afford an apartment in a building with a doorman, no problem . Maybe even the whole damn building.
I sighed.
As the elevator ferried me up, I tried, for maybe the thousandth time, to make a decision about Andreas’s offer. It had been just two days, but it had felt like weeks since he’d stood in my tiny apartment and explained his plan.
Andreas, even as a child, had been the type to make amends for the sake of his own internal sense of righteousness. More and more, I was beginning to suspect that he’d only reached out to me in an attempt to correct a wrong between our respective families, settle a debt, make things right.
But for me ... my intentions and motivations for considering his offer were much less virtuous.
Also, both my past and current feelings for Andreas Kristiansen didn’t have much to do with correcting historical injustices.
Mind you, none of my present feelings for (i.e.
, attraction to) Andreas were at all voluntary.
A fact that didn’t stop the attraction from existing.
Even sleep-deprived, even discombobulated and emotional and blindsided, both times he’d popped up unannounced, I couldn’t seem to stop checking him out.
How incredibly inconvenient.
But here’s the thing about attraction: It always fades.
See, attraction is like a plant. If you water it too much, it dies.
If you water it too little, it also dies.
And that’s the key to killing attraction.
Over time, with either enough exposure or enough distance, it goes away.
Thus, either I needed A LOT more exposure to Andreas—like, daily—or I needed to cut him out of my life.
I was currently leaning toward cutting him out. True, I’d asked Andreas for time to think about his plan. In reality, I hadn’t stopped thinking about it for even a second.
I also hadn’t told anyone. Not my therapist, not Diya, obviously not my grandfather, not even Kaitlyn. Which was why I was here now, in front of her apartment, steeling myself before the door.
I pressed the little call button and waited.
“Sam!” Kaitlyn’s excited voice sounded from the speaker. They had an app on their phones, instead of a built-in intercom, that allowed them to interact with door-button pushers.
Despite my mood, I tried to sound chipper. “Hey, it’s me.”
The lock buzzed. I entered and let myself in to the warmth and soft golden light of the apartment.
I used to love coming here just after Kaitlyn and Martin got married.
The apartment belonged to them both, but the grand piano was entirely Kaitlyn’s.
She’d changed her major in college to music theory and now did what she loved, writing compositions for famous singers and collaborating with famous songwriters.
Kaitlyn’s family had money, but not a Standard-Oil-before-the-trust-breakup amount.
Her mother was a senator and her father was the dean of the School of Medicine at UCLA.
So, well-off, but not tech-bro well-off.
Martin’s father was the absurdly wealthy one in their family tree, but both Martin and Kaitlyn had severed ties with the telecom giant years ago.
Still, every square foot of the apartment screamed antique and quality, and nothing looked cheap or temporary.
I hung my coat on the rack by the door, then called out, “Where are you?”
From somewhere deeper in the apartment, her voice called back, “Come in! I’m at the piano.”
I padded down the hallway, past the powder room and the minimalist kitchen, and into the living room, where Kaitlyn sat perched on the piano bench with a mug in one hand and a pencil in the other.
She seemed to be writing something in an open notebook set on the music stand.
Her curly, dark brown hair was up in a bun and tonight she wore black leggings, a wildly oversized red turtleneck, and not a stitch of makeup.
She stood as I entered and set her mug down on the mission-style coffee table.
“Sam,” she said, and her face lit up with real joy, her big smile showing off the subtle gap between her two front teeth. She never used my full name, unless it was in print or on a birthday cake. “Get over here, you gorgeous beast.”
We hugged. She always went for a full-body embrace, even if one of us was holding something sharp or breakable. There was a long moment of pure, unspoken comfort. I tried to remember the last time I’d hugged anyone longer than five seconds.
It was the last time you saw Kaitlyn.
“Where’s the baby?” I asked, pulling away.
“Martin is in the nursery rocking him. If he’s still awake, you can go peek in before you leave, but he’s been a monster all day and the last thing anyone needs is him catching a second wind.
” Kaitlyn grinned. “Sorry if I stink, I’m in feral momma mode and I have a deadline on this new song with Abram. ”
I looked her up and down, then gestured at myself: scrubby jeans, fraying cardigan, T-shirt I’d found at the bottom of my laundry. “If this is feral, I’m basically a trash panda in human skin.”
She grinned, reaching for her mug again. “You say that, but you have no idea what feral is until the aroma of sour breast milk seasons all your clothes. Here, sit, I have a new tea I want you to try.”
Kaitlyn motioned me toward the sofa, then disappeared into the kitchen to retrieve the tea. I glanced at the piano and noticed the book she’d placed on the bench— The Queen’s Gambit .
Not subtle.
Last night, when I’d called to see if she had time for me to come over, I hadn’t told her about Andreas’s offers to marry me / impregnant me / adopt me, but I had told her that my old friend Andreas Kristiansen had reached out with a proposition, and I wanted to discuss it with her.
Kaitlyn, being a nerd, already knew who he was in the chess world.
She also already knew a bit about my history with him.
I’d shared more of myself and my past with Kaitlyn than I had with any other (non-therapist) person in my life.
She returned with a new mug, handed it to me, and plopped onto the large leather couch, tucking her feet under her. “Tell me everything.”
I took a sip. It tasted faintly of cardamom and something sweet. “Oh! It’s good.”
“I think so. That’s fenugreek that you’re tasting. It increases breast milk production.”
I froze, cup halfway to my mouth.
She laughed. “It won’t do anything to nonlactating humans, you goose.”
Regardless, I set the mug on the coffee table and folded my hands.
“Okay, now tell me, what’s going on with your old friend Andreas? What’s this proposition? This is the youngest in that family that screwed over your family, right?”
I inhaled, exhaled, and prepared to sound ridiculous. “Yes, the Kristiansens are the family in question. And yes, the father—his name is Oskar—and potentially the oldest son—let’s call him Satan, even though his Christian name is Tobias—framed my father for fraud.”
I then went on to summarize how my father, while under an active criminal investigation, lost his shares in his own company, was voted out by the board, declared bankruptcy, and then died of a sudden and massive heart attack.
Kaitlyn listened patiently to the CliffsNotes version of a story she’d heard before, her features soft with compassion. “So, we hate everyone in this family but the youngest, Andreas. And wasn’t teenage you in love with him? Or am I thinking of someone else?”
I felt my face heat up. “Not in love. More like ... I don’t know how to describe it.” Crap.
This sometimes happened when I spoke to Kaitlyn or my therapist. They’d make an offhanded comment, or an assumption, and then things about myself—my past behavior and my past choices—would suddenly make sense.
The reason you can’t stop thinking about Andreas and the reason why your body goes haywire whenever you see him now is probably because you had a serious crush on him back then, dummy.
“Okay, sure. He was something like my first love, but I was only thirteen, and he was eleven, so it doesn’t count. We were too young for those kinds of feelings, or at least he was. In any case, it was one-sided.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Sam. That would make him your only love.”