Chapter 7
Aubrey
Friday Morning
One Day After the Outing
Aubrey sits on Grayson Fields’s bed with his orphaned dog in her lap while her best friends debate what to do with the body.
The body, like it’s a thing, an old armchair with peeling leather and a saggy cushion kept around because you can’t remember
how it got through the door in the first place. He’s a person, Aubrey wants to scream, but doesn’t. She doesn’t have anything to follow it with. No solution to offer.
She’s seen enough movies and TV shows to know that there’s still a window of time where they can make this right, not get
in any deeper, call the police and justify Mallory not doing so sooner because she was in shock. Shock can do all sorts of
things to a person. Something she learned with Ethan. She pictures him, his sandy hair falling into his light green eyes,
and drops of sweat erupt along her hairline. Her vision narrows as if traveling through a darkening tunnel, and she roots
herself deeper into the mattress to stay upright.
She senses another sneeze coming on and tries to stifle it, as if by being quiet she can offset the fact that she’s in here with a hypoallergenic dog she’s somehow allergic to while her best friends deal with a dead body.
“Ilena, your legs.” Mallory’s order filters through the crack of the bedroom door. “Lift with your legs.”
“Legs? My legs?” Ilena says. “Oh, of course, wait, there they are. It’s hard to see them past my honeydew melon of a stomach.”
Lifting? Ilena’s lifting Gray—the body? Isn’t that bad? Aren’t pregnant women not supposed to lift heavy things? Or is it
carry? Or is it—
The sneeze refuses to be stopped and the dog leaps from her lap, a blur of orange disappearing through the door before Aubrey
can unfold herself. “Harley, no!” she shouts.
Keeping the dog calm and contained, that’s all Aubrey was tasked with doing. Both of her friends had taken one look at the
queasiness all over her face and sent her away. Aubrey was relegated once again to the place she’s lived in her whole life
as the youngest, quietest member of a family of Teflon-strength personalities. By the time she’d come along, birthday cakes
were always chocolate even though the caffeine gave her headaches, pets were always of the feather variety even though their
jerky necks gave her nightmares, and afterschool activities involved balls of any size, not wires or motherboards. She believed
in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy for far too long because she wanted to believe the impossible could be possible. Like her
grandmother did. If it weren’t for her grandmother convincing Aubrey’s parents that Williams College was a place that wouldn’t
swallow Aubrey whole, she might not have gone. She might not have majored in computer science and wound up at the Silicon
Valley start-up program, filling in for a coworker who dropped out. She might never have met Mallory and Ilena. Or wound up
here.
“Harley!” Ilena cries. “Careful, Mallory!”
Aubrey untucks her legs and swings them to the floor. She presses her hands into the mattress, a reflexive pro-con list forming in her mind, and of all the pro-con lists that have formed in her mind or will ever form in her mind, this has to be the most surreal.
She clears her throat and tries to choke out a “Do you need help?” but of course they need help. But they won’t ask. Because
she’s too fragile.
“Your left foot, Mallory, watch your left . . . your other left!” Ilena says.
“Christ, this dog, where’s Aubrey? Aubrey!” Mallory shrieks.
And Aubrey forces herself off the bed and into the hall.
Ilena faces her full on. “Aubrey, we’re fine. Grab the dog and go back into the bedroom. We’ve got this.”
A striped blanket in the shape of a body lies on the floor between Mallory and Ilena. Aubrey takes in the block of a torso
in the middle, the limbs spreading to either side, the thrust of a nose making the blanket protrude, and her face must relay
every ounce of her fear and grief and uncertainty, but she says, “I can help. I—I want to help.”
Ilena sets her jaw, a refusal coming, but then begins one of those silent conversations with Mallory, their friendship of
more than twenty years intimidating and inspiring, and still it’s entirely dumbfounding how Aubrey’s been a part of it for
the past eight. Ilena steps back and says, “Okay, then.”
“Spectacular.” Mallory tugs down the hem of a white shirt that must be Grayson’s. She slipped it over her jumpsuit, for warmth,
maybe, or maybe to cover those marks on her arm.
A week out from taking their company public and potentially filling their bank accounts with more money than Aubrey could spend in three lifetimes, they are placing a dead man in a freezer custom-built to look like a blanket chest. It’s gorgeous, a deep red mahogany with chiseled wood inlays and a compressor that’s nearly silent.
You’d never know it was storing not extra sheets and pillows and duvets but organic, raw dog food and grass-fed beef and cauliflower pizza crusts.
You’d never guess it was about to be home to one of the most successful venture capitalists in the country.
To make room for Aubrey, Mallory shoves the garbage bag full of frozen food aside with her foot. “Just for now. Until we figure
out what’s happening. Then we’ll make it right.”
They’ll want to, maybe they’ll even try, but they won’t be able to. Some wrongs are only wrong after the fact, when consequences
and perspective give you hindsight you’d have otherwise never had. Like Ethan. Other wrongs can be seen from a mile away.
This is one of those.
The three of them heave Grayson Fields into the freezer with a fair amount of difficulty given Ilena’s current situation and
the fact that Aubrey’s hands can’t stop shaking. Without the need to say it, Mallory is the one who makes the final adjustments
and closes the lid.
Mallory turns to face them. “Okay, we need some rules. It goes without saying, we tell no one.” Her eyes dart to Ilena, who
reluctantly nods. “We stay vigilant, ears open, eyes wide, taking in everything but offering little. We need to let others
lead and direct the conversation. Just like Aubrey already does.”
This isn’t meant as a criticism despite it feeling that way.
“We maintain our normal routines, whatever those are here,” Mallory continues, ticking things off as if she’s done this before.
“Check calendars and emails and cancel things that seem dangerous.”
Aubrey stiffens. “Dangerous? What’s dangerous?”
Mallory shrugs. “I don’t know, like a high school reunion? Where people will know too many things we don’t.”
Isn’t that basically everything here? Everyone?
Mallory pushes on. “We don’t draw attention, we don’t post on social media, we don’t deplete our other selves’ bank accounts. What’s that thing Jonah made us do when he forced us to go camping?”
Ilena hugs her arms. “Leave no trace?”
Mallory nods. “That’s it. That’s what we do. As best we can.” She pauses. “But AIM’s still going public in this reality, and
we owe it to all versions of ourselves to support that. We can’t be absent from work.”
Ilena’s jaw tightens.
Mallory ignores her and fixes her gaze on Aubrey. “We’re here, together, in one piece. One step at a time. Okay?”
Aubrey. The weak link. Always.
She starts to nod, then says, suddenly, “Someone’s got to take the dog. I think I might be allergic, and Ilena—” She gestures
to Ilena’s belly. “So, Mallory. Mallory’s got to take the dog.”
It’s the first decision Aubrey’s made without hesitating in a long time.
Aubrey cannot believe she’s here. At AIM. Their AIM, but not. The office seems real, everything seems real, the slight rock
of her desk chair, the smell of microwave popcorn wafting from the communal kitchen, the wave from the receptionist she doesn’t
know, the people looking at her like she belongs. But she doesn’t. Does she?
Outside Grayson’s building, they confirmed AIM’s location was in the same spot and called up a rideshare app on Mallory’s
phone. “Hitch,” apparently, short for hitchhike, which is either totally cute or totally creepy. Aubrey can’t decide.
On the ride to AIM, Aubrey nearly stuck her head out the window like Harley to take it all in.
Starbucks, stifling humidity, summer tourists sightseeing via the lens of their phones. Brick sidewalks, ritzy shops on Newbury
Street, traffic clogging every route out of Boston and into Cambridge. Everything seemed the same.
But there’s also a grocery store called Eat Me and the Charles River looks clean enough to drink from and the contact list in Aubrey’s phone is twice its normal size.
At her desk, she hides behind the three huge monitors. One more than usual. Is she more talented here or less? Does an extra
monitor help her do more work efficiently or does she need the extra monitor just to keep up?
Like everything else, the office here is slightly off. Desks of wood not white, coworker faces she recognizes, names she knows,
ones she forgets—though that’s the same as in her world. “Her world” is how she’s come to think of the place she was before
she woke up here.
Woke up here and helped hide a dead body and kidnap a dog. That’s what they did, isn’t it? They strolled through the art deco
lobby with the jittery pup on a leash, Mallory breezily giving the doorman a friendly wave and the explanation of “watching
the dog while Mr. Fields goes on an unexpected trip.” Aubrey speed-walked ahead of Ilena and Mallory so as to not ruin everything
by vomiting right there on the black-and-white geometric tile. She ran out the door with her head down, nearly colliding with
a set of legs in white linen whose owner quickly leaped out of harm’s way.
They have Mallory’s rules, easily followed behind the closed door of Grayson’s penthouse, but here, with people who will assume
things and ask things and need things, with people who don’t know she just touched . . . a body, Aubrey’s not sure she can
remember the rules, let alone follow them.