Chapter 37
Mallory
Monday Morning
Four Days After the Outing
Mallory opens the sliding glass door to her parents’ kitchen to find her mother’s tongue halfway down the throat of a giant
of a man with a paunch straining the front of his police officer’s uniform.
“Hey,” she says, and they break apart.
Her father stumbles back in surprise, struggling to keep his balance as he falls against the fridge. Mallory stifles a gasp,
ripped back to the beach when she was eleven and a figure in the distance lumbered on the hot sand. The figure she had been
convinced was her dad. The figure who seems very much like the one before her.
The memory passes like a hot gust of wind, and Mallory manages a “Morning, Mom,” but can’t follow it with a “Dad,” the word
too foreign to release.
Her mother eyes her quizzically before turning to her half-packed lunch on the counter.
Mallory is too exhausted to pretend to be the happy, perfect daughter.
As she waits for the reason she came—to be alone with her father—she opens the door to the pantry, rummaging through every shelf, looking for nut crackers.
“Dinner’s in your court tonight,” her mother says, straightening the badge on her father’s shirt. “Don’t forget.”
“Never again,” he says. “The last time I forgot, you fed me kale salads for a week as punishment. Thankfully MallieMoo taught
me how to set reminders on my phone.”
She did? I did?
Her mother scoffs. “A double-edged sword. Because that means you also know how to set them on mine. Do you know how embarrassing
it was when my phone dinged with a reminder that you loved me every fifteen minutes?”
“Embarrassing, how so?” he says.
“I was in a staff meeting.”
“It was sweet.”
“And at the same time, creepy,” her mom says with a smirk.
Mallory feels like an intruder. This isn’t her family. These aren’t her parents. This easy, comfortable, loving relationship
bordering on soft-core porn isn’t something she grew up witnessing. The brightness in this Mallory’s life runs much deeper
than her wardrobe.
She pulls out her phone and slips on her reading glasses. A dozen tabs lie open in her browser. The articles on the multiverse
she’d been trying to read last night scrambled her brain. With the police investigating if Grayson is a “missing person” and
requesting an interview with her, Ilena, and Aubrey, she’s feeling the scratchiness of an orange jumpsuit against her delicate
skin. Is there not a single academic who can tell her in words with less than a dozen syllables how multiverse theory works
and how universes can cross—how to force them to cross?
A new email arrives from the morning show, confirming that the team who filmed in Mallory’s apartment last night will be at AIM that morning to shoot more B-roll. And there’s also a message dictated by Shandy herself regarding the interview the day after AIM goes public:
Ms. Mallory Latham! My, what a score it is to get you! I aimed high, right? Come wearing the color of money, because you’ll
be rolling in it!
Added by the assistant:
Ms. Shane is being literal. She requests you wear green and Mr. Fields wear a matching green tie.
Mr. Fields. No one’s told the morning show that Grayson won’t be on it.
She starts to forward the email to Noreen for scheduling when her mom sets a hand on her forearm.
“Mallory?” she says. “Walk me to my car?”
“But it’s right there.” Mallory points to the driveway, anxious to get her father alone. Him being a police officer could
have been a hindrance, but considering her mom’s saccharine story about the reminders on her phone, she’s now sure she can
totally use this teddy bear of a man for her own advantage.
“You can carry this.” Her mom pushes a tote into Mallory’s arms that’s as light as a bag of cotton balls. She turns to her
husband. “No sausage. Cholesterol, remember?”
The pout Mallory’s father issues seems entirely out of place for a man in his sixties and one hundred percent out of character
for a man who abandoned his family. He winks at Mallory as she takes off her glasses and follows her mom out the sliding glass
door, onto the back porch, and to the small electric car parked behind the house.
“Here you go.” Mallory hands off the tote. “Careful, you could strain a fingernail.”
“What was that back there?”
“What was what?”
“Come on, Mallory, you’re not sixteen, and you’re also not being fair.”
Should she know what this is about? Other than mom-daughter squabbles that transcend universes?
“He’s a grown man,” her mom says. “He’s in charge of his own choices. You can’t blame him for that.”
But I can. I really, really can.
“It’s me you should be mad at,” her mom adds.
“Why would I be mad at you?”
Her mother grits her teeth. “Sarcasm gives you lip wrinkles.”
“I’m not being—”
“It was a month. Not even a blip when the span is forty years.” She holds up her palm. “I know I hurt him. And you. But don’t
blame him for taking me back. Blame me for going.”
Shock renders Mallory speechless.
“I was curious. I was bored. I was . . . I don’t know what I was. Selfish. I was selfish. A woman in her sixties doesn’t just
up and try out a new life on a whim.”
Mallory can’t move. She can’t even breathe.
Her mother opens the car door and tosses the tote into the passenger seat. She faces Mallory as she slides behind the wheel.
“I’ll make it up to you both. Just give your dad a break. You know it’s not in him to hold on to negativity. So don’t try
and make him.” Her eyes begin to glisten, and she shoves the emotion away. “Come for dinner?”
“I—I can’t.”
“I know. Busy, busy, busy. My smart girl. Guess I played a role. Serves me right. Reap, sow, and all that. Another time?”
Mallory nods, stepping back as her mother puts the car in Reverse. Her mother tried out another life? What does that even mean? She left her father? The same way he supposedly left in her world? Could there possibly be more to the story Mallory grew up believing?
The car is halfway through a three-point turn when Mallory rushes forward and raps on the driver’s-side window. “Was it the
first time? The only time? Did you want to before—”
Her mother looks at her blankly, scratches the back of her neck.
“Because he seems invested,” Mallory says. “So to leave . . .” A flash of her mom, sipping prosecco, a single bite left of
a vanilla wafer, fingers scratching against her skin, the vertigo of déjà vu, and Mallory shakes her head. She’s confusing
herself. Confusing realities.
“No relationship is perfect, Mallory. We make choices, we make mistakes. Life is simply trying to do the right thing most
of the time. And love? Love is being able to forgive when we get it wrong.”
Mallory releases her grip on the edge of the window, and her mom drives off. Her mom and her dad, their relationship, one
of them always leaving. Coincidence or destiny? Mallory never believed in either.
But what about love? Does she believe in that? She hasn’t been able to forgive Grayson. Is that because he doesn’t deserve
it or because she doesn’t actually love him?
And perhaps it’s this shared sense of betrayal that gives Mallory the sudden urge to hug her father for the first time in
her life. This man she has no memories of but who rents so much space in her head, affecting her in ways she’s never let herself
truly admit. She rushes to the porch and bursts through the sliding glass door, but her dad isn’t in the kitchen. The basement
door is open. The light is on. She bounds down the stairs.
Her father stands beside the freezer. The open freezer.
With a plastic bag in one hand and a look of anguish on his face.
He sees Mallory and holds up the bag. “Sausages. I hit the butcher before your mom woke up. I couldn’t put them in the fridge upstairs and let her think I wasn’t listening to her.
Because I’m listening, I am. I want to make her happy.
So I . . .” He looks into the freezer. “I broke the lock, MallieMoo. And I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. ”
Mallory’s legs feel like concrete. “It’s . . . I mean, I . . .” She forces herself to lift a foot.
“No!” Her father slams the freezer shut. “Don’t come any closer. It’s . . . goddamn, Mallory.”
Her throat tightens as if a fist were lodged in it. “I don’t—”
“At least if someone’s got to tell you this, it’s me.” He balls his hands and takes two giant steps toward her. Before he
says anything, he yanks her toward him, and the intensity of the love this man feels for his daughter both breaks and heals
her heart.
The badge on his uniform pricks the yarn of Mallory’s long-sleeved sweater as he draws back to look into her eyes. “It’s Grayson,
MallieMoo. He’s—”
“Don’t say it.” She stifles a sob, and somehow, one of the worst parts of all this is knowing she’s letting her father down.
“I know, sweetheart, I know.” He keeps one hand cupped and runs the palm of his other back and forth over his cropped hair.
“No matter how many times I’ve done this, it doesn’t get any easier. We’ll get through this. I already called Officer Middlebury.
She’ll be here any minute.”
It’s over. Everything’s over.
“She has a lead. Something found at Mr. Fields’s home. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but now . . . I found something similar.”
Mallory’s father opens his closed hand. In it is a silver charm in the shape of Texas with the single word home.
Just like the one Mallory had seen on Noreen’s key chain at Grayson’s penthouse.
When Mallory retrieved the keys that Aubrey had accidentally dropped into her mom’s freezer, they’d snagged on the way out. This must be why.
Ilena and Aubrey. Mallory has to keep them out of this. She can’t let them get hurt. No matter what, she has to protect them.
Her father rubs his head. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’m starting to think this involves one of your employees.
Oh, MallieMoo, not just an employee, your assistant—that girl who you really seemed to like, the one who has access to your
office, your home, my goodness, your house keys, which means our house keys.”
What? What, what, what?
“That day, she offered you her car, didn’t she?” her father says. “She knew you were coming home with the serum and insisted
you use it? It wasn’t to be nice. She had an ulterior motive. To cover her tracks in case anyone recognized the car.”
“I—I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either. Not fully. Not yet. But this . . .” He holds up his phone. “She was here. Your mom turned off the alerts
for our doorbell camera a couple of weeks ago. That beast of a cat the neighbors let hunt the garbage rats kept setting it
off. I just went on now and checked the history. The cat’s there. But so is a young woman. She was cupping her hands to look
through the window on the front door. She had a set of keys in her hand with charms just like these.”
A woman? What woman?
Her father is looking straight at her and can’t see who she really is.
“The mood-enhancing serum you were storing in here is gone. It’s been replaced by something else.” His hand clenches into
a fist. “She’s setting you up. Noreen Parra is framing you for murder. I’d bet anything.”