Chapter Twenty-Five
I never thought I’d be the one to break my sister’s heart.
Being a sister should be the most natural thing in the world, and yet I’ve messed it up.
I’ve been so single-minded about my career and relied on Karo holding me together through all the ups and many downs of it that I forgot about her needs.
I should’ve been looking out for her over the last years, too, instead of hijacking any conversation.
And to top it all off, I bombarded her with my worries on what should have been her unique and stress-free, once-in-a-lifetime honeymoon.
Here I am, as incompetent in life as I am in my career. Turns out, Jacob was right when he predicted I’d end up unsuccessful and alone. My chest feels hollow, my knuckles tight around my phone, and guilt swirls deep in my belly as my mind stabs itself with memories.
Memories in which I put myself first and her second.
Memories in which I treated her the way I hate to be treated.
It’s too much right now. Too much to unpack where I’ve gone wrong.
I couldn’t bear talking to Lewis earlier, emotions flaring bright when I’d just learned he’d won the same grant I’d been rejected for, but the cocktail of anger, disappointment, and jealousy has lost enough of its sting and made space for a slew of questions.
After his betrayal, I don’t think the promises we made to each other late last night still stand, but I want answers and I want him to know how much I’m hurting.
Instead of heading home, I turn back to campus.
The Sawyer’s summer picnic is still in full swing.
The lanterns have blinked on, strings of light crisscrossing above the food sections, and alcohol has turned up the volume on people’s conversations.
Some of the vendors are already packing up, but the lines for drinks are long.
I push down one of the main footpaths, past an area of the green that has been turned into a dance floor, and there he is at one of the metal tables—elbows angled, head in one hand, the other tapping his phone whenever the screen switches off.
The lit screen gives me flashes of him: eyebrows pressed into a frown, downcast mouth, the smudge from my fingers dark on his chest.
Seeing him sets off a flurry behind my ribs, like my body hasn’t learned yet that we can’t reach out to him anymore. Next to him, Brady talks as she spins her straw through the shrunken ice cubes of her drink.
My sneakers crunch over the gravel as I plot a path toward them, and a few steps before I reach the table, Lewis looks up, then jumps to his feet.
“Frances— Jesus, I was worried.” His eyes trace over my face, his hand twitching up as if he’s about to touch me.
I take a step back. “I want to know why.”
“He was worried you didn’t get home,” Brady chimes up behind Lewis, who must have given her an excuse for his sullen mood.
My gaze remains fixated on his face. “Why didn’t you tell me about the grant?
I want to know what else you didn’t tell me.
” My anger has evaporated, and it has left behind a deep aching pit in my chest. “If this whole fake-dating business was all a game to you. Why you didn’t think the grant was important to mention when we agreed to give us a chance last night.
” My voice cracks and I press my lips together, not willing to let him see me like this. Not anymore.
“No, I—” Lewis starts.
“Oh. My. Fucking. Golgi.” Brady shoots out of her chair, her eyes wide and pinballing between Lewis and me.
Right. Brady.
I forgot she didn’t know about our charade. Two weeks of painstaking care to make this relationship seem real so Lewis’s and my reputation wouldn’t suffer and I just spelled it out for her. Fake dating.
Brady cannot know. It doesn’t matter that the Sawyer’s is over and Lewis and I are, too—it could still mean the end of our careers. I wait for a rush of nerves but, after everything that has happened this evening, I can’t bring myself to care anymore.
Brady’s voice is shrill when she cries, “I was right. I knew there was something fishy going on, like how Lewis never mentioned you were together until this trip and I barely saw you at our hotel, and never in the mornings… And how excited you were to meet Professor Alderkamp, as if you wouldn’t have had any other opportunity to meet her, even though Lewis has been in touch with her for so long. It was all… Right. There.”
Brady pauses, her gaze frantically jumping between us.
“But you guys were also so cute together and looked so happy. Like, Lewis lit up like a Christmas tree every time you were around, and I wasn’t sure— I thought nobody would ever fake date in real life!
Oh no, I said something about the two of you having a just one bed situation, didn’t I?
” She clamps her hands over her mouth. “Why didn’t you tell me? ” she adds, squinting at Lewis.
He juts out his chin. “Brady,” he says without averting his eyes from me, “I’ll see you at the hotel later, okay? I’ll explain, but please. Not a word to anyone.”
“I’d never.” She sounds appalled as she gathers up her tote bag and empty glass. After she pulls me in for a hug and says her goodbyes, she mimics zipping her mouth shut before she trudges away.
“Do you want to sit down?” Lewis offers cautiously as he motions toward the chairs.
I shake my head. “I’m not staying. I just want answers.”
He nods, slowly. “I guess I should start from the beginning. I met Rosanna when she was visiting for a talk at the institute in Berlin last summer.” He hooks his fingers into his collar and lifts it away from the nape of his neck, as if to grant himself a little extra space to breathe.
“At first, she only wanted me to be her postdoc since her current electrophysiologist was leaving. But we started brainstorming from there, realizing we could merge the focus of our research in a much bigger way. To study memory in a multi-methods approach. I pushed to include MRI and computational modeling. I was thinking of you and everything I’d learned from your papers.
” His somber tone brightens with excitement about the project, but only for a beat.
“So we wrote the grant together, Rosanna and I, and I thought maybe, in the unlikely case we won it, I could contact you. To see if you wanted to handle a part of the project.”
He holds my gaze and I swallow thickly. It’s scary how much our dreams of the future are aligned, how similar we are in our goals. Some twisted part of me melts because he wrote me into his grant, because he thought my research was valid, useful, necessary.
But it also makes me sick, getting pushed into somebody else’s grand scheme like this—again.
“And yet I had to find out about the grant from Rosanna. So what happened?” I prompt, crossing my arms.
“The Sawyer’s happened. Our plane ride happened.
You happened. You sat down next to me on the plane, and I honestly forgot about the grant because there was no space for it.
” He bites his lip and his voice goes quieter when he adds, “There was only you, and how much I wanted to be around you. And by the time I heard the news, I was already in so deep. Everything I said these last days is true, Frances. I care a lot about you. I just didn’t know what to do. ”
“You care about me, so much that you were planning to keep this a secret?” I push down all the unwanted feelings his words trigger and focus on his betrayal instead. “How long have you known?”
He lowers his eyes. “Sunday night.”
“Sunday?” I press out. The donuts, the weekend in the Catskills—they weren’t a lie. But everything after?
“You were there when I unlinked my emails from my phone. I didn’t check my inbox until after we got back to the city.” He’s looking at me now, lets me see the trouble stirring in the blue of his eyes. His hands lift for a moment, but then he sinks them into the pockets of his jeans.
“So, your notebook going missing was a really convenient distraction to keep us focused on something else until the end of the Sawyer’s,” I observe.
“Did you think you could keep the grant a secret until we were back home? Were you ever going to tell me, or did you plan to ignore it like you did four years ago?”
“No, I…” Lewis frowns. “I wouldn’t do something like that on purpose. I really did lose the notebook. You know I was desperate to get it back. I didn’t want it to mess up either of our careers.”
“Whatever the deal with the notebook was, the fact still stands: You decided to keep the grant a secret.”
“Only until I knew what was going to happen with us. I was going to tell you, Frances, you have to believe me. I thought I could figure out some kind of solution before it messed anything up…” He gulps.
“And we weren’t sure what was going to happen after the Sawyer’s anyway.
What’s the use of talking about this grant if I was only going to get a few more days with you?
” He presses his lips together. “I’m sorry for how it happened—for not telling you when I know I should have. ”
“Regardless of what was or wasn’t going to happen to us after the Sawyer’s, how did you think you could solve this?
” I ask him, words brimming with hurt. “Did you think I’d leave to some faraway lab and you’d hire someone else?
Or were you going to sit me down and offer me the position?
None of these options sound like a good solution to me.
And what about letting me drive and just wanting to be along for the ride? ”
“Frances, you have to understand. I was terrified of messing things up. When it comes to you, I don’t know what to do.
” His voice is gritty as he presses his index finger and thumb to the bridge of his nose, and when he lowers his hand again, the half-moon dents of his fingernails are imprinted into his skin.
“I’ve never felt this way before. Attraction, sure.
Appreciation, maybe comfort, too. But not this endless wonder.
Like I’m a kid again, going to bed after the best possible day, but scared to fall asleep because I don’t want it to end.
That’s what it feels like when I’m around you. ”
The space behind my ribs feels raw, exposed. Lewis admitting his feelings for me hurts just as much as the explanation of his lies. I hug myself tighter, trying to minimize the area of impact.
Lewis leans forward and catches my gaze. “If you’d think about it—think what we could achieve together. Scientifically. And with our lives. At the end of the year, we could already be living in the same city if, you know, you decide to take the job.”
I shake my head, his suggestion like a punch out of nowhere. How can he still think there’s a good outcome for both of us in this situation? “Have you been listening at all?” I blurt out. “You know I won’t. I’m not going to depend on you. This is my job and my career, and I won’t take handouts.”
“But isn’t it different this time? It’s a lab you’ve dreamed of working with, a professor you know you get along with—who you’ve been wanting to work with, no less.
You’d be responsible for your work package of the grant.
I wouldn’t be your boss, just your colleague, really. You’d still be in the driver’s seat.”
Lewis’s inability to understand that the damage is done is like a screw winding tighter and tighter. He’s pushed us down an impossible path, one we can only navigate separately now.
I shake my head, more insistently this time. “It doesn’t matter. Whatever study I run, whatever conference I go to or colleague I talk to, whatever paper I publish, I’ll always think it was all because I fucked the right person.”
His hands fly up as if I physically lashed out. The crease between his eyebrows deepens. “But that’s not how it works,” he argues back. “It’s not like I can give you a job just like that. Despite all the nepotism in science, you’d have to interview, Rosanna would have a say in it…”
“Don’t you think I know all that?” I bite out.
“So why doesn’t it change your mind? Why isn’t it enough?
” Lewis counters, and as his hands reach for the back of a chair, his emotions are all right there in the white of his knuckles.
“If we break up, would that be your solution? I don’t want to come between you and what you love.
Tell me what it is you need me to do, and I’ll do it. ”
The screw winds so tight that I splinter around it. “I need you to leave me alone. I need you to not fit me into your five-year plan to professorship. I need you to understand you can’t make choices for me.”
“Frances,” Lewis says, exasperated. “Let’s take a step back for a moment. This is not about fitting you into my plans. I care about your reputation, but I care about producing good science, too. Don’t you?”
A dry laugh claws out of my throat. “Stop making excuses for yourself in the name of science. No wonder people leave if you mess up this badly.”
The words rush out of me before I fully parse their meaning. Like running a bit of code I came up with, just to see if it works. Except there’s another human being at the other end, one who flinches and then looks at me incredulously, a muscle in his jaw dancing to a beat I cannot hear.
My stomach feels like it’s climbing up my chest, and I want to pull my words back.
“I’m—”
“You know what,” Lewis snaps, and something cold slithers down my spine. His face is all angles, like he desperately wants me out of his space. “You’re right. I’m done. You can put this into your long list of failed experiments. It takes more than a week of play-pretend to fall in love.”
And with that, he steps around me. He shoves his hands into his pockets, as though he needs to restrain them from reaching for me. When he’s stalked past me, Lewis turns around once more.
“Have a safe trip, Dr. Silberstein.”