Chapter 10
Eve Olsen hates Eve Olsen.
It has not always been like this. It’s something of a new development, actually. Who is this new version of her? A stranger. Once, she wrote songs not because she wanted her parents to think she was smart or her boyfriend to love her more, but because she had something she wanted to say.
Eve leaves her apartment and steps into a hot February rain.
The temperature is unseasonable, but these days, everything is always unseasonable.
She walks through the downpour to Domino Park, whose lampposts flicker and glow against the deluge.
There is no one else around. Eve stands on the edge of the East River and tries to make out the lights of Manhattan.
She is furious at herself for being furious at herself.
What does she want to do? What does she want to be?
The river churns, lapping up against the edge of the earth, and Eve puts her hands on top of her head and tries not to falter under the sudden realization of the epicness of it, the power.
On and on and on the river runs. Has run for eleven thousand years, since a glacier carved a valley and the valley flooded full.
Fletcher never wanted to move to the city because he thought there was not enough nature, but look at all this water, this salt and wind and rain.
Now this? This is a cathedral. The kind of thing that could move a person, shake a person, break a person—inspire a song or make you fall in love.
She wants to call her mom but her mom will not pick up.
Eve thought it was cool, kind of badass, when she handed her parents that big check, but it was not cool.
She did not free herself. Because she still loves her parents. Still wants them to love her back.
In Montana, Danny suggested Eve reach out to her parents.
What Danny does not realize is that if he had opened her phone, he would’ve seen a long blue text to her mother, which said, among other things, that Eve felt lost and lonely, that she wanted to work through this, that she still wanted to be part of the family, that she would like to come over—to which Cecilia did not respond.
And while it’s true that Eve could have gone over anyway—knocked on the door and forced Cecilia’s hand—Eve also can’t help but feel that it is pathetic to beg for someone’s love.
Eve could have told Danny this, of course, but Danny thinks that Eve is kind and good, and she is afraid he will start to wonder if perhaps her parents know something he doesn’t.
And perhaps they do. Perhaps they see something bad in Eve, something wrong, something fundamentally unlovable.
A guy with a black umbrella and a dog on a leash stops when he sees Eve. He is standing too close to her and not trying to hide the fact that he’s staring, even though Eve is clearly in the middle of a psychic break, here crying on the edge of the river in the pouring rain.
“What?” Eve says. “What could you possibly want?”
“You’re not dead!” he says.
“No,” she says. “I am not dead.”
Within ten minutes, a video of this interaction will exist on the internet. The prevailing sentiment is that it is a pretty amateur deepfake, and that the man should feel ashamed of mocking Eve Olsen fans in their time of mourning.