Chapter 39
Thirty-Nine
Fits and starts, Mom used to call the kind of sleep I had. She spoke so fast I thought it had that name: fitzinstarts. My fragmented dreams were of the TIME magazine from when I was a kid that had Dolly the cloned sheep on the cover. Back then, my elementary class had voted, and
eighteen out of twenty-one of us believed human cloning would happen by the year we graduated.
Now I rolled over and researched Dolly, something I would’ve fallen into at my work computer for an entire morning before
Soulmail happened. I read, absorbed, for the better part of an hour to distract myself from the unrelenting desire for Caleb
that coursed through me on a loop. I opened another tab, ready to dive into the process of embryo transfer, when Natalie tapped
on the door to her guest room.
“Come in,” I called, propping myself on her pillows. My feet were sore from last night’s stilettos, but I did my best to shove
that from my head, because I was very much not thinking about last night. “Do you remember Dolly the sheep?”
Her nose wrinkled, then smoothed. “How could I not? I was a child in the nineties.” She handed me a mug of steaming coffee,
then pretzeled herself on the bed at my feet. Her face lit up. “Did you dream about sheep?” she guessed. Natalie loved hearing
about other people’s dreams. I tended to think no one wanted to hear about them unless they were into dream interpretation.
I blew on the steam. “Sorta. I was just reading up on her. Did you know that it took 277 tries for scientists to get twenty-nine embryos to survive longer than six days? And of those, Dolly was the only one who made it?”
Natalie tilted her head. “Is this really about sheep? Because these are all key words in IVF. Is your bio clock ticking? Are
you trying to have a kid? Is that what last night was about?” She peered at my face, then shook her head. “No, that’s not it.”
“I do want kids.” I frowned. I’d neglected to make a consultation appointment for the egg freezing. “You know that.” The pit
in my stomach shriveled. I clenched against it. I’d be lying if it wasn’t screaming, and not with Wells, but I’ve been pretty good at lying to myself lately.
“Then what’s the reason for the look on your face?”
“What look?”
“You know.” She clicked her tongue, then pointed at the mirror. I was foggy-eyed in that dizzy-cloudy kind of way, my face
way more peaceful than it should’ve been after that night of sleep. My mother would say my color was high. I felt kind of
high, with information.
“I just like learning,” I said.
“Right,” Natalie said in the way I knew she didn’t believe me one bit. “Hey, your phone is blowing up.”
One glance showed me notifications falling on top of one another in a way that I had learned should make me uneasy. I clicked
on one, navigating to a social post I probably shouldn’t try to view.
The post was made by a true-crime creator I recognized, one whose following was garnered by her reposting cold cases or unsolved
murders and dissecting them for her followers. I’d seen her while scrolling before. But I wasn’t prepared for the face I saw
now.
Sabrina’s.
OLIVIA ADLER’S SECRET SISTER HAD A GRUESOME DEATH, the video was captioned.
After I forwarded the post to Marta Jenkins, PR, copying in Chuck Wheeler and Samantha, I borrowed Natalie’s hat and sunglasses
to shield my puffy eyes for the walk home, since crying in the back of an Uber felt like the lyrics to a Taylor Swift song.
I immediately called my parents, the silence on their end as bitter as I figured it would be. As I walked, I flipped through
Wells, Caleb, my job, Natalie, my sister, tossing each away like a deck of cards.
“Wait one moment, Ms. Adler,” the regular doorman called, once I walked through my lobby. “You have a package.”
“When are you going to call me by my first name, Hank?” I asked, smiling.
“Never.” He winked. “A gentleman came by for you,” he said, bending to retrieve something. “I recognized him, but you know
no one in this building goes up without a key.”
“Oh?” My pulse hammered. I lifted my chin, thinking of museum curators. Hank raised the object in question, and my heart managed
a one-two thump before reregulating. “Oh.”
“Here you go.”
My smile weakened. I accepted the package: a gold bag that had been nestled between someone’s feet last night. “Thanks.” I
swallowed. “Did he call up?”
He shook his head. “Nope. Said you were probably sleeping after your big event.”
“Right,” I said, elbowing the elevator button.
“Ms. Adler?”
I turned.
Hank twisted his mouth, hesitating.
“Hank?”
“This is just an observation,” he said finally. “The gentleman was dressed in running clothes. He offered me a coffee on his return lap.”
His return lap. He was coming back. My shoulders slumped. “Got it.”
I made it all the way up to my apartment without opening the gold bag. Wells’s gift language was jewelry, both costume and
fine. He said his mother told him that women only like fine jewelry for special occasions, which I always told him was outdated.
At my one-year job anniversary, when I’d casually slipped that I wouldn’t mind something creative, he’d shown up with a candy
necklace printed with positive affirmations instead. I’d loved it.
My phone dinged with a text from Caleb:
Hope you liked the exhibit, he’d written. See you tomorrow?
I did like the exhibit. I loved the exhibit. I loved the map of a world of relationships, the web of connections. But right
now, I set my phone on the counter and peered into Wells’s gift. I didn’t know what I expected, but if I had to qualify what
I least expected, it would be this.
There was an actual gift inside. A tiny bright tangerine box that looked expensive before I even clocked its HERMES label.
But I left that in the bag unopened because something else was in there, something thrown in for convenience to carry, probably,
something nearly hyperbolic in nature. A curtain of moisture swept against my eyes, tears rushing toward the bridge of my
nose. But it wasn’t crying I was doing, it was laughing. It’s for later, Wells had said. He’d meant it literally.
The half-empty bottle of melatonin rattled in my hand.
If I’d had this exact bottle, then the odds of me seeing Cambrey’s text that night were infinitely lower.
MOM ASKED ME TO GIVE THIS TO YOU, Wells had written on the stationary embossed with his family monogram.
He’d penned the words in the all-caps block letters he favored.
YOU LEFT IT IN THE HAMPTONS. WASN’T SURE IF YOU WERE OUT. —W
Heat rushed to the small of my back. The amber bottle was slick in my palm. The capsules inside jostled, my big clue that
I was shaking. I dropped the medicine and clapped my hand to my mouth.
I coughed once, twice, my laugh faster and faster until it morphed into a buzz against my ears. I stopped laughing, though,
because the sound wasn’t me. It was my intercom, announcing the arrival of someone on their return lap. Someone who believed
in the possibility of us.
I pushed against the anvil of dread. I was sick of being resigned to this destiny. I wanted so much more for myself than what
my email had delivered. It wasn’t fair—nothing was.
And then I started to cry again, because I knew in the smallest parts of me what would happen next.