Chapter Forty-Three
Forty-Three
Back in my apartment, I paced. Caleb fidgeted. He hung his suit jacket on my beloved coatrack; yanked his tie from his neck
and strung it over the hook.
“I don’t understand,” I said for what felt like the fortieth time. Soulmails were never wrong. Samantha and her unspoken-named
baby girl, Dola and Trent—that first day, and then all the stories that trickled in thereafter. Plus all the experts who have
reaffirmed it over and over. In all recorded history, at least the last few months, we had seen it time and time again: Soulmails
were un-deletable, and they were never wrong. The Soulmail gods themselves had confirmed that for me.
“Me either. It’s miserable.” His hands were aimless. They fumbled over his hair, my counter, his pant legs, until he finally
sat on the counter stool and fisted them below his chin.
So how was it possible that I had two different soulmates? I searched my inbox for the word Soulmail, then changed strategies when I realized that almost every news alert, personal email, promo ad, contained that keyword.
Instead, I navigated to the sidebar with my folders. My insides lit with relief at the one marked STARRED.
Wells’s name loaded, the font carved and clear like the hundreds of Soulmails I’d seen. I flinched at what was supposed to
become my last name, at his birthday.
“I have never once seen unmatched Soulmails.” I pushed my phone toward him. “Tell me how this is possible.”
“I can’t.”
I pressed my shoulder to his, allowing myself a fraction of a second of contact before I grabbed his phone. My name glared
at me.
I laid the devices side by side, flicked my gaze between them. Both Soulmails sent on that same day in July. Three-a.m. arrival.
No red flags, but something brewed in the recesses of my brain. I drummed my knuckles on the quartz counter. “We have the
same model phone, right?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Do you see this?” I tapped where the S in Soulmail curved just so on his. “Does my S look a little pixelated?”
He leaned toward me, then deflated. “No.”
“This makes no sense. I’ve never heard of unmatched pairs. No one has, to my knowledge.”
Caleb took a screenshot. “Insurance,” he joked, tapping the trash can icon. The screen shook merrily, then repopulated with
my name.
“First rule of Soulmail: this icon is obsolete,” I said, tapping my own trash bin.
My screen vanished, returning to my inbox.
We froze.
A dentist appointment confirmation. A promo code for Simon Pearce. A litany of emails, subject lines mixing with the dull
roar in my ears, the whoosh of blood leaving my face as I stopped my frantic swipes.
Slowly, not without fear, I met Caleb’s eyes, his horror reflecting my own.
The last few months unspooled in my head, my thoughts flipping faster than I could hold on to them. This wasn’t supposed to
happen.
Something arrived in my head like a freight train, fully formed and chugging, and I couldn’t stop it, but it carried with it so much hope and at the same time so much fear that I was afraid, afraid, afraid to see if I was correct.
Dread felt like elevator lifts in my belly. It wasn’t like the stakes were life or death. I’d already broken up with Wells.
In my life, fear belonged to my parents losing their oldest child, to my dad risking his life every day on a boat. I thought
of the widow’s walks dotted along Cape Cod, the stories about women pacing them in an eternal wait for their fishing husbands
to come home once they were lost at sea.
I’d always wanted to do a story on those women.
My own fear was foolish in comparison.
But what was life without a little bit of silliness? So I opened it. My archives folder. It held a bunch of emails from before
I changed the settings during my hack-your-life era, and one single email from this calendar year, from after.
Subject Line: Your Soulmail is Attached
My stomach twisted, my tongue acrid with the taste of charred toast. The sensation was not unlike the fastening of a belt
buckle, the slip of a suspender, the two-fisted tightening of a ponytail.
Two Soulmails. One with Wells’s name in my deleted items folder, where real Soulmails weren’t supposed to live. An unopened
one in my archives folder.
A workaround.
Our breakup dialogue burned through my brain.
You’re my soulmate, Olivia.
How did you figure this out?
Do you hate me?
I’m sorry I did this to you. To us.
I went over every syllable that had trailed from his mouth, at least how I remembered it.
I’d thought his words were meant for another betrayal, but this one—this attack on my future, on my past, on everything—was worse than the way he’d cast aside my trust. “How did he do this? How could he do this?”
“Let me see.”
“I can’t do it,” I whispered. “I can’t—he stole time from me. He stole my dignity.”
Caleb’s hand covered mine. He was close. So close the scent of his laundry detergent mingled with mine.
“Wait,” he said. “How could . . . How can you stay with him now, Livi? He falsified your Soulmail?”
I covered my mouth with my free hand. My fingertips touched the wetness on my cheeks. “I already broke up with him,” I said
from beneath my palm.
He let go of my hand, gripped my barstool, and spun me toward him. “You did what?”
“I ended things.”
“When?”
“Yesterday. Right before I quit my job.” I picked up my phone and did the only thing I could do: dial Wells.
As the rings ended in his voicemail message, my whole body trembled with adrenaline, with anger. “How dare you,” I said to
his mailbox. “I just went into my archives folder. You are despicable. You falsified my entire life. I don’t know how you did it. I don’t know how you could do it. I never even knew you.”
I tossed my phone on the counter. “I cannot believe this,” I murmured.
“Olivia. You really broke up with Wells already?”
Sometimes, when I looked at Caleb, I still felt like he was missing those glasses. His eyes were naked. This was one of those
times. “You’re serious,” he added.
“Uh-huh,” I breathed.
The corners of his mouth tilted upward, deepened, then vanished. “What does this mean?”
“I’m not a wordsmith, but I’m pretty sure I can define myself as being single,” I said. “Pretty sure.”
He wrapped my ponytail in his fist and tugged so gently I might have broken. “You really split up with Wells?”
“I really did.”
“Even though you believed he was your soulmate?”
I licked my lips, suddenly desperate for ChapStick. I reached across the counter, snagged a bottle of olive oil, and dabbed
a drop on my pinkie. I slicked it on my lips, his eyes traveling my motion. “Correct.”
“But you believe in all this.”
“I do.”
“Then why?”
I could explain that I was sick of living my life like that little entertainer. That now, my identity as my parents’ collective
distraction had been stripped, and I was free. That my parents had tried to protect me, and I them, ever since Sabrina died.
That I’d spent my childhood running alongside this now-man, trying to buoy my parents; that I’d spent my adulthood skating
until I’d landed like a fish in a net made for sharks, entertaining the masses.
“Wells was important to me. Especially before he cheated on me. But even still, he didn’t feel like my soulmate,” I said finally.
“Soulmail is this tsunami that’s been thrown at the world. And right before it came, instead of getting us to higher ground,
Wells yanked any chance of stability away from me. I’ve spent my entire life doing things for other people. We only get one
of these things, as far as I know. And I need to do right by me.”
“Yes,” he said. “You do.” Time ticked between us. “Once you open that,” he started, then swallowed. His brow pinched. “If you open yours . . .” Caleb didn’t finish his sentence.
But he didn’t have to because it was there. Hope. It was a cracked window on that first spring day, a pinprick of light in
the dark, a sun-warmed towel after bodysurfing.
I was in charge of my own destiny now. I didn’t have to open it.
“You already opened yours,” I said.
His head dipped, an acknowledgment. He thumbed my lower lip, an echo from the other night. I willed my eyes not to dilate.
His hands smelled like my soap.
“I’d really like to not talk about anything else right now,” he said, not taking his eyes off my lips.
I didn’t answer him with words. I met his mouth with mine. His hands skimmed my jaw, the nape of my neck, the shell of my
ear, before they trailed down my body. His knuckles scraped my breast, and the pressure knocked a sound loose from my throat.
Pressure might be the best and the worst of all things. It famously makes diamonds, causes arguments, bursts pipes. But right
now, when I launched myself onto Caleb’s lap and wrapped myself around him, urgent, my hips found his, and that pressure made
us whole.