Chapter Forty-Five
Forty-Five
Over the next few weeks, Caleb’s project became the largest Soulmail exhibit on the planet.
Within hours of his Per Diem appearance, it hit a million subscribers. By that evening, ten million. Since then, he’d landed
over a hundred million subscribers, and scientists could hardly keep up with the amount of raw data they were getting. Businesses
across the city started encouraging midday buddy walks, the sidewalks crowded with pairs of friends all looking to live longer,
happier lives. The museum had to have its tunnel lights re-calibrated.
Given its success, the museum board organized a charity gala to dually benefit the museum and the scientific community. I wore
the same taupe gown from my awards banquet for two reasons: One, I liked the irony, and two, I had no income. But this time,
I wore my hair down and did my makeup the way I liked it. I sent a selfie to Dola. She returned one back of her and Trent
Foster on a Caribbean beach somewhere.
The morning after the gala, we were wrapped in bathrobes, our social batteries drained.
While we ate scrambled eggs with feta and spinach, we listened to an NPR data analysis by a team of Madrid scientists, who’d learned that depending on where you live in the world as of the day before Soulmails first released, you were more or less likely to have been matched with someone with whom who you were already paired.
I retrieved my notebook and scrawled notes below the newly rewritten contact information for the agent who specialized in debut documentarians while we ate, watching Caleb’s facial expressions as he inhaled breakfast.
The most likely place for you to be soulmates with a stranger was S?o Filipe, Cape Verde, and the place with the highest number
of already-wedded Soulmail bliss was Fiji. They did not have official data from most of China, except Guangdong. American
scientists being American turned around and completed the same study for every municipality in the country, a fact I noted
in my bulging notebook that Caleb punctuated with an eye roll.
I wasn’t entirely sure what, if anything, I’d do with the collection of them. Maybe I’d turn it into something someday; maybe
they’d be what they were for a lot of people: information that was relevant for some, useless for others. Maybe I’d click
into some kind of stat that made sense in comparison to zip codes with higher and lower rates of addiction. I clicked a pen
closed, pushed it away.
“Miss work?” Caleb asked, pausing the audio.
I shook my head. “I miss working, but not that work. After all that time trying to make my parents happy, I dove into a career built on background work. There’s
nothing as undercover as uncredited story writing, is there? I don’t think I realized until I was in the spotlight how far
I’d swerved from it.”
“Well, when you were a kid, you were trying to alleviate all this grief and tension around you.” Caleb’s jaw worked. “I was
definitely accomplice to more than one performance, but I couldn’t see back then that it was a heartbreaking choice made by
a lost little kid.”
I sniffed. “I mean, god. My Aunt Josie used to call me Baby June, that little Broadway entertainer.”
His hand skated down my arm, his grasp warm. Comforting. I could melt directly into him, my molecules sifting into his palms like they were an hourglass and I was the sand. It wasn’t lost on me that both when I was a child and now, he played the shelter role. The umbrella that kept me dry.
“Isn’t she the one whose mother used to whisper to her that her dog had died to try and get her to cry while she filmed those
silent movies?”
I turned to face him. “What?”
His mouth twisted. “I know. Cruel.”
“That poor kid.”
“Yes. Failed by everyone in her life,” he said, moving to the sink.
“She’s not the only one.” I meant generally—way too many people out there were. But then I caught it. The stumbling block.
No matter what I did, there was one thing quitting my job and breaking up with Wells had not yet healed. “I think I need to
confront Wells,” I said, handing Caleb our plates.
“You sure?”
“No. But yes.”
“I’ve got you. Before and after.” He snapped the dishwasher closed.
“I planned on that, Mariner.” The decision was exhilarating. And scary. I wasn’t sure how it would go, but for now, Caleb
tasted like orange juice, and so did I.
I didn’t trust myself enough to not behave in a way that would make some D-list tabloid if we met at a restaurant, nor did
I want Wells in the safety of my space. I also had zero interest in ever stepping through the threshold of my old life. I
asked him to meet me in Central Park, by the renovated playground where Judy Blume had supposedly had her character Fudge
break his teeth. I’d told Wells this anecdote probably a dozen times through the course of our relationship, but he never
remembered. Plus, a growing part of me wanted to break his teeth, so I enjoyed that private irony.
I arrived first. The park had that November feel, ochre and sepia. Curled leaves skittered the cement, sand and salt crunching beneath my boots. Unlike in recent years, late fall had brought cold spells, so I’d wrapped myself in a warm coat and donned fuzzy gloves.
He showed up with the decency of looking remorseful. My whole body vibrated with anger. As we walked, I formed a half-dozen
lines on my tongue before I spat out the one that kept me up at night.
“It wasn’t enough that you cheated on me.” I was so mad my voice shook, but there was nothing I could do about it. My tears
didn’t spill over. They made my eyes hot. “You manipulated my entire life to try to get me back with you. How one human being
could ever do that to another is just—” My face crackled with energy. “Beyond me.”
“I thought you figured it out,” he said, glum. “And that’s why you broke up with me.” He sighed. “I knew I was getting off
too easy.”
“What you did goes past deceitful.” It was evil.
“Yeah. I know.” His jacket was open against the cold, his neck red. The scent of his shaving cream turned my stomach.
“How could you?” I shook my head. He wasn’t going to answer that. He was going to do whatever he could to have the life he
wanted. I couldn’t imagine living without a conscience the way he did. “Who is your soulmate, then?”
His mouth screwed up, his face an instant scowl. I used to think the early rakes beside his eyes were from laughing, that
they would only make him appear distinguished as we grew old together, but now they made him look tired.
The same way I could sense a storm coming in my parents’ home, I could take Wells’s emotional temp. He was angry about whoever
his soulmate was. That, combined with the idea that his real soulmate didn’t leak out from behind a curtain to come after
him. “Your mother?” I guessed.
When his expression didn’t change, I threw my hands in the air. “Wow. She must love that.”
“Not her,” he said shortly. “It’s my dad. My father and I are apparently endgame.”
“Oh.” Bitterness fell, swirled, landed. “Oh. Well. She must hate that, then.”
“Said we were two peas in a pod,” he muttered.
“That makes sense,” I said evenly. “She loves to communicate in clichés. Plus, you’re two people who only care about themselves
and the money they make. Sound well-suited for one another, no?”
His flinch. I was prepared for it, but even after all this, hurting him—it still hurt me, too. Someday, I’d better examine
why that was, but for today, I’d let it sit between us.
At a crosswalk, Wells hovered his hand in front of me. It was the protective gesture a parent gives a kid in the front seat
of the car when they stop short. A horse-drawn carriage clomped by us, the tour guide shouting into the brisk air so the couple
woven around one another in the plum velvet seat behind him could hear.
I wondered if I hadn’t found out about Cambrey, if Soulmail had never been a thing—if beneath that veil, I would’ve been happy
with Wells. I could’ve been. But not this version of me, the one who said and did what felt right. “I don’t envy you. It must
be hard to go through life lying to everyone you love.” So much metaphorical weight to carry.
His Adam’s apple bobbed. “It’s not like I recommend it.”
I waited for more people to cross, then forged through an open gap of traffic. “I don’t know how you do it.”
“I did it for you,” he said.
I was desperate to feel better about this, but it wasn’t working. I walked faster than I intended. “I’m not even that great!”
I shouted. “I am perfectly okay. That’s it.”
“You’re right. That’s exactly it.”
I pulled a face. “Groveling looks great on you.”
“You don’t get it.”
“Clearly not.”
He did a little hop to catch up to my stride. “For the first time in my life, I was with someone self-aware. Someone who didn’t
care about who my parents were, or what level club membership we had, or what her work title was.”
“That’s essentially baseline-level humanity,” I said. “That doesn’t make me special.”
“You didn’t grow up like me,” he insisted. “Where I come from, that stuff matters.”
“You’re welcome for the opportunity to, what? Slum it? Is that what they say?”
He made a grunt of frustration. “That’s not it, and you know it. You’re just you, Olivia. As long as I’ve known you, you don’t look at who likes your social posts, or comb through who’s checking out your
stories. Girls in my grade made rules about how to appear cool on social media, but you?” He snapped his fingers. “Post and
ghost. You were the first person I’d ever met who didn’t Google herself every few months.”
“Okay, got it. I don’t want to spend too much time on the internet, so I was perfect wife material? Worth manipulating into
believing we were soulmates. Make it make sense, Wells.”
He twisted his mouth. “That’s not it.”
“Then what is it?”
He reached toward my arm, thought better of it. His hand fell between us. “It’s simple. Almost everything in my life felt
fake, but the pain of losing Charley was the realest thing I’ve ever experienced. Everyone around me said the things you’re
supposed to say, but if important things didn’t seem to matter to them, then it felt like what they said meant nothing.” He
wiped his eyes. “Then I met you. You were someone who understood what it felt like to grieve. You made the pain of losing
my best friend feel . . . seen. Justified.”
For once, his words felt undeniably true. This was the real Wells, the raw one, the one that I’d fallen in love with, the one who’d organized Honey O’s box tops and tried what may have been his best to make us into something he thought was real. “I believe you,” I said quietly. “But then Cambrey.”
“Yeah.” Misery in his voice. “Then her. Biggest mistake of my life.”
“Until you duped me even worse.”
His nod was an acknowledgment. “I know. But the timing.”
“What about it?”
“You discovered what I’d done the same day Soulmail came out. It felt . . .” He cast his eyes around the park. “I don’t know.
Fated or something.”
“How could you rationalize making up for sleeping with Cambrey by commandeering the rest of my life instead?”
“It was wrong. Desperate people do desperate things.”
“Yeah. But there’s a difference between desperate and deliberate.”
We kept walking. I waited to feel better, but I didn’t. Near the entrance to the zoo, I stopped. “I think it’s time for me
to go.”
He swallowed. “I’m really sorry, Olivia.”
I nodded, then pivoted to walk away.
“I don’t know what else I can say,” he called from behind me.
I turned back. “I don’t think it matters what you say.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew they were true. “But tell
me one thing.”
“Anything.” He twisted the heel of his shoe against the ground, gravel protesting beneath his sole.
“How’d you do it?”
He sucked in a breath. “It was right when they came out,” he said. “When the coder at work said they were un-deletable.”
I waited.
“I pretended I’d messed up something for a client, and I asked how I could backdate an email.
He said that I just had to send it from a PC, and I could change the time on the computer to the time I was trying to simulate before sending the email.
Then I paid a Silicon Valley guy to use AI to dupe it—I told him it was for a joke.
” He paused. “I know your email password, so I hacked into it, archived the real one, then sent the fake.”
Anger reared its wings in my ribs. “What would’ve happened when I found you out someday?”
“I checked your archives folder. You didn’t use it. I banked on you not changing that habit.”
“What if that changed, though? What if one year, five, ten, thirty down the line—I started using it? And found the real one?
Or tried to delete it?”
His smile wasn’t the same. “Sometimes, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.”