My muscles, stiff after the day of hiking, protest when I slide out of bed. I grab my glasses and pad downstairs. My phone is where I left it charging on the kitchen counter and I check it before switching on the light over the extractor hood. No new messages, but when I open my chat with Karo I see that she’s online: 2 a.m. here is… 11 p.m. in Oregon.
Before leaving this morning, I’d texted her about the grant,figuring it’d be easier that way. I’m glad for it now as I hit call, since it means I don’t need to find the words and feel my mouth perform the movements around them.
“Hey,” I whisper when she picks up. Several voices reply with a“Hallo,”which is when I realize that, instead of picking up herself, Karo has pulled me into the family group call. My parents must be having breakfast, since it’s morning over there—after five years in NYC, the time difference to Berlin is practically ingrained at this point.
“Oh,Hasi, I’m so sorry,” my mother says, and I feel the pinprick of tears in my eyes at her nickname for me. “Karo told us about the grant.”
“If they don’t want you to solve amnesia… their loss,” my father adds, voice much louder than my mother’s. I picture him at the table, setting his butter knife aside and bending over his phone. The urge to sit with them at the heavy and well-loved dining table hits me out of nowhere. I’d sipMama’sperfect latte that she makes with the coffee maker we gave her for her last birthday, watch her andPapabicker over Sunday’s crossword and wonder how they were so lucky to find their persons and hold on to them, all through teaching for twenty years at the same high school.
“How are you holding up?” Lennart’s voice pipes up.
“I, um…” I falter, lost for words, because how do I explain that I’ve added a whole other set of worries to the ones already occupying my mind? “I’m okay?” I keep my voice low to avoid waking up Lewis. “Catching my breath upstate. I needed to get out of the city for a bit. What are you up to?”
“I was just telling them about our hike, Franzi,” Karo jumps in.
“Send us the pictures you were talking about,”Mamasays. “We need to get going.”
“Want to take the boat out, it’s a beautiful day,”Papacontinues. Ever since they bought a paddleboat two summersago, they spend their weekends out on the rivers and lakes, sometimes taking camping gear to make it into an overnight trip.
We say our goodbyes, and when my parents have left the call, Karo asks, “Everything alright with you? It’s kind of late, right?”
“Yeah.” I sigh. “It’s…” I close my eyes and will the hum of the fridge to ground me. “I think I’ve made a mistake.”
There’s a pause where Lennart murmurs something, Karo sighs, and then her voice comes closer to the microphone. “I don’t think it’s your fault they didn’t give you the grant.” I hear her walk somewhere, presumably into a different room.
“I’m not talking about the grant, I…” I drag my toe over the wooden floor. “He’s a good cook. And do you know how I know? Because he made me dinner. Vegetarian dishes with dairy in them, even though he’s lactose intolerant and eats meat. How the hell am I supposed to come back from that?”
“As much as I love nonlinear storytelling, I’m going to need a little more context here. Start from the beginning,” she demands softly, “and then I’ll tell you if it’s fixable.”
From our last call she already knows that Lewis agreed to fake date me, but now I catch her up with the events of the past week, the evening outings, the first hiccups at selling our fake relationship, the action plan we came up with and how it made our act a little easier and, eventually, not like an act at all.
“Oh no.” She sighs. “I told you, Franzi. No extra credits when you’re fake dating.”
“Our act wasn’t good enough, so it needed to be done. Though maybe the kiss was overkill,” I muse.
“And this whole weekend, too. But as long as your reputation’s safe, it doesn’t seem like it was a complete mistake,” Karo notes. “And maybe Lewis isn’t so bad, either?”
“He isn’t.” I sigh.
“You sound like that’s bad news. Why?”
I hope she has an hour. There are many reasons why.
“We’re only in the same city until Friday. He’ll go back to Germany, and you and I will go on our trip, which is great, but after that? The best-case scenario would be that whatever lab I end up in is on the same continent as him. But even then, I’ve only known him for days, so why would I want to start anything as complicated as this?”
“I mean, if you really like him…”
I begin to pace the length of the counter. “Karo, we work together. Not in the same office, obviously, but we’re in the same field and after Jacob— I can’t.”
“But to everyone else, you’re already a couple anyway,” Karo points out.
“I know. But it’s not only my reputation I’m worried about, though of course, there’s that, too.” I take a deep breath, feel for the words that describe best what has me so wide-awake at night. “I lost sight of myself when I was with Jacob. As long as Lewis and I are not in it for real, at least I know that me and my work exist separately from his. Losing that certainty? That’s what I’m most worried about.”
Karo falls quiet for a moment, then huffs out an exasperated, “Ugggh.”
“Exactly,” I say.
“Frances?”
