Lewis’s inability to understand that the damage is done is like a screw winding tighter and tighter. He’s pushed us down an impossible path, one we can only navigate separately now.
I shake my head, more insistently this time. “It doesn’t matter. Whatever study I run, whatever conference I go to or colleague I talk to, whatever paper I publish, I’ll always think it was all because I fucked the right person.”
His hands fly up as if I physically lashed out. The crease between his eyebrows deepens. “But that’s not how it works,” he argues back. “It’s not like I can give you a job just like that. Despite all the nepotism in science, you’d have to interview, Rosanna would have a say in it…”
“Don’t you think I know all that?” I bite out.
“So why doesn’t it change your mind? Why isn’t it enough?” Lewis counters, and as his hands reach for the back of a chair, his emotions are all right there in the white of his knuckles. “If we break up, would that be your solution? I don’t want to come between you and what you love. Tell me what it is you need me to do, and I’ll do it.”
The screw winds so tight that I splinter around it. “I need you to leave me alone. I need you to not fit me into your five-year plan to professorship. I need you to understand you can’t make choices for me.”
“Frances,” Lewis says, exasperated. “Let’s take a step back for a moment. This is not about fitting you into my plans. I care about your reputation, but I care about producing good science, too. Don’t you?”
A dry laugh claws out of my throat. “Stop making excuses for yourself in the name of science. No wonder people leave if you mess up this badly.”
The words rush out of me before I fully parse their meaning. Like running a bit of code I came up with, just to see if it works. Except there’s another human being at the other end, one who flinches and then looks at me incredulously, a muscle in his jaw dancing to a beat I cannot hear.
My stomach feels like it’s climbing up my chest, and I want to pull my words back.
“I’m—”
“You know what,” Lewis snaps, and something cold slithers down my spine. His face is all angles, like he desperately wants me out of his space. “You’re right. I’m done. You can put this into your long list of failed experiments. It takes more than a week of play-pretend to fall in love.”
And with that, he steps around me. He shoves his hands into his pockets, as though he needs to restrain them from reaching for me. When he’s stalked past me, Lewis turns around once more.
“Have a safe trip, Dr. Silberstein.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
The evening has taken away the protective layer of my skin, leaving behind a raw, sulking mass of inadequacy. Each step farther away from Lewis deepens the crack in my chest and makes me sick with guilt for what I said, but I force myself to breathe through it and remind myself of what he did—what he kept from me.
What he said yesterday about how he feels isn’t important. HowIfeel isn’t important.
Not when he wasn’t honest about something so big, pushing me back into the corner I’d been fighting my way out of ever since my breakup with Jacob.
For about ten minutes after I leave campus, I’m in denial about everything. Ten minutes, or about as long as it takes to get to my studio and realize that my fingers have twitched for my phone too many times to count, eager to call Karo so she can make sense of everything for me.
Except I’ve already messed up her honeymoon.
Except what she said boils down to: Grow the fuck up and handle your problems on your own.
Shame pinches in my stomach as I think about Karo, and when I’ve toed off my sneakers at the door, I finally allow my brain to flip through the last years. Our almost daily phone calls, my short visits to Berlin, our trips together. I was proud of myself for keeping such close contact with her, my anchor point amidst all the changes. But through the new filter her words have given me, I see that all these memories are tinged in my work. Ranting to Karo about failed experiments, racing to meet conference submission deadlines while sitting at her kitchen table, and pushing off visits because I had too much to do. A trip with Karo tacked onto a conference abroad, off-loading my worries onto her while she was supposed to celebrate her honeymoon with Lennart, fitting her in around the biggest constant in my life. I used her to fill up my social battery and to solve any emotional problems without caring for her needs. Karo cheered me on toward my goals, but I’d stopped asking about her life and what future she was dreaming of.
I think back to my relationship with Jacob. How he’d become so focused on himself and his career that he only cared about my use for him and nothing else. Now, I’d done the same with Karo—I’d taken my own sister, her kindness and emotional support, for granted.
And for what?
An offer to work in a lab with a professor I admire and a topic I care about. A way to tackle the research questions that have hovered out of reach, a way to finally make a difference.
Yet all I feel is this churning sense of dread. A scratching doubt. That whisper in the back of my mind.
Has any of it been worth it?
Was it worth all the stress, the late nights and long weeks? Packing up my suitcases over and over again? Never making a home anywhere because soon I’d be moving to a new place? Prioritizing my data over making friends, over finding trueconnection? Yanking a colleague into this ridiculous charade that risked both of our careers? Hurting my sister?
I want to cry, but I’m too stunned, too disappointed, and too disgusted with myself to give in to the urge. I’m not ready to reevaluate the last five years yet, and even less ready to get close to that tender spot behind my ribs that pulses whenever I think about Lewis. But as I put myself under the icy spray of the shower, I realize that there’s one thing Icanchange. I can show Karo how much I care about her. That she’s not my emotional trash can but the most important person in my life.
My flight gets into Seattle at midday tomorrow, just a few hours after Lennart leaves back to Germany for the summer concert series his orchestra is playing. Two weeks of uninterrupted sister time. Two weeks that’ll hopefully allow me to make up for all the ways I’ve been absent.
