“Yes. No,” I press out between two giant sobs that feel like someone has taken a sledgehammer to my chest. I’ve been holding everything in for the sake of Karo’s and my relationship but now it comes crashing out in my tears, like an overstuffed piñata. Lewis’s betrayal, my guilt over how I ended things with him, even more guilt about how I’ve treated Karo. And though I’ve tried not to think about work after Karo blamed me for having such an unhealthy relationship with it, there’s that, too: my failed grant, Rosanna’s job offer I can’t take, and the general panic I feel when I think about my future because it will mean uprooting myself again when I’m not sure I can take it anymore.
“Franzi, you’re crying.” Karo lets go of the steering wheel and shakes my shoulder. “What does that mean?”
“I’m okay,” I wheeze out. “I just feel like I messed everything up.” Behind the stream of my tears, I imagine her rollingher eyes, wondering if it’s about my code or my job again, and I quickly add, “But it’s okay. I can ha-a”—a sob makes me hiccup—“handle it.”
Karo leans over and drops a roll of toilet paper from the glove box into my lap. I trumpet into a tissue as fat drops of rain start pelting onto the windshield, drumming on the roof of the car. “I’ll figure it out. We don’t need to talk about me,” I assure her, and this time it sounds believable, voice sans snot and teary cracks.
Karo knits her eyebrows and squeezes my knee. “Of course we do, silly,” she says softly.
I press my lips together. I don’t want my thoughts and anger and sadness to come spilling out. I can’t, not when I’ve witnessed how much it hurts her to shoulder them all the time. “No, Karo. Seriously. If anything, we need to talk about us. About how I’ve been treating you.”
She looks at me skeptically.
A car whizzes by on our left side, splashing water against the windows. “Are you okay to drive?” I ask. “Should I…”
Karo slowly turns the key in the ignition, and with her eyes on the road and hands on the wheel, I hope that this can finally be the space where we can talk.
“I’m so sorry,” I tell her, noting how her shoulders inch up, and my heart twists. Maybe I’ve read her wrong. Maybe it still isn’t the moment.
But then she gives a minuscule nod that tells me to continue. “I’m really sorry for how I’ve treated you. I thought our closeness was special. How we kept in touch even when I was living on the other side of the world. But I can see now how I’ve taken you for granted, all these years, and how it must’ve been really hard from your side.” My tears are threatening to come back, but I swallow them down. “I promise it won’t get tothat again. I promise I won’t bug you with my stupid problems anymore, and I’ll make sure to ask you about yours and everything that’s going on in your life.”
“It’s not like I don’t want to hear about your life anymore, Franzi.” Karo sighs. “But the way we worked, it was all you and never me. Sometimes one person needs to lean on the other for some time and that’s fine. I was fine having your back while you figured things out. But I realized I was becoming this one-dimensional side character in your life. The one you call when it’s not going well, while you were getting more and more stuck on this path you’d determined for yourself.”
“I’m so sorry, Karo,” I tell her, nestling up with my back against the door. “All I ever wanted was to learn more about what happened to you in that ski accident. You asked me all these questions, over and over again, and at some point, the answers I gave you stuck, and everything turned out fine, but it’s not like that for everyone. So many people out there have long-lasting complications after accidents, or other memory issues. Epilepsy, dementia, Alzheimer’s. People whose memory gets scrambled, who forget more by the day or can’t hold on to any new information. It’s heartbreaking to see a person disappear while they sit right in front of you. This is who I’m doing my work for. I never meant to hurt you in the process.”
The rain drums down strongly now. Karo increases the speed on the windshield wipers. “I know that this is yourwhyand I’m not telling you to change it. But I worry about you. You’re willing to sacrifice so much for this. Ever since you broke up with Jacob you got so hung up on your career. I get that you needed to fight for it and stand up for yourself, but suddenly nothing else mattered anymore.”
My first instinct is to deny it. As Lewis once hazarded, I’m a bit allergic to criticism. But truly, she’s right. As I crumple upthe greasy paper bag that’s left over from the donuts, I force myself to say, “Maybe, yeah. I think after Jacob, and how he took advantage of me, I overcorrected.”
Karo sets the indicator to turn off the main road, deeper into the forest where we’ve rented a tiny house. “It was like the places and people you passed were props in your journey to success. But now—I don’t know. It sounded like this time in New York you stopped being just Dr. Silberstein the scientist but gave the rest of yourself some space to breathe, too. Like you were finally making memories instead of just studying them.”
She shrugs, but her words hit me, hard. “I guess I thought something in you had finally shifted. That we could turn the page to the next chapter, where you were doing better, finding balance for yourself and caring about things other than work or proving Jacob wrong. Where I could share my own problems and ask for your advice, too, and where we could be silly sometimes. So, when you called and it was all about solving amnesia and success again, I snapped. And I’m so sorry for the way I did, in a moment that was hard for you.” Stopped at a traffic light, Karo’s eyes leave the road for a moment, glancing at me. “I got scared when I sensed you moving backward to the place you’ve spent the last five years in. One where you doubt yourself constantly, forget about yourself and everyone else, and don’t find peace. I don’t like to see you in that place.
“But obviously none of that means you’re not allowed to talk about yourself anymore. That’s nonsense. Especially because, well…” She gesticulates at my tear-streaked face and the wad of tissue tucked into the middle console. “Clearly something’s up. So, tell me what happened?”
“What about you, though?” I divert.
Karo rolls her eyes. “We talked about me for the last week. I don’t know what else to tell you. I need to get back home and live a little before I can tell you more.”
I study my beautiful little sister, my best friend; how every few seconds her eyes pivot over to me, the gray tinted with warmth and care.
“You’re not happy with your job anymore?” I insist. “Maybe we should talk about that.”
“It’s not that I’m not happy, it’s just… I’ve gotten to the point where it has started to feel boring. I love the books, and my colleagues, our campaigns, but I feel like I’ve gotten all I need out of the job. And it’s hard, because I don’t know what’s next for me. I’ve always admired how adaptable you are, and I wish I had some of that, too. It might make changing jobs easier.”
That same adaptability Karo is talking about is the exact reason why she’s the only person I confide in—I’ve perfected this skill to the point I don’t put down roots anywhere anymore. But maybe this is something I can help her with. “We can look for other opportunities when we’re back at the cabin,” I offer. “Get your résumé up to speed. I can…” I falter because the constant changes in my life are so second nature that it’s hard to verbalize them into one concrete piece of advice. “Coach you through it. What’s holding you back?”
“I don’t know,” she says, voice soft.
“Start from the beginning,” I tell her, borrowing the words she’s calmed me down with time and time again, “and then I’ll tell you if it’s fixable.”
Later that evening, after brushing up her professional social media profiles and scrolling through job portals to identify vacancies that spark some kind of excitement in Karo, we sit down to veggie burgers and a truckload of fries at the local diner. On the short way over, I’ve caught her up with the bitsand pieces about the Sawyer’s she didn’t know about: running into Jacob again, our hunt for the notebook, my breakup with Lewis, the strange surprise at discovering Vivienne’s kindness, and how unmoored I’m starting to become when thinking about my career choices.
Because I’m worried it’ll push us back into the pattern we’re trying to work ourselves out of, I’ve decided not to tell her about the panic attacks until I’ve made a therapy appointment back home. Once I know I’ll get the professional help I need, I can be vulnerable about it without giving her the feeling she has to carry this on her shoulders, too.
“Okay. Let me sum this up,” Karo says, dragging her fry through the puddle of BBQ sauce on her plate. “You either take the job, which would give you the opportunity to live close to the guy you fell in love with, or you don’t take the job and you’d have to find a new lab wherever, plus you’d be far from the guy you fell in love with. Those are your options. Correct?”
“Taking the job is not an option, because I wouldn’t take myself seriously,” I confess as I peel the sliced pickle off my patty and stack it on the side of my plate from where Karo transfers it onto her burger. “It doesn’t feel earned. I’ll always question whether I deserve to be there and I can’t live like that. I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished, and I’ve worked too hard to be put in that position. It’s like Jacob all over again.”
