“Revolting.”
“Right?” This is how it felt on the subway when she was eighteen. “And besides, I don’t want someone, I want you.”
His breath is heavy, laden with all they’ve been through and all they’ll have to go through. “I want you too. It’s why I wasbringing these cupcakes to celebrate with you at AIM. But our problems, they don’t magically go away.”
Ilena never thought problems would magically disappear. But the woman she was before all of this would have insisted that if she only tried harder, did everything perfectly, she had the power to eliminate them. Happiness might not be the journey, but it’s also not something static, that once achieved means everything falls into place.
“No, they don’t,” Ilena says. “But these are the problems I’m choosing to work on. Because the trade-off is so very worth it.”
The lines around his eyes crinkle. He looks at her as if seeing her for the first time but also seeing every version of who she has been and will ever be. The heat of embarrassment sneaks into her cheeks in a way it hasn’t since before they were married.
“Let’s go to Plum Island,” he says.
“It’s horsefly season.”
“Then let’s embrace those little demons and let’s talk. I want to talk.”
“Me too.” She picks up the box of cupcakes. “But first... how late is checkout?”
As she follows him up the creaky staircase with the butterfly wallpaper, she pulls her phone from her purse. She can’t miss the opening bell at AIM. Just enough time. She lets her phone fall back into her bag, where it clanks against something hard. She pauses, puts her hand inside, and feels around.Impossible.There’s no part of coherence link that explains this. This is... something else. Still, she knows it, somewhere deep inside, before she sees it. The diamond-encrusted emerald ring that Ilena wore in another reality, that Mallory swears she saw Ilena wearing here, the night they watched Ethan die.
51
Mallory
Thursday Morning
Seven DaysAfterthe Outing
The Day AIM Actually Goes Public
Grayson steps into Mallory’s office, and reflexively her arms entwine around him. Her chest aches with guilt and her head with relief and other parts with desire.
“A week of silent treatment and now this?” Grayson pulls back from her to close the door. “I realize we have much to discuss, but first things first. These glass walls of your office have blinds, correct?”
The life in his limbs, the animation in his eyes, the puckering of his lips are all in such contrast to the Grayson she left behind that when he touches her again, she recoils.
“All right, then,” he says with a resigned sigh. “No sex in the office rule stands.”
Her head’s thumping and she curses the fact that hangovers can apparently cross universes.
“Mallory?” Grayson says with concern, with none of the arrogance or harshness of his words on the day of the outing. Heshakes his head. “Still? Not ready to have a mature conversation about this?”
Right leg bent at an unnatural angle, body still, eyes open, opaque and not moving.
“Mallory?” he says.
Crunch of glass, smell of wine, pooling of blood.
Her heart thrums as she tries to reconcile the images of the only two dead bodies she’s ever seen. They’re connected across universes. Because of her. She has to do what she can to make things right.
She slowly circles to the chair behind her desk, taking comfort in the familiar view of the river outside her window. “We need to talk about Ethan.”
Grayson remains standing. “Patrick sent a sympathy gift—premade dinners, I believe. He says there’s always too many floral arrangements.”
He’s uncertain, evaluating, the way he would when she’d bring him the financial statements and an unorthodox idea he always said yes to. She’d forgotten that. He never said no. Until the day of the outing. Maybe that’s why it infuriated her so much. Hurt her so much.
She knits her fingers together in her lap. “Do you really need me to say it?”
