She senses another sneeze coming on and tries to stifle it, as if by being quiet she can offset the fact that she’s in here witha hypoallergenic dog she’s somehow allergic to while her best friends deal with a dead body.
“Ilena, your legs.” Mallory’s order filters through the crack of the bedroom door. “Lift with your legs.”
“Legs? My legs?” Ilena says. “Oh, of course, wait, there they are. It’s hard to see them past my honeydew melon of a stomach.”
Lifting? Ilena’s lifting Gray—the body? Isn’t that bad? Aren’t pregnant women not supposed to lift heavy things? Or is it carry? Or is it—
The sneeze refuses to be stopped and the dog leaps from her lap, a blur of orange disappearing through the door before Aubrey can unfold herself. “Harley, no!” she shouts.
Keeping the dog calm and contained, that’s all Aubrey was tasked with doing. Both of her friends had taken one look at the queasiness all over her face and sent her away. Aubrey was relegated once again to the place she’s lived in her whole life as the youngest, quietest member of a family of Teflon-strength personalities. By the time she’d come along, birthday cakes were always chocolate even though the caffeine gave her headaches, pets were always of the feather variety even though their jerky necks gave her nightmares, and afterschool activities involved balls of any size, not wires or motherboards. She believed in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy for far too long because she wanted to believe the impossible could be possible. Like her grandmother did. If it weren’t for her grandmother convincing Aubrey’s parents that Williams College was a place that wouldn’t swallow Aubrey whole, she might not have gone. She might not have majored in computer science and wound up at the Silicon Valley start-up program, filling in for a coworker who dropped out. She might never have met Mallory and Ilena. Or wound up here.
“Harley!” Ilena cries. “Careful, Mallory!”
Aubrey untucks her legs and swings them to the floor. Shepresses her hands into the mattress, a reflexive pro-con list forming in her mind, and of all the pro-con lists that have formed in her mind or will ever form in her mind, this has to be the most surreal.
She clears her throat and tries to choke out a “Do you need help?” but of course they need help. But they won’t ask. Because she’s too fragile.
“Your left foot, Mallory, watch your left... your other left!” Ilena says.
“Christ, this dog, where’s Aubrey? Aubrey!” Mallory shrieks.
And Aubrey forces herself off the bed and into the hall.
Ilena faces her full on. “Aubrey, we’re fine. Grab the dog and go back into the bedroom. We’ve got this.”
A striped blanket in the shape of a body lies on the floor between Mallory and Ilena. Aubrey takes in the block of a torso in the middle, the limbs spreading to either side, the thrust of a nose making the blanket protrude, and her face must relay every ounce of her fear and grief and uncertainty, but she says, “I can help. I—I want to help.”
Ilena sets her jaw, a refusal coming, but then begins one of those silent conversations with Mallory, their friendship of more than twenty years intimidating and inspiring, and still it’s entirely dumbfounding how Aubrey’s been a part of it for the past eight. Ilena steps back and says, “Okay, then.”
“Spectacular.” Mallory tugs down the hem of a white shirt that must be Grayson’s. She slipped it over her jumpsuit, for warmth, maybe, or maybe to cover those marks on her arm.
A week out from taking their company public and potentially filling their bank accounts with more money than Aubrey could spend in three lifetimes, they are placing a dead man in a freezer custom-built to look like a blanket chest. It’s gorgeous, a deep red mahogany with chiseled wood inlays and a compressor that’s nearly silent. You’d never know it was storing notextra sheets and pillows and duvets but organic, raw dog food and grass-fed beef and cauliflower pizza crusts. You’d never guess it was about to be home to one of the most successful venture capitalists in the country.
To make room for Aubrey, Mallory shoves the garbage bag full of frozen food aside with her foot. “Just for now. Until we figure out what’s happening. Then we’ll make it right.”
They’ll want to, maybe they’ll even try, but they won’t be able to. Some wrongs are only wrong after the fact, when consequences and perspective give you hindsight you’d have otherwise never had. Like Ethan. Other wrongs can be seen from a mile away. This is one of those.
The three of them heave Grayson Fields into the freezer with a fair amount of difficulty given Ilena’s current situation and the fact that Aubrey’s hands can’t stop shaking. Without the need to say it, Mallory is the one who makes the final adjustments and closes the lid.
Mallory turns to face them. “Okay, we need some rules. It goes without saying, we tell no one.” Her eyes dart to Ilena, who reluctantly nods. “We stay vigilant, ears open, eyes wide, taking in everything but offering little. We need to let others lead and direct the conversation. Just like Aubrey already does.”
This isn’t meant as a criticism despite it feeling that way.
“We maintain our normal routines, whatever those are here,” Mallory continues, ticking things off as if she’s done this before. “Check calendars and emails and cancel things that seem dangerous.”
Aubrey stiffens. “Dangerous? What’s dangerous?”
Mallory shrugs. “I don’t know, like a high school reunion? Where people will know too many things we don’t.”
Isn’t that basically everything here? Everyone?
Mallory pushes on. “We don’t draw attention, we don’t post on social media, we don’t deplete our other selves’ bankaccounts. What’s that thing Jonah made us do when he forced us to go camping?”
Ilena hugs her arms. “Leave no trace?”
Mallory nods. “That’s it. That’s what we do. As best we can.” She pauses. “But AIM’s still going public in this reality, and we owe it to all versions of ourselves to support that. We can’t be absent from work.”
Ilena’s jaw tightens.
