Ilena hadn’t wanted it, then suddenly wanted it. It wasn’t the first difference between them, but Ilena wanting a baby as much as Mallory didn’t had been defining them in a way nothing had before. She wished Ilena didn’t want it.What a fucking selfish thought.But ithas beenher thought. Mallory’s mom loved her and supported her in a way Ilena’s didn’t, yet neither of them had had Norman Rockwell childhoods. Mallory has never felt any urge, notickticktickinside her; when parents show her pictures of their kids with faces covered in chocolate ice cream, she chokes back bile and offers to buy them napkins.
Still, Mallory had been supporting Ilena in the way she could, sitting by Ilena’s side in waiting rooms, reading brochures, listening when Ilena said that Jonah wasn’t dealing with it the way she’d hoped. Mallory understood how hard it all was, but honestly, she’d been more focused on how hard it all was on herself.
Was this part of it? Why Ilena wanted to leave AIM? Because it would also let her leave Mallory?
“Good amount of trees,” Mallory says, heart racing as she props open the car door. “Nice shielding.”
The neighborhood where her mom lives is the same one of Mallory’s childhood, though in this world, their particular street is three blocks farther from the Green Line. This Mallory didn’t have to fall asleep to the soundtrack of trains screeching against the tracks.
Her mom’s contact information listed “Unit 1,” meaning the apartment was on the first floor, just like in her world. A quick internet search showed not one but two pandemics in the past fifteen years. Both gave Mallory hope that her mom was still her mom: a low-grade hoarder.
“Bargain shopper,” her mom had called it, stocking up on 75 percent–off blenders (even though they already had one they hardly used and two still in boxes) because who knows when you’d get invited to a wedding and need a gift. Shelves overflowed with enough gift wrap to Tyvek a skyscraper because fifty cents a roll is fifty cents a roll even if it was just the two of them and they couldn’t really afford a lot of gifts. The $1.99 chicken thighs and two-for-one frozen peas came later, after the first pandemic, the same one this Mallory had lived through.
One text and one white lie later, and they had somewhere to put Grayson until they could figure out something better. Though Mallory suspects she’s reaching the end of “they.”
Still, Aubrey’s here. All five feet four and one hundred and thirty pounds of her—though probably less considering the fit of those pink pants.
Mallory unlocks the back door and enters the kitchen of a railroad apartment just like the one she grew up in. Her mother still loves roosters. Tea towels, a fruit bowl, a sign above the sink, they cock-a-doodle-do at her.
Her mom had assured Mallory that the house was nearly always empty during the day, the owners of the other two units at work or school. Her mom is a physician’s assistant here, not a paralegal. But also not a doctor or a lawyer, the same things apparently holding her back from aiming that high in play here too.
Perhaps they needed to be for Mallory to become Mallory in both worlds: ambitious and tenacious enough to found acompany worth two point two billion dollars. She can’t help but wonder what her younger self would have thought.Fuck yeah, or more likely,Whynot three? Four?
She spies her mother’s rooster cookie jar and remembers opening the lid, pulling out two gingersnaps or vanilla wafers or whatever had been on sale that week, and setting them on a carefully torn-in-two paper towel. She’d carry them into the living room where her mom would be laughing at some sitcom as she marked up something from work, getting in overtime, sipping Lipton tea or the occasional “splurge” of cheap prosecco. Mallory’s younger self would stare at the silver bangle some boy had given her or her report card filled with As and Bs she only half deserved and wonder why she couldn’t be more like her mom—content with what they had, which was more than so many, which was enough. Except that hole in Mallory’s chest never closed.
A part of Mallory uncharacteristically wants to pass through the kitchen to the bedroom on the right, the bedroom that would have been hers, but it’s nearly eighty degrees, and Grayson’s under a blanket in a parked hatchback with the air-conditioning off.
She finds the door to the basement, her mom’s private half crudely finished and accessible only through this unit. In the far corner is the white, utilitarian chest freezer. Secured with a padlock. Pandemics bring out the worst in people. She loves that her mom doesn’t trust anyone.
Mallory rotates each little dial, lining up the combination, and lifts the lid.
“Goddammit, Mom.”
Mallory grabs an empty box from the recycling bin and loads in the equivalent of five chickens, two pigs, and a farm’s worth of frozen vegetables. Then, she goes to get Aubrey.
Under the cover of the open hatchback and those leafy trees, they shift the blanket-shrouded Grayson into the wheelchair, trying not to touch his cold skin or imagine the warm fingers that tied those double knots on his expensive loafers, as they half roll, half drag him down the stairs and into the basement.
“It’s temporary,” Mallory says to Aubrey as they settle Grayson into his second freezer of the day.
Aubrey nods.
Mallory pulls the car keys out of her pocket and hands them to Aubrey. “Listen, grab the overnight bag, will you?”
A nod and perhaps a slight grunt of assent, and Aubrey aims for the stairs. Mallory turns back to the freezer. Her mom thinks it’s being stacked with a special mood-enhancing serum that needs to be kept icy cold until AIM begins its giveaway. When Mallory had called, her mom had been thrilled to help. She even said she’d tell her patients all about it, to which Mallory launched into words like “confidentiality agreement” and “first to market” and “competitive advantage” that were enough for her mom to promise to keep it under wraps until she was told otherwise. Mallory’s success was the only thing her mom had ever wanted.
And Mallory had given it to her. Despite attention span and focus and all things that would be diagnosed as something warranting help today. Mallory saw her mom’s tired eyes and never full enough bank account and used to think life wasn’t fair, but then she realized that life doesn’t owe you shit. Women like to think that it does, those raised to be “good girls,” to be honest and helpful and polite and kind. Deferential, not wanting too much or assuming too much. Do the “right thing.” Don’t make waves. You’ll be rewarded. Good things will come.Bullshit.No one grew a company into the billions by making good choices. Good choices left you in overworked, underpaidjobs where brushes of side boob and hands on waists still happened but without the compensation; her mom was proof of that. Her mom did the right thing her entire life and all it got her was a daughter who would do anything to not follow in her footsteps.
So Mallory developed a skill more valuable than anything she’d learn in books: how to read people. She knew the school librarian’s self-esteem rose with every analysis Mallory sat wide-eyed through then regurgitated in her book report. She knew the class brainiac would trade math homework for lip-gloss shopping. She knew the boys would let her copy their test answers if she let them drape their meaty arms across her in the halls. All things that never occurred to her weren’t okay.
Mallory grabs three racks of ribs to spread over Grayson’s legs and accidentally yanks the blanket, which slips to reveal the top of his head, hair like dark porcupine spines. The product he uses must have hardened.Used.
A ghastly, violent sob punches through her. Her fingertips instinctually reach out, pressing the pointy tips. There’s nothing temporary about this for this Grayson.
What if there’s also nothing temporary about this for her? What if this place is all they have?
She pushes back the sleeves of her shirt, tracing the marks on her forearm in the shape of fingers, fingers that must be Grayson’s, fingers that reached for her last night with intensity or urgency or anger or fear or all of it combined. She considers extracting his hand, holding his cold, stiff fingers against the lines on her skin to see if they match. Because maybe they don’t. Maybe whatever happened last night to cause them wasn’t Mallory’s fault, maybe someone else was there, maybe she’d tried to stop it. Maybe here, Grayson hasn’t manipulated her but someone else. Maybe AIM’s valuation is real. And maybeshe didn’t have a motive to kill him. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe’s a good place to be. She leaves Grayson’s hand where it is.
As Aubrey returns, Mallory straightens. She trades the overnight bag for the cardboard box full of food that could feed the neighborhood for a week. Aubrey passes Noreen’s keys to Mallory, but they’re both shaking so much that the charm-filled key chain falls straight into the freezer.
