The yellow pad of sticky notes trembled in Aubrey’s hand. She’d needed to jot down the potential fix for the load-time lag in the ratings component of “How Wide’s My Smile.” Of course there was a lag time. The feature wasn’t designed for this many subscribers. They’d never expected it to take off like this. More than three and a half million at last count, three and a half million people whose smooth user experience Aubrey was responsible for.
All day in the office, all evening while she waited for Ethan in his apartment, she’d tried to sort out what wasn’t working. It hit her right in front of his desk, so she yanked open the top drawer and grabbed the stickies, tore off the top note with scribbles in his handwriting, and wrote down the solution before it flittered from her brain and she was left debating whether it was a back end or database issue even though she’d once been so sure.
She’d placed Ethan’s scribbled note back on top and was about to return the pad to the drawer when she realized what itwas: a pro-con list. She was rubbing off on him. A smile took over until she read the title:A lifetime ofAubreyisms.
Two columns, unlabeled, a line down the middle, and that phrase at the bottom of the second one, circled and underlined. The first column had:Plays video gamesandLetsme choose dinner *and* NetflixandSexy in a geeky way. The second column had:Asks so many damn questions about stupid stuffandGeeky sometimes annihilates the sexyandCodependent AFand of course thatA lifetime ofAubreyisms.
The second column outweighed the first. She heard the door to the apartment open, and she quickly shoved the sticky notes back into the drawer.
Three days later, she was drinking a glass of Chardonnay he’d ordered for her even though she never really liked the buttery flavor. She was perched uncomfortably on a cold, metal stool at the bar of a restaurant that was on every Boston “best of” list even though it exclusively served tinned fish that required no cooking, only plating. He was unsuccessfully sawing through the long, skinny razor clam drowning in olive oil that cost more than her last grocery bill when he stopped, set down his knife and fork, and stared at her.
She was sure that she had a smoked mussel dangling from her chin and reached for her napkin. But he’d pressed the burlap cloth, which was really too scratchy for something you used to wipe your lips, back into her lap and said, “This is working, isn’t it?”
“Well, not great. Really could use a steak knife.”
He grinned one of those grins that didn’t come often, the one that puffed his cheeks so much that it brought out those cute lines around his eyes that Aubrey forever longed to see. “Sometimes you’re just right.”
And she smiled, and when he said they’d been together fornearly half a year and they might as well keep it going and maybe even make it official, she forgot for a second the list she’d found in his desk drawer.
“Like married?” she said.
“Engaged. Let’s get engaged.”
And then the list came back. The list that was heavier on the “con” side, and she was overwhelmed with a gripping fear that he’d forgotten, and that if she didn’t say yes now, despite the way he asked without actually asking, without a ring, that he’d remember and maybe even add to that second column until it outweighed the first so much that he’d make a different choice. So she made the only choice she could.
She said yes.
18
Ilena
Saturday Morning
Two DaysAfterthe Outing
This is where Ilena’s gray lives. The walls of the nursery, which they apparently just finished the build-out and decorating of, are Coventry Gray. She knows it, because she knows every hint of brown, every subtle trace of green, every undertone of blue and black and yellow in every version of gray paint there is. She studied them, tested them on the walls of the living room, dining room, hallway, and mudroom of her and Jonah’s house in Newton. This was the perfect one. Pure, no deception. No traitorous eggplant or fraudulent charcoal infiltrating with the second coat.
She presses her feet into the fluffy white area rug that softens the ebony wood. The room is beautiful, everything she could have imagined and things she couldn’t have. A gray crib a shade lighter than the walls, cream changing table with black matte pulls, a simple pewter standing lamp above this upholstered chair she’s gliding back and forth in. She’d never have chosen the gold sunburst dial mirror or the menagerie of safari animals, proudly stuffed and commanding the bench under the window. The blackout shade she’d wanted in her bedroom hangs abovethis window, ready to help the singleton sleep by blocking the reflection off the harbor. Her baby will have a waterfront view. What would her mom say to that?
The “her” in “her baby” still gives her a mild case of imposter syndrome, yet she can’t deny what she saw at the hospital. A baby, this baby, a “Felix and Ilena” baby curled inside her uterus. She has the picture to prove it.
She rises from the glider and peers over the edge of the crib. Last night, Felix surprised her, first with the meal he cooked of lobster risotto and then by leading her here to see all the gifts from the office baby shower put away and arranged. He’d nestled the photo from the ultrasound inside the crib atop a sheet with little sailboats like polka dots. He’d done all of this while her best friends hid a man’s body. Not just any man, a man who had helped AIM to become AIM. A man she considered a friend. One who had been more than a friend to Mallory. Ilena knew, of course she knew. She knew her best friend better than anyone. And as much as Mallory was hiding it, including to herself, she was hurting.
Ilena had cried. And not a little.
She’d cried because of the wood floors she’d have never picked out and the view she never dreamed she’d have and the hydrangeas at home that probably needed watering and the glass-topped dresser in the bedroom she despised and the lingering lemon of the luxurious risotto in her mouth and the house that was hers but not hers and the man that was hers but shouldn’t be and the baby that should have been hers and Jonah’s.
But it wasn’t. It was hers and Felix’s. Which is why she couldn’t bring herself to search for Jonah’s name here. When the technician ran the wand over her skin, Felix had clutched her hand, tears in his eyes even before the ghostlike picture came into focus on the monitor.
“This is everything,” he’d said, leaning in to kiss her forehead.
It all disappeared: Mallory and Grayson and the police andJames and the pregnancy stick note and Jonah, everything that had been swirling in Ilena’s mind. She was simply present with her baby and the father of her baby. When the technician asked if they’d changed their mind about not knowing the sex, her instinct was to say yes, they had. She had. That’s when she knew.
She wasn’t going to the police. She wasn’t going to tell Felix that she wasn’t the Ilena he thought she was, that in her world, he’d married someone else, had a child with someone else. She couldn’t risk it, couldn’t risk an arrest or jail or an evaluation by social services or a psychiatric ward. Goddammit, Mallory was right.
The lessons Ilena’s mother had instilled in her should have made it a harder choice, one she had to think through, struggle with, in order to conquer her dependency on doing the right thing. But nature is stronger than nurture, and she knew instinctually without doubt or hesitation that nothing mattered except this baby. The singleton came first.
Mallory knew it, because Mallory knew Ilena the same way Ilena knew Mallory.
