He did a little hop to catch up to my stride. “For the first time in my life, I was with someone self-aware. Someone who didn’t care about who my parents were, or what level club membership we had, or what her work title was.”
“That’s essentially baseline-level humanity,” I said. “That doesn’t make me special.”
“You didn’t grow up like me,” he insisted. “Where I come from, that stuff matters.”
“You’re welcome for the opportunity to, what? Slum it? Is that what they say?”
He made a grunt of frustration. “That’s not it, and you knowit. You’re justyou, Olivia. As long as I’ve known you, you don’t look at who likes your social posts, or comb through who’s checking out your stories. Girls in my grade made rules about how to appear cool on social media, but you?” He snapped his fingers. “Post and ghost. You were the first person I’d ever met who didn’t Google herself every few months.”
“Okay, got it. I don’t want to spend too much time on the internet, so I was perfect wife material? Worth manipulating into believing we were soulmates. Make it make sense, Wells.”
He twisted his mouth. “That’s not it.”
“Then what is it?”
He reached toward my arm, thought better of it. His hand fell between us. “It’s simple. Almost everything in my life felt fake, but the pain of losing Charley was the realest thing I’ve ever experienced. Everyone around me said the things you’re supposed to say, but if important things didn’t seem to matter to them, then it felt like what they said meant nothing.” He wiped his eyes. “Then I met you. You were someone who understood what it felt like to grieve. You made the pain of losing my best friend feel... seen. Justified.”
For once, his words felt undeniably true. This was the real Wells, the raw one, the one that I’d fallen in love with, the one who’d organized Honey O’s box tops and tried what may have been his best to make us into something he thought was real. “I believe you,” I said quietly. “But then Cambrey.”
“Yeah.” Misery in his voice. “Then her. Biggest mistake of my life.”
“Until you duped me even worse.”
His nod was an acknowledgment. “I know. But the timing.”
“What about it?”
“You discovered what I’d done the same day Soulmail came out. It felt...” He cast his eyes around the park. “I don’t know. Fated or something.”
“How could you rationalize making up for sleeping with Cambrey by commandeering the rest of my life instead?”
“It was wrong. Desperate people do desperate things.”
“Yeah. But there’s a difference between desperate and deliberate.”
We kept walking. I waited to feel better, but I didn’t. Near the entrance to the zoo, I stopped. “I think it’s time for me to go.”
He swallowed. “I’m really sorry, Olivia.”
I nodded, then pivoted to walk away.
“I don’t know what else I can say,” he called from behind me.
I turned back. “I don’t think it matters what you say.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew they were true. “But tell me one thing.”
“Anything.” He twisted the heel of his shoe against the ground, gravel protesting beneath his sole.
“How’d you do it?”
He sucked in a breath. “It was right when they came out,” he said. “When the coder at work said they were un-deletable.”
I waited.
“I pretended I’d messed up something for a client, and I asked how I could backdate an email. He said that I just had to send it from a PC, and I could change the time on the computer to the time I was trying to simulate before sending the email. Then I paid a Silicon Valley guy to use AI to dupe it—I told him it was for a joke.” He paused. “I know your email password, so I hacked into it, archived the real one, then sent the fake.”
Anger reared its wings in my ribs. “What would’ve happened when I found you out someday?”
“I checked your archives folder. You didn’t use it. I banked on you not changing that habit.”
