Samantha put an arm around me. “Sheisengaged to one of the Strattons. Wells.”
Tate’s face cleared. “Oh. You’re the staff writer with theFromYes to I Dospecial, then?”
My vision blackened around the edges. Slowly, I tucked my left hand behind my back. One of the only things Wells and I ever argued over was his family throwing their name toward me getting this job. The compromise I had made with myselfwas that I would work my way up here, on my own merit, and then maybe apply for a job at our competitors once I had documented success. Wells swore I would have gotten the job anyway, and I believed I was good enough, but knowing that Wells’s father had “put in a good word” without my permission was demoralizing.
“That’s me,” I confirmed. I did technically have a wedding special. At present. But losing the executive producer credit and experience was a vortex I refused to tinker with right now. And besides, denying my engagement could spawn a whole bouquet of issues. Untangling myself from this wedding was going to be a nightmare. Beside us, Alma wavered like a palm tree.
“Go home, Alma,” Samantha repeated.
“I’m here to do my job,” Alma said.
“Is the Stratton fellow your, er—” Tate Dimmock made a vague motion with his hands. “Soul-person?”
“I didn’t open mine.” My pulse picked up.
Tate Dimmock pressed a finger to his temple. “At least I can reassure our ad people you’re the future Mrs. Wells Stratton.”
I hesitated. I felt dangerously close to something—the first waft of heat from an oven opening, a light rise onto two wheels on a hairpin curve. I chewed on what I was supposed to say—always the truth, or a version of it—and what I wanted in this moment.
Once I had been three years old, sidestepping a pile of vomit Sabrina had left on the stairs and gifting my parents with hugs. At seven, I forced Caleb to invent songs and dances with me to coax a smile from my bereaved mother’s face so often my aunt Josie started calling me Baby June from Broadway’s no-longer-politically-correctly-titled showGypsy, the headlining song, I later learned, famous for stripteases. Now I was in my mid-thirties, trying to decide which box to leap from to chase something I wasn’t even sure I wanted.
But it was also probably reasonable to think that no one onearthreallyknew what they wanted on a day like today. I ran my thumb against the naked crook where my finger met my palm, where my ring usually nestled. “I’m keeping my name,” I answered finally. A truth that told half the story. “I’ll always be Olivia Jane Adler.”
“Appealing to the feminists. Smart,” the network head said. “Get back out there, Olivia Adler.”
Eight
The decision to share Samantha’s Soulmail—and thus, that the universe dictated that not only were soulmates real, but they also could be platonic—was thankfully the bite AP News and Reuters had picked up, instead of focusing on the image of me chatting amiably to a camera off-lens.
Theories flew in forums, on social media, in the news cycles, in suburban streets and coffee shops, but most Americans had realized before lunch that you had to be eighteen to receive a Soulmail. Butthatwasn’t a universal truth. It was mostly true in America (except in Nebraska and Alabama, where you had to be nineteen, and Mississippi, twenty-one), and everywhere else where the age of majority was eighteen. By dinnertime, it became common knowledge that people in Scotland and Cuba who were sixteen and up had received it, and fifteen and up in places like Indonesia and Iran. One of the staff writers cracked the answer by using Wikipedia, of all things.
Soulmails came to those at and above the age of majority in their home countries. Immediately, parents of parent-child soulmated pairs were learning a new kind of consent: whether to reveal they were soulmates to their child, who had no say in the matter. There was no script for telling your child you were their soulmate, no self-help books for explaining that one relationship in your family had been highlighted as something universally more than the others within. Yet.
As possibly the only reader of Per Diem’s employee handbook in its one-hundred-eighty-two-page entirety, I was unsurprised when I was booked into a hotel that evening, thanks to working more than fourteen hours and living more than two miles from our office. Thus, due to company policy surrounding the number of hours the network could legally keep someone at work without paying for meals and putting them up for four-plus star lodging, combined with the flight delays and hotel overbookings, I wound up in a room on the Upper East Side. It was a famous hotel, one with historical detail and black-and-white floors and staff who seemed terribly interested in how your day was going.
The black town car driving me there was blissfully devoid of Samantha, Dola, and Al. For the first time since that morning, I was alone, except for the silent driver and the local radio, which had extended its popular morning show hosts for the entire day.
“Do you know it’s been near-record temps today and no one has evenmentionedthe heat?” the main host asked. “It’s all we would’ve been talking about if it weren’t for this Soulmail thing.”
“I did get an email with the use of the phrase ‘unprecedented times,’ which I haven’t seen since 2020,” the co-host answered. “And my brother texted that the grocery stores are all emptiedof bread, milk—”
I cut him off by popping my noise canceling AirPods in my ears.
My viral post was still going strong, and my Instagram had so many notifications that my screen buffered every time Iopened the app. When I finally cleared the red bubbles, I assumed there’d been a major mistake.
I now had over one hundred fifty thousand new followers. Dozens of recognizable accounts, including both Beyoncé and someone identifying as Betty White’s Ghost. My other apps told the same baffling story.
Entertainment agencies, scouts, and talent agents flooded my DMs asking if I had representation, punting requests to chat. Bots rained on my past posts with the ask to promote my work and invitations to view them naked. Maybe I should forward them to Wells.
The sensation of disbelief knotted in my neck. Right as I was about to close the app, I landed on a name so familiar my stomach contracted with surprise.
Caleb Mariner
is that you?
Caleb. The boy next door and down West Labyrinth Street. We had grown up barefoot on beaches, tiptoeing barnacle-clad jetties to jump where the sea was clear of stringy, red-brown Irish moss and mermaid hair weeds. Afternoons flavored with salted caramel ice cream, our mouths sticky with it, our breath heady and sweet. My parents were nicer than his, and his house was nicer than ours. At least twice as big, even though we lived on the same street—as Cape neighborhoods can go, with mansions beside one-room summer shacks beside stubborn original cottages like my own.
Shock rained into my fingertips. His was the last name I had ever expected to see in my DMs. When I was a teenager, I had believed we would be in each other’s lives forever. I spent my college years mourning the untruth of that fact, thanks to one huge, grievous, permanently undoable mistake.
