“Seeing it unfold in person was wild. It challenged every doubt I had. I couldn’t not believe in Soulmail after that.” I paused. “Are you willing to share who yours is?”
“Oh. Mine is my mother,” Natalie said, deflating me from inside out. “I’m not sure what to make of that.”
“Aw. Lucky Helena. I was hoping it would be me.” I peered at her. “You okay?”
Natalie flashed a smile, her trademark one, her carefree one. But it didn’t light her eyes. “It’s just... weird? Knowing for sure I don’t have a romantic person. Maybe I should hack my love life, like you did to your phone. Like how I have to call you three times.”
“Remind me to tell you a story about that another time,” I said. A couple years ago, I read an article about technology and hacking your own life, and I’d finally gotten around to implementing it after a segment we did where a parent talked about revolutionizing her mornings by buying two sets of lunch boxes. I love when processes can be streamlined, simplified. “I also changed the setting on my Gmail to delete instead of archive when I swipe.” I made a chef’s-kiss motion.
“Yeah.” She screwed up her face in thought. “Just have to figure out how to hack it, I guess.”
“Oh, Natalie. Come on. A mother-daughter Soulmail match doesn’t mean you can’t have a relationship, right? It just means you have a relationship of value outside of romance.” My throat tightened.
Nat sucked in her cheeks. “I’m afraid of what Danny’s going to say.”
“I didn’t realize you and Danny were that serious.”
“We’re not, but... no one wants to waste time with someone who isn’t meant to be. What if he opens his and learns of a fated romance? We’d be over.”
I waved a hand. “Who’s to say these aren’t just naming one meaningful person in your life?”
“Then why won’t you open yours?”
“I don’t want mine to mess with my head any more than it already is.”
“Huh,” Natalie said.
An ache pulsed through my abdomen at the duality: How lucky this was for Natalie, how I wish I could have that kind of bond with my own mother. Natalie and Helena had struggled, strengthened, persevered, soared. They’d always had that special single-mom-only-daughter bond, part of why it was easy to believe in the things we couldn’t see. What made up our feelings was invisible to our eyes, but the way people live in our minds, the way our bodies crave someone else’s, the way memories light our dreams—that was as real as that egg on the sidewalk. This was why I wanted to be a mother someday, part of why letting go of Wells would hurt so badly the moment I let myself think about him for more than five seconds. Changing my expectations, my timeline.
Before long, we turned off the lamps and brushed our teeth with the charcoal toothpaste and bamboo toothbrushes the delivery service had picked up. The bamboo was strawlike, the charcoal grainy and jarring in my mouth.
“Nat?” I burrowed beneath the covers.
“Mm?”
“I wouldn’t worry about your mom being yours.”
“I’m not worried about it. I’m just acclimating to the past, present, and future absence of my one true love.” Natalie snorted. “No big deal.”
I rolled onto my back, staring at the soaring ceiling. “Do youknow you’re more likely to believe in true love and happily ever afters if you’ve watched a Disney movie?”
Natalie lifted her head. “Really?”
“Really. I have early notes on it for a Valentine’s Day special.”
“You’re something else,” Natalie mumbled, her voice dropping toward sleep.
I willed myself to join her there, but I groaned. No melatonin. The irony. My mind whirred to life in the creaking, painful way old dial-up internet did. I opened my social media, rewatched the video from this morning. The shock, the awe, the bird’s-eye-fly-on-the-wall. It was a vantage point, one people were interested in. But it couldn’t distract me from my own reality.
Wells and Cambrey Coyle.
Per Diem and the wedding reality show episode.
The sudden vulnerability of a zeitgeisty awareness of who I was for a portion of the population.
And something else unfinished. Someoneelse. Caleb.
I rolled over, dimmed my phone screen, and opened the message from my childhood best friend. I read it again, my chest brimming with something I couldn’t identify, something like hope and sadness entwined and left to marinate in my bones.
