“I—” I bit off my words when I took in the image. The email.
More specifically, his Soulmail.
My name. My birthday.
The edges of my vision vibrated, my brain’s nerves crackling from fire to embers to ash. My saliva vanished. I put one hand on my chest, which was trying and failing to suck in oxygen.Breathe, I thought, and oxygen came rushing in. I almost wished it didn’t.
I shoved Wells’s phone back into his hand. “How could you?”
Smudgy circles lined the skin beneath his eyes. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “For everything, Olivia.”
Tears sprang to my eyes, my telltale sign of anger. “Move,” I ordered. I tapped keys on my laptop, the pads of my fingers skating over them, bumbling. I raced against myself, as if the outcome would be,could bedifferent, if I could just get it over with. Ripping the Band-Aid off on the count of two instead of three.
Sure enough, there was my starred email.Subject: YourSoulmailis Attached.
WELLS STRATTON.
His birthday—January 5. And our shared birthyear. On his last birthday, I outdid myself to please him. It had taken me three months to pay off my credit card for that event. “I never wanted to know who mine was,” I said. Fury leeched from every syllable I spoke. I clung to that, the first thing that felt good, right, since I’d stepped in here.
“I didn’t want to tell you,” Wells said. “But Olivia, we only have one life. If I’m going to live it, I want to do it with the person I’m destined to be with—”
I made a choking sound.
He swiped his mouth with his knuckles. “And if we’re going to do that, I have to start by making amends for the things I regret.”
My soulmate wasn’t Caleb. Not that I’d really thought it would be, but it was of course a bullet point in my list of worries from last night’s seesaw. I used the back of my hand to blot the tears from my cheekbones. Thankfully, my on-camera time was over. I felt undone, unkempt, when just moments ago I was ready for the weekend, eager to get on a plane with my adult best friend and my childhood best friend, to laugh and jump in waves and have a wine headache. I’d bought zinc to put on my nose, which always gets burned, and remembered to pack the shampoo I liked to use after going in the ocean.
I gave my head a small shake and glanced beyond my glass walls. Sure enough, people were trying to hide the fact that they were watching us, rousing themselves like their hiding spots were discovered, bending toward computer monitors and phones and each other. Embarrassment raked my throat.
“I never wanted to know,” I repeated quietly. It felt illegal, dishonest, to have this information ripped from me in this way. I’d entered into the Soulmail stratosphere now in the way I’d never meant to, and the violation dirtied my insides.The higher you climb, the harder you fall, Mom always said. For the first time, I considered the science in that proverb: gravity.
Gravity had more than one meaning. One illustrated how somber and dignified a situation was, and another was a force that kept everyone and everything on earth.
The whole thing was physics. I felt dizzy.
“I didn’t step out because of you,” Wells said, earnest. “I did it because of me. And because I felt bad for—for her.” He winced at his own language. “I know how it sounds.”
But he didn’t.Step out.The cleanest, purest way to describe cheating, as if he’d leaned outside for a package, toed the street instead of the sidewalk. I almost laughed. “I’m not talking about you cheating, Wells. You certainly didn’t cheat because of me. The person who cheats is the one who’s trying to fix something that’s not broken, not the person being cheated on.” I curled my hands into fists and clenched my teeth. “I’m talking about Soulmail. I didn’t want to know who mine was. Ever. And in one second, you just took that from me.”
I sank into my chair, my head in my hands. The violation was deep. Unrelenting. And unless whoever or whatever was behind Soulmail could also produce a time machine, there was nothing I’d be able to do about what I now knew.
Other people had gone through this violation, at least in some way. Not like Dola and Trent Foster, who had been thrust into this new thing before we all understood it. Now I’d bathed in the surface of Samantha’s pain when she spoke of her infant, born so secretly. I knew Natalie’s combined joy and pain about being soulmates with her mother. And all the experts I’d interviewed, all the government information I’d been delivered, everything. It whirled together in my head.
A fact: Soulmail was real.
And now, I’d learned something else that made me feel like ice had been painted on my skin. My destiny was my past. Wells Stratton was my soulmate.
From behind me came an unexpected voice. “Are you all right?”
Dazed, I pivoted. Phoebe, the host approximately sixteen to twenty-six percent of the country loved to wake up with, whose eyes had flashed disapprovingly in the company-wide meeting that announced the launching of my Du Jour segment. Who in this instant appeared to be staring at me with an actual modicum of concern. I would be touched if I wasn’t so numb.
The HVAC system gushed filtered air into the workspace. Dust lined the rim of my monitor. I swallowed. “I’m fine,” I lied.
Twenty-Two
“Blink twice if you’re being held hostage,” Natalie hissed from behind me in the Friday morning security line. “New rule.”
I crushed two Altoids with my molars. “No Stockholm syndrome yet.”
