“We both are.” I stashed bottles of water in the bag. “Though I was definitely more comfortable in my old role.” Not my old life, but I didn’t say that.
“You always have to be...on,” he said. I could tell he chose his words carefully. “Now that Soulmail’s running the world.”
“It’s definitely running mine.” Wells’s face flitted through my mind.
He stepped away from the speaker. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I want to talk about it. Ineedto talk about what’s going on. But Soulmail crushes everything I’m doing now. It runs beneath almost every single thought I have.”
He took the tote from me, set it by the door with a gentle thud. “Wanna go for a beach walk with me?”
Before I knew it, it was like we were sixteen, fifteen, fourteen again. Those summers, I don’t wear shoes outside; I’m proud I can step on sticky burrs and not even have them embed in the rough pads of my feet. Caleb is scrawny, much lessTed LassoRoy Kent and more young Clark Kent. Back then, we take turns beating each other, racing on the dune until my mother forbids me from running through tall grass because I have two ticks removed, one from the back of my knee and one from my groin, of all embarrassing places. I take two antibiotics courses that successfully prevent Lyme disease, because both dead ticks test positive for it at the Massachusetts lab my mother sends them to, bloated and bloody in the same Ziploc baggies she packs my peanut butter sandwiches in.
Our adult selves skipped the dunes, stuck to the shoreline. The sound was warm, frothy. The lifeguards had raked the seaweed away from the supervised section, but we moved to the uncharted strip without discussion. I purposefully didn’t look for Wells.
We walked, silent and companionable until we passed the jetty that beckoned like an old witch’s finger.
“You could tell me that long story if you want to,” Caleb said.
I inhaled the briny air. Colorful sailboats bobbed against the horizon. In the distance, one fisherman’s boat I didn’t recognize putted toward the port. There was a time in my life I would’ve been able to name eighty percent of the boats chugging through here, but there was also a time in my life when I wasn’t growing in media fame. “I don’t want to, but I feel like I have to. My whole life is dictated by this now, and...” I winced against the specific pain of stepping on ajagged shell. “You know I’ve done enough reporting, talked to enough people, to be entirely convinced that Soulmails are real.”
Caleb scooped a rock from the sand, chucked it as far as he could. “As much as I felt like they had to be a scam at first, I believe you. You’re smart. You wouldn’t buy into this unless they were. I guess all this is to say that I’m... confused.”
My exhale was lost to the sound of a crashing wave. “I was skeptical. I really was. But then I was given so much information that I couldn’t look away. And once I realized it was true, Ialwaysplanned on not looking at mine. Like you.”
Another rock hauled into the water. “What made you change your mind?”
“I didn’t,” I said softly. “Wells confronted me with his result. I pulled it up in my email to confirm after that. Because I couldn’t believe it.” I placed my hand on his arm, dropped it. My stomach tightened.
Caleb halted. Sand sifted into the air. “So he—he basically, what? Ambushed you? Tossed out your beliefs?” He shoved his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose. “That’s unacceptable.”
“Wholly disregarded them. Yep. Now I know what people are saying, that it feels like a consent issue.”
“It’s not fair.”
“Correct.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
I flailed my hands high, surprising myself. I tried to cover the motion by tugging my sun hat. “What can I do? He’s my destiny.” I spat the last word.
Caleb kicked a puff of sand. “You can’t really believe that.”
I caught a pinch of cheek flesh between my molars. We resumed walking, arcing around the beach bend that captured all the clamshells, seaweed, carcasses. “I’m not the type to believe that kind of thing,” I said softly. “I’m really not. But there is something true about the partnerships this has revealed.Unequivocally so. Almost divine? As much as I wish she was my platonic soulmate, Natalie and her mom are—well, it’s cliché as can be, but they’re like two sides of one coin. The room gets bigger with both of them in it. And all these interviews I’ve done... Soulmail has revealed a lot of things about a lot of people, but no one I’ve talked to has called their matchwrongyet.”
Caleb was silent for a beat. “And you think your match with Wells is?”
“Wrong?”
“Yeah.”
We reached the dock of a local inn, which has historically been our silent turning-around point. History. We pivoted before I answered. “I don’t know what Wells is for me right now. I know at one point, I was happy with the idea of marrying him. Maybe I will be again.” My stomach hardened, but I tried to mentally reason against it. Accepting that Wells had cheated on me was hard, and now, knowing he was my soulmate was close to impossible. Unless I needed to figure out how to forgive him for my personal growth? I couldn’t change it. Wells was my soulmate, and therefore I’d somehow figure out how to love him again. Perhaps the universe knew that putting me in my new job, having me learn all I could about Soulmail, would set me on that path. Ruefully, I wondered which website that slimy Enzo from HeartString corporations would advise me to register for now.
“Livi,” Caleb said after we walked for a few more minutes in silence. “I just don’t like that your freedom of choice was taken away.”
“I’ll never not agree with that.”
“I miss life in the before times,” Caleb said. He leaned over, bumping my shoulder. “Though I am glad we’re home.”
