Was it the best one?
The worst?
I didn’t know. What I did know is that when I arrived on Natalie’s stoop and she buzzed me inside, I felt like I was home. And this time, when I cried about the boy I was in love with, it was the wrong one.
Thirty-Nine
Fits and starts, Mom used to call the kind of sleep I had. She spoke so fast I thought it had that name:fitzinstarts. My fragmented dreams were of theTIMEmagazine from when I was a kid that had Dolly the cloned sheep on the cover. Back then, my elementary class had voted, and eighteen out of twenty-one of us believed human cloning would happen by the year we graduated.
Now I rolled over and researched Dolly, something I would’ve fallen into at my work computer for an entire morning before Soulmail happened. I read, absorbed, for the better part of an hour to distract myself from the unrelenting desire for Caleb that coursed through me on a loop. I opened another tab, ready to dive into the process of embryo transfer, when Natalie tapped on the door to her guest room.
“Come in,” I called, propping myself on her pillows. My feet were sore from last night’s stilettos, but I did my best to shove that from my head, because I was very much not thinking about last night. “Do you remember Dolly the sheep?”
Her nose wrinkled, then smoothed. “How could I not? Iwas a child in the nineties.” She handed me a mug of steaming coffee, then pretzeled herself on the bed at my feet. Her face lit up. “Did you dream about sheep?” she guessed. Natalie loved hearing about other people’s dreams. I tended to think no one wanted to hear about them unless they were into dream interpretation.
I blew on the steam. “Sorta. I was just reading up on her. Did you know that it took 277 tries for scientists to get twenty-nine embryos to survive longer than six days? And of those, Dolly was the only one who made it?”
Natalie tilted her head. “Is this really about sheep? Because these are all key words in IVF. Is your bio clock ticking? Are you trying to have a kid? Isthatwhat last night was about?” She peered at my face, then shook her head. “No, that’s not it.”
“I do want kids.” I frowned. I’d neglected to make a consultation appointment for the egg freezing. “You know that.” The pit in my stomach shriveled. I clenched against it. I’d be lying if it wasn’t screaming,and not with Wells, but I’ve been pretty good at lying to myself lately.
“Then what’s the reason for the look on your face?”
“What look?”
“You know.” She clicked her tongue, then pointed at the mirror. I was foggy-eyed in that dizzy-cloudy kind of way, my face way more peaceful than it should’ve been after that night of sleep. My mother would say my color was high. I felt kind of high, with information.
“I just like learning,” I said.
“Right,” Natalie said in the way I knew she didn’t believe me one bit. “Hey, your phone is blowing up.”
One glance showed me notifications falling on top of one another in a way that I had learned should make me uneasy. Iclicked on one, navigating to a social post I probably shouldn’t try to view.
The post was made by a true-crime creator I recognized, one whose following was garnered by her reposting cold cases or unsolved murders and dissecting them for her followers. I’d seen her while scrolling before. But I wasn’t prepared for the face I saw now.
Sabrina’s.
OLIVIA ADLER’S SECRET SISTER HAD A GRUESOME DEATH, the video was captioned.
After I forwarded the post to Marta Jenkins, PR, copying in Chuck Wheeler and Samantha, I borrowed Natalie’s hat and sunglasses to shield my puffy eyes for the walk home, since crying in the back of an Uber felt like the lyrics to a Taylor Swift song. I immediately called my parents, the silence on their end as bitter as I figured it would be. As I walked, I flipped through Wells, Caleb, my job, Natalie, my sister, tossing each away like a deck of cards.
“Wait one moment, Ms. Adler,” the regular doorman called, once I walked through my lobby. “You have a package.”
“When are you going to call me by my first name, Hank?” I asked, smiling.
“Never.” He winked. “A gentleman came by for you,” he said, bending to retrieve something. “I recognized him, but you know no one in this building goes up without a key.”
“Oh?” My pulse hammered. I lifted my chin, thinking of museum curators. Hank raised the object in question, and my heart managed a one-two thump before reregulating. “Oh.”
“Here you go.”
My smile weakened. I accepted the package: a gold bag that had been nestled between someone’s feet last night. “Thanks.” I swallowed. “Did he call up?”
He shook his head. “Nope. Said you were probably sleeping after your big event.”
“Right,” I said, elbowing the elevator button.
“Ms. Adler?”
