I laid the devices side by side, flicked my gaze between them. Both Soulmails sent on that same day in July. Three-a.m. arrival. No red flags, but something brewed in the recesses of my brain. I drummed my knuckles on the quartz counter. “We have the same model phone, right?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Do you see this?” I tapped where theSinSoulmailcurved just so on his. “Does mySlook a little pixelated?”
He leaned toward me, then deflated. “No.”
“This makes no sense. I’ve never heard of unmatched pairs. No one has, to my knowledge.”
Caleb took a screenshot. “Insurance,” he joked, tapping the trash can icon. The screen shook merrily, then repopulated with my name.
“First rule of Soulmail: this icon is obsolete,” I said, tapping my own trash bin.
My screen vanished, returning to my inbox.
We froze.
A dentist appointment confirmation. A promo code for Simon Pearce. A litany of emails, subject lines mixing with the dull roar in my ears, the whoosh of blood leaving my face as I stopped my frantic swipes.
Slowly, not without fear, I met Caleb’s eyes, his horror reflecting my own.
The last few months unspooled in my head, my thoughts flipping faster than I could hold on to them. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
Something arrived in my head like a freight train, fully formed and chugging, and I couldn’t stop it, but it carried with it so much hope and at the same time so much fear that I was afraid, afraid, afraid to see if I was correct.
Dread felt like elevator lifts in my belly. It wasn’t like the stakes were life or death. I’d already broken up with Wells. In my life, fear belonged to my parents losing their oldest child, to my dad risking his life every day on a boat. I thought of the widow’s walks dotted along Cape Cod, the stories about women pacing them in an eternal wait for their fishing husbands to come home once they were lost at sea.
I’d always wanted to do a story on those women.
My own fear was foolish in comparison.
But what was life without a little bit of silliness? So I openedit. My archives folder. It held a bunch of emails from before I changed the settings during my hack-your-life era, and one single email from this calendar year, from after.
Subject Line: Your Soulmail is Attached
My stomach twisted, my tongue acrid with the taste of charred toast. The sensation was not unlike the fastening of a belt buckle, the slip of a suspender, the two-fisted tightening of a ponytail.
Two Soulmails. One with Wells’s name in my deleted items folder, where real Soulmails weren’t supposed to live. An unopened one in my archives folder.
A workaround.
Our breakup dialogue burned through my brain.
You’re my soulmate, Olivia.
How did you figure this out?
Do you hate me?
I’m sorry I did this to you. To us.
I went over every syllable that had trailed from his mouth,at least how I remembered it. I’d thought his words were meant for another betrayal, but this one—this attack on my future, on my past, on everything—was worse than the way he’d cast aside my trust. “How did he do this? Howcouldhe do this?”
“Let me see.”
“I can’t do it,” I whispered. “I can’t—he stole time from me. He stole my dignity.”
Caleb’s hand covered mine. He was close. So close the scent of his laundry detergent mingled with mine.
