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Begin Reading Table of Contents

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FOR EVERYONE WHO IS UNMOORED

made: my efforts at beauty in exchange for their regard. And so, twice in my life, I have worn the cost of that recognition.

The process of defeating the buttons distracted me, and so it was only after I had my shoes on that I realized I had no way to see whether I’d achieved enough loveliness to satisfy the demands of the occasion. I used a kitchen knife to cut the packing tape away from my full-length mirror, feeling at once foolish and resourceful. After I’d peeled the layers of protective plastic wrap from the glass, there I was.

I allowed myself a breath of satisfaction: it was enough.

The gown was black silk. The skirt fell perfectly, the darts at my waist making the fabric bell over my hips before draping into crisp pleats. I, inside the silk, was the same person I always was, but the gown was a costume that gave me the right to be notable. It justified the evening I was about to face.

I tilted my head to see that my earrings weren’t too much, ran my fingers across the high bateau neckline.

The task was accomplished. The result was good.

By the time I turned away from the mirror, it was six o’clock. My car was due in four minutes. I turned the lights off in my house and walked into the gray light of early evening to wait.

My wedding gown had also been beautiful, and expensive. It had been nothing at all like my gown for the Neufmann Banquet. Satin instead of silk, and suffocatingly tight. It had been white, gently cut, with a low neckline trimmed in Alençon lace. It had been aggressively soft, determined to be hopeful.

It had been vulnerable, where my Neufmann gown was severe. It had been tender, where my Neufmann gown was pitiless.

On the day that I had worn the kinder of the two gowns, Nathan had snuck into the suite where I was dressing. He walked in with exaggerated stealth, his tuxedo shoes squeaking as he minced pizzicato across the waxed wood floor. He gave me a velvet box with a necklace in it. The pendant floated perfectly above the dip of the lace. He wasn’t supposed to see me—he’d bought the necklace to

give me after the ceremony, but he said he just couldn’t wait. He’d wanted me to have it sooner.

He clasped it behind my neck and kissed my cheek and fled before I could scold him for breaking the rules. Before I could bring up the traditions that neither of us cared about, but that both of us had been so determined to follow. When I walked down the aisle, the sapphire of the pendant caught an errant sunbeam and refracted light across the arm of Nathan’s father’s suit.

After the ceremony was over, Nathan touched the hollow of my throat and smiled, a small secret smile that was just for me.

I can’t remember ever wearing that necklace again. It had been a ridiculous extravagance. When would I ever wear a sapphire?

But I watched for that smile. I watched for it every time I dressed up for a date or an event, every time I came home from a conference, every time we made up after a fight. I filled my pockets with that smile. I tucked it away for later, to get me through the lean times when we couldn’t look at each other.

Even then, I think I knew I’d need it.

Three and a half hours after I put the Neufmann gown on, I was ready to be finished wearing it. The silk was fitted closely through my ribs and waist, flattering enough, but as uncompromising as an ethics committee. I couldn’t seem to get a deep enough breath. The banquet hall was full of people, all of them looking at me or talking about me or thinking about me. Or worse: not thinking about me at all. I kept catching people’s eyes by mistake, flashing smiles that felt raw and strange on my face.

I wondered if there was enough oxygen for everyone present. I wondered if maybe there was some problem with the ventilation system, and whether the carbon dioxide levels in the room were rising. Everyone in the room exhaled once every few seconds. There was no avoiding that. They had to respire. Every time they did, I felt the air grow a little heavier.

People were talking to me, endlessly talking to me, and I knew that there were hours still to come, hours and hours of people looking at me and moving their mouths and raising their eyebrows and waiting for me to say things back that would satisfy their vision of the person I was supposed to be. Hours of their opinions and compliments and complicated insults. Hours of smiling.

There were seven other people seated at my banquet table, their wineglasses kept in a perpetual state of half-emptiness by a series of bored waiters. The man seated to my left was a senior jurist from the selection committee. He was talking to me, just like everyone else, and I arranged my face into a shape that would seem pleasant and interested. He was important. I should have known his name.

David? No. Daniel?

“I’ve been terribly impressed,” the man was saying, “by the finesse your technique displays. I’ve never seen such singular control of the acute hormonal mode of neuropsychological conditioning.” I smiled and nodded, pretended to take a bite of risotto as though I could possibly have swallowed it. It rested on my tongue like a pill. It tasted like nothing at all, like the flesh of the roof of my mouth, like the edge of the wineglass in front of me. I could not eat it. I had to eat it. The man on my left (Douglas?) was looking at me, waiting for me to accept his compliment.

There were hours still to go.

After much too long, the risotto slid down my throat and the name appeared fully formed in my mind. “Thank you … Dietrich,” I replied. “It’s been a team effort, of course—”

“Nonsense,” he said, and my throat clenched the way it always did when a man in my field interrupted me with that word. “You have a fantastic research team, there can be no doubt of that—but no, Dr. Caldwell, this is about your work. Your legacy. You get the credit, yes? You are the pioneer of the Caldwell Method. It’s all right to bask in it, at least for tonight.”

He lifted his glass. I obligingly raised mine to meet it, because don’t be a bitch, Evelyn. The movement caught the eyes of others

He’d been right. He’d been cruel about it, cruel on purpose, but he’d been right to remind me. I already looked so much like my mother that, in my graduate program, the jokes wrote themselves. Wow, it looks like the cloning research is going well! It was bad enough to have the same colorless hair, the same dishwater-gray eyes, the same thin mouth as that woman. I wouldn’t act like her too.

I’d left that behind long ago—being anything like her, doing the things she did to get to the end of each day intact. I’d left that behind and I’d never looked back.

Poise, that was the way. No twitching. No fidgeting. Poise.

I lowered my hand to my lap, curled it into a fist and nested it inside my other palm. No one would be able to see me clenching that fist, digging my nails into the soft valleys of flesh between the tendons of my hand. Even to the forgettable Federlauer, I would seem composed.

The room was full of eyes, and I reminded myself that I could hide from every single one of them. I knew how to walk quietly. I knew how to slip by unnoticed. I knew how to be the thing they wanted to see, the thing they wanted me to be.

I knew how to hide when I needed to.

I had gotten through the previous year of impossibly hellish obstacles. I had survived the discovery and the betrayal and the fallout. I could handle this banquet.

On stage, a woman I’d never met was talking about my early research. She clutched the microphone in a white-knuckled stagefright grip, and described the initial stages of my work in glowing terms. It was, quite frankly, mortifying. Neuropsychology, neurobiology, hormonal conditioning—it seemed so entry-level now, so sophomoric. At the time, it had seemed like the biggest thing in the world. It had seemed worth every late night in the lab, eating takeout with Nathan while samples spun in the gravity centrifuge. The woman onstage called that work brilliant, and I choked back a startled laugh. We were so young then, balancing notebooks full of

handwritten lab notes on our knees, trying not to spill noodles on the pages. Falling in love. We had dreamed of a night like this: me in a ball gown, him in a tuxedo. Two names engraved on a silver double helix.

A legacy.

I caught myself balling up my napkin in my fist, reflexively clutching at the fabric. I smoothed it out, creased it carefully, and set it next to my plate. I folded my hands. Poise, Evelyn,I repeated to myself. Poise.

This banquet was supposed to be my night. It was not a night for regret; it was a night for satisfaction. After everything that had happened, didn’t I deserve that much?

I crossed my legs, drank my wine, arranged my face into a gracious smile, and pointed my chin at the podium. There was no point in dwelling on the things that the Evelyn of a decade ago had wanted. I told myself that I had been a different person then, practically a child, with a different life. Different goals.

Things change.

Things die.

And now, here was a banquet hall filled with intellectual luminaries. Wine and waiters and flowers and programs. Rented gowns and uncomfortable shoes, speeches and seating charts, all to celebrate me. All for me.

I did not allow my hands to tremble. I did not grit my teeth. I did not climb up onto my chair and tear the silk from my ribs and scream at the top of my lungs about everything that was wrong and broken and missing.

There was nothing to feel upset about. Not a single thing.

CHAPTER TWO

I tried to pace myself at the reception, but glasses of champagne kept appearing before me, pressed into my hands by people I’d never met, but who seemed to know me. Everyone wanted to be the one to give me a fresh glass, everyone wanted to hold the award, everyone wanted to talk to me. It had been hours and there was so long still to go. There were at least a hundred rented tuxedos standing between me and the door. The end of the night was well beyond the horizon. There were too many people, thousands, it felt like, and I couldn’t possibly keep up, so I sipped champagne and smiled at all of them and tried to let myself feel swept away instead of half-drowned.

“Isn’t that thing heavy?”

“What will you be working on next?”

“I have a question about your use of cognitive mapping in the developmental process.”

“How on earth did you come up with the idea to sidestep the Mohr Dilemma?”

“Where’s Nathan?”

This last question snagged me like an errant briar; I only just caught my smile before it faltered. It was Lorna van Struppe asking —and, yes, handing me yet another glass of champagne, my halfdrunk one whisked away already.

Lorna was my old mentor, the woman who had developed the practice of telomere financing to extend the lives of research subjects. She was also the one who showed me how to gracefully

“He’s not here,” I said. The seam of my dress dug into my skin, merciless. “He’s probably at home with his fiancée.”

“His what? Oh,” Lorna said, catching on and looking at me with deep, sudden concern. “I see. Tell me, do we hate him now?”

“No, no, of course not.” I let my grip tighten on the silver double helix just a little, just enough to keep my voice steady. I couldn’t tell if I was drunk or not. I wanted to be drunk. I wanted to be extremely drunk. “Very amicable.”

Lorna raised one wild-haired white eyebrow. “I’ll be taking you out for coffee later this week, and you can give me all the details. In the meantime, I’ll commence hating him just a little,in case I need material to seed hating him a lot.”

“I’d love to get coffee, yes,” I said, my cheeks numb, and before I could add something about really, though, there’s no need to hate him,thingsjustdidn’tgoasweplanned,a hand was on my elbow. I endured an urgent introduction, another fresh glass of champagne. By the time I turned back, Lorna was talking to someone else.

It was a mercy, in a way. The whirlwind of the evening had kept too many people from asking about Nathan. I didn’t think I could have stomached defending him, not to Lorna. Even if it was the right thing to do, professionally. It wouldn’t have been good for me to be seen bringing my personal life into my professional circles, damaging Nathan’s reputation in his academic ones. It would have been justified, but justification didn’t matter in situations like this; no, I needed to be careful.

I had seen it a hundred times in the field that we’d chosen. I knew who always bore the weight of divorce. Nathan could afford all of this, would come out unscathed regardless of how clearly the entire situation was his fault. And no matter how obviously I was the wronged party, it would haunt me for the rest of my career if I slipped at all, even once, if I ever seemed hurt or angry or sad. I needed to maintain the moral high ground, which meant that if I was asked, I needed to insist that everything was fine. I was fine. Nathan and I were fine. Amicable.

I did not want to be asked. The internal battle between doing the right thing and doing the honest thing and doing the temptingthing was an ongoing one, and I just wanted a break from it, just for one night. I wanted to hide.

And there were so many hiding places in that crowd.

Any other night, my story of the development of synthetic amniotic fluid alone could hold the right audience rapt for an hour at a stretch—but of course, this crowd didn’t want to hear about amniotic fluid, nor about the process of accelerating bone growth in nascent specimens without damaging skeletal integrity. No, this crowd knew about that work, had heard it all before. They wanted something different, something remarkable. They wanted to know about the work that had won me the Neufmann Prize.

The process of taking an adult clone and writing their personality into their neurological framework: It was mine. All mine.

Sleepless nights, research mishaps, hours and hours in the lab alone. Nobody cares about those solitary, devastating failures. They don’t want to hear about that—they’d rather hear the story of the eureka moment. And mine was good. “I was making eggs for breakfast,” I would tell them, “and I was watching the way they started cooking from the bottom up, and that’s when I figured it out: the key is to begin programming before the tissues of the hypothalamic nuclei have solidified. I ran to write down my breakthrough … and I completely forgot that the eggs were still on the stove. They burned so badly that we had to throw out the pan.”

Things I never added to the story: the fact that Nathan had been the one to throw the pan into the trash, had been the one to open the kitchen windows to let the smoke out, had come into my study red-faced and shouting. The way he stormed out of the house without listening to my breakthrough. The way he didn’t come home for days. Was I supposed to use the word “husband” or “exhusband” for that part of the story? I could never decide, so I always told the story as though I’d been making breakfast for myself.

It was my breakthrough. It was my legacy, not ours. Nathan was already nostril-deep in academia then. It was all mine.

The Caldwell Method had never been a thing we shared.

“But aren’t you concerned about the developmental mottling of the limbic system in early stages?” This question from a man in rimless glasses and a wrinkled suit, another person I’d never met before. I fielded the question as if I didn’t chafe at the implications of such a basic objection to my methods. No, youasshole,I did not say, it never occurred to me to keep an eye on the fucking limbic system,whatabreakthrough,here,takemygrantmoney.

Poise. Patience. Be nice, Evelyn.

I answered questions, worked the crowd, took photographs. Someone asked me to sign a program, and I did, feeling ridiculous. I kept thinking that I wanted to go home, and then remembering that “home” didn’t really exist anymore. I just wanted to escape. Right up until the moment when it was time to do just that. That’s when I realized that leaving the suffocating press of the crowd would be the very worst thing in the world.

But there was no choice. The night was finally over, and home was waiting. I climbed into the back of a black car with my award in one hand and my tiny, useless clutch purse in the other. I leaned my head against the window. Behind my eyes, the champagne-hum was already turning into a headache that would be devastating come morning. The streetlights that passed were blurry, haloed by the winter air. I tried to remember why that happened—ice crystals in the atmosphere? No, that was the thing that put a ring around the moon. Maybe it was something wrong in my own eyes, something that I should have recognized as a warning sign. Should have known, I’d say later. No one else ever mentioned halos around streetlights.

It was past two o’clock in the morning by the time I walked in through the backyard of the little town house I’d rented, letting the gate slam shut behind me. I kicked my shoes off next to the sliding glass door and made an involuntary noise at the relief of standing

commented on the way I was there before anyone else in the morning. No one had needed to know that I was sleeping in my office during that terrible week.

I pressed the tip of my pen to the bottom of the first page, above the first yellow sticky flag, a line with my name on it. My married name. My name for good, since all my publications were under it. My doctorate had been issued to that name, even. I was so young when I married Nathan, so sure that he was good enough, that he was what I wanted. So sure that we’d go on to conquer the world together. So ready to give up the name I shared with my mother and my father. So ready to become someone new.

My award glinted in my peripheral vision, the silver double helix shining in the fluorescent light from the kitchen. I put it on top of the thick stack of divorce papers and let the weight of it compress the pile.

“Worth it,” I whispered to myself. I let the pen in my hand fall to the ground. I could sign the papers in the morning, with coffee and aspirin and whatever headache was waiting for me. I decided that I would lean right into the misery of it, make it a whole pathetic tableau.

I walked upstairs and wilted onto my bed, on top of the covers. I yanked at my gown until I felt the buttons between my shoulder blades pop off. I tugged the silk over my head and gasped at the feeling of freedom, my ribs expanding further than they’d been able to for hours.

I could breathe. I could finally breathe.

CHAPTER THREE

The weekend gave way to Monday like fog dissolving in sunlight. I drove to the lab with too much gratitude, embarrassingly relieved to be out of the little house I’d never wanted. The lab, by contrast, was something I’d wanted with the kind of mania some women reserve for childbearing.

It had been an incredibly hard win. The Artemis Corporation hadn’t initially wanted to give me my own space for my research— they’d claimed that, without military contracts, my work was too controversial to be profitable. It took years of fighting to convince them that my work could have other applications, the kinds of applications that would bring in immeasurable profit from private sources. Years of measuring out the size of the waves I could afford to make. Waves just big enough to keep the conversation going, but not so big as to make me into a problem. Years of sharing my space with people who could never begin to understand the kind of work I was doing. Except for Seyed, of course. He always understood the work. He always understood me.

But then, one day, the fighting was over, and the lab was built. Tempered glass tubes filled with artificial amniotic fluid, tables made of tungsten instead of steel or aluminum, a fume hood big enough to fit an adult specimen if necessary. I still had to fight over funding every year, of course, but maybe the Neufmann would change that. Maybe resultswould change that.

Either way. My lab felt more like homethan any iteration of home ever had.

“Did you bring it?” Seyed never greeted me with a “hello.” He considered that kind of formality a waste of time. It was part of why I’d hired him in the first place.

Seyed was already waist-deep in the fume hood. I couldn’t see him until after I went through the airlock, positive-pressure ventilation pulling a few strands of my hair loose—but I could, as usual, still hear him. He always started talking as soon as he heard the affirmative beeps of my entry code.

Now, his muffled voice reverberated through the vents of the hood as I walked into my lab. “Of course I brought it,” I said, setting the Neufmann on a bare patch of lab table. “You’d quit if I didn’t.”

Seyed emerged from the fume hood, scrub brush raised high, and yanked off the respirator that covered the lower half of his face. He was small, rail-thin but with a round face that made him look like an undergrad. A soul patch sat in the center of his chin, groomed with the great pride a man shows the only facial hair he can reliably produce. He stared at the silver double helix with a critical eye. “It’s smaller than I expected,” he said.

I dropped my things on my desk and told him to get used to it. “You’ll have ten of them someday, if you keep practicing your fume hood maintenance.” He saluted me with a finger, pulled his respirator back on, and vanished into the fume hood again. “What are you doing in there, anyway?” I asked. “Did something explode?”

“No,” he said, “not technically. Don’t worry about it, I ordered the replacement parts already.”

I didn’t worry about it. I never worried about anything that Seyed told me not to worry about. Some of my colleagues would flinch at the idea of trusting an assistant the way I trusted Seyed, but he’d earned it. He was smart, sure, but anyone could be smart. I would never take on an assistant who wasn’t smart. I demanded more than smart—brilliance was the bare minimum required to keep up in my lab, and not keeping up wasn’t an option. Not keeping up was dangerous.

Seyed was more than just brilliant. He was competent, independent, and fearless on a level that matched me pace for pace. I spotted it in him for the first time when Nathan brought him home for dinner, when he was a graduate student threatening to become Nathan’s protégé. The questions he asked me about my research that night went well beyond polite interest. His teeth were sharp and he was hungry, too hungry to be satisfied by the kind of growth Nathan could offer him.

I told him so, that night, and then I offered him a job where he could flourish, and that was that. I don’t remember if Nathan was upset or not. I suppose that, by then, I’d stopped paying attention to that kind of thing.

Most of the time, it was just the two of us working together, and it was easily the best working partnership I’d ever been half of. I trusted Seyed’s judgment like I trusted my own. I trusted him without question.

So I didn’t bother looking into the fume hood to see what he was doing. Instead, I grabbed a clipboard from the side of a specimen tank and started reviewing nutrient updates, as recorded by the weekend intern I’d never wanted to hire. I hated trusting data collection to someone other than Seyed or myself, but there were labor laws to consider.

The subject in the tank, 4896-T, was eight days into the growth process and was already recognizable as an adult humanoid. She appeared to be progressing well, but her HGH levels were uneven, which was concerning. I eyed the major muscle groups on the subject’s thighs, looking for signs of atrophy—the only visible indicator of the compartment syndrome that would result from the subject’s muscle growth outpacing the flexibility of her other tissues.

Of course, if there was atrophy, it was already too late to fix the problem. If there wasn’t atrophy, it would be tough to tell if there was any compartment syndrome at all without getting involved in some seriously invasive diagnostic procedures. Those procedures would interfere with the programming process significantly enough

“End of day,” I called over my shoulder, not looking back for confirmation.

I walked to the lab phone. There was a trash can on the floor next to it, which held messages—one of the many ways in which Seyed had streamlined the systems in the lab since I hired him. The legal pad next to the phone was dominated by a running tally of who had last ordered takeout. S, E, S, E, S, S, S, E, E, S, E. Next to the column of letters, Seyed had written the name “Martine” and a phone number. His handwriting was architect-tidy. “Did she say what she wanted?”

“No,” Seyed called back. “She just asked if I would pass along her regards and her ‘request for a return call at your earliest convenience.’ What kind of person talks like that?”

No kind of person talked like that.

My mother talked like that.

Martine talked like that.

I thanked Seyed, and my voice must have given something away, because he asked if I was okay. He never asked if I was okay, never. He would only have asked if I sounded truly broken. I swallowed another flash of anger as I told him that I was fine. “I mean, I’m not fine, but I’m fine,” I added, hating everything about the conversation already.

“Right, sure,” he said, his voice as steady as if I’d said something normal. As if he believed me.

That, I think, is the thing that made me tell him the truth. I hadn’t planned to say anything, but Seyed sounded like he believed me, like he thought it possible that I could be fine at a time like this one. “Martine is Nathan’s fiancée.”

I didn’t like to talk about Nathan. Especially not at work. Especially not with Seyed, whose connection to Nathan I’d so effectively severed. But there it was, in the room, right there where Seyed could hear it: MartineisNathan’sfiancée.It was the first time I’d ever said that exact sentence out loud, and it stayed on my tongue with an aftertaste, like tin and brine.

Seyed sucked his teeth. “He’s engaged already? Shit, I’m sorry, that’s fucking terrible.”

“Yeah.” He was right. It was oddly satisfying to hear someone put it that way, because yeah. It was fucking terrible. “They’ve been together for a while now. I haven’t really talked to her beyond the bare minimum.” I shook my head. “I don’t know why she’d call me here.”

Seyed paused, his eyedropper of iodine hovering over a slide. “You’re listed in the staff directory.” He was being careful, staying neutral, trying not to step wrong. It didn’t suit him at all. “It was probably the only polite way she could figure out to contact you.”

A headache was spreading through my temples. I couldn’t tell if it was new, or the lingering remnants of my champagne hangover. “Right, no, I mean I don’t know why she’d call me atall.”

“One way to find out,” Seyed singsonged.

I glared at him, but he didn’t look up from his work, and after a few seconds the glare felt more like theater than anything else. I tore off the part of the legal pad with the phone number on it and tucked it into my breast pocket. It could wait.

Nothing Martine had to say to me could possibly be urgent.

Putting off the unpleasant business of returning Martine’s call was easy enough. The lab was full of work that urgently needed doing— assessing Seyed’s tissue samples, adjusting fluid levels in the specimen tanks, taking and testing new fluid samples from 4896-T, writing up a plan to level out the hormone ranges of several struggling specimens. I owed the lab director an expenditures report, and I needed to figure out how to massage the numbers in the report to justify a slow increase in costs. We were running through supplies faster than we could afford them, and the only solution was money.

Procrastination would have been easy enough, if not for the crinkle of paper in my pocket and the little blinking light in my brain: Martinecalled.Martinecalled.Martinecalled.

WhyonearthwouldMartinecall?

CHAPTER FOUR

Late in the afternoon, Seyed sat on a lab stool next to me and eased my pencil out of my hand. “Hey, Evelyn?” He ducked his head and looked at me with his wide, patient brown eyes.

“Yeah?”

“You’re driving me fucking crazy.” He drummed the pencil on the side of my clipboard in a staccato rhythm. It was loud, uneven, and deeply irritating. He twisted in his chair, looked at the lab phone, looked back at the clipboard, tapped it with the pencil again. “You’ve been doing this shit all day,” he said. “Call Martine already.”

A flush of shame. Fidgeting. “You’re right. I don’t know why I’ve been—ugh. I’ll do it soon, okay?” I almost apologized, but I stopped myself just in time. It was one of my rules, a rule that my father branded into me when I was a child. It was a rule that had gotten me through grad school and internships and the endless fight for respect and recognition. Never apologize in the lab. Never apologize in the workplace.

Never apologize.

“C’mon, boss.” Seyed gave me an encouraging smile. It stung like cautery. “You’re Evelyn Goddamn Caldwell. You just won a Neufmann Honor. This lady’s got nothing on you.”

I grimaced, but nodded. Seyed calling me “boss,” the sign of a serious pep-talk attempt.

He was doing his best.

He couldn’t help what he didn’t know.

I’ve never been an optimist.

I’ve never had cause to expect a positive outcome when all the signs point to a negative one.

Except once.

I bowed to optimism one time, and it was a mistake.

I had been at the museum, enduring an ill-advised attempt at connecting with Lorna’s other research assistant. He was a man who rode his bicycle to the lab every day and ate raw vegetables for lunch. He was tall, stringy, an array of tendons loosely hung on a wire framework. He seemed like a good way for me to practice networking, if not actual friendship. I can’t even remember his name now—Chris, probably, or Ben.

Nathan had found me while I was waiting for my colleague to return from an eternal trip to the lavatory. He sidled up to me at a display of collider schematics. He had long hair then, past his shirt collar, and wore it tied back into a low ponytail. I remember noticing the ponytail and rolling my eyes before he even spoke to me. Later, just before our wedding, he cut it off, and I cried myself to sleep missing it.

“You don’t look like you’re having fun on your date.” That was the first thing he said, his voice pitched low enough that I didn’t immediately recognize that he was talking to me. When I glanced over, Nathan was looking at me sidelong, his mouth crooked up into a dimpled half-smile.

“It’s not a date,” I snapped. “We just work together.”

“He seems to think that it’s a date,” he’d said. “Poor guy’s under the impression that you think it’s a date too. He keeps trying to grab your hand.” I looked at him with alarm, and he held up his hands, took a step away from me. “I haven’t been watching you or following you or anything, we’ve just—we’ve been in the same exhibits a couple of times, and I noticed. Sorry.”

He started to walk away, hands in his pockets, but I stopped him. “It’s not a date,” I said, not bothering to keep my voice down. “He

She was more than polite. Excited, even. She sounded like she was talking to an old friend, instead of to the woman whose husband she’d stolen. That’snotfair , I mentally chastised myself. It’s not herfault. I told her that I couldn’t talk long, tried to sound like there was a reason I had to go, instead of like I was running away.

“Oh, before I forget I understand congratulations are in order,” Martine said, her voice easy. I couldn’t help admiring the way she navigated conversation, the infinite finesse of it. She was showing me mercy: by interrupting, she kept me from having to commit the rudeness of admitting I didn’t want to stay on the phone. The faux pas of her interruption rescued me from feeling awkward. It absorbed discomfort on my behalf. The ultimate mannerly posture. I recognized the maneuver. It was directly out of my mother’s playbook.

Martine asked me if I would consider getting a cup of tea with her. I paused long enough that she asked if I was still on the line. “Yes. I’m here.” I cleared my throat. “Why do you want to get tea with me, Martine?”

Martine laughed, a light, tinkling laugh, one designed to make people feel fun at parties. That was also my mother’s. “Oh, I’m so sorry if I’ve worried you at all, Evelyn. I just wanted to get tea so we could get to know each other a little. I know that things with Nathan aren’t ideal, but I don’t want there to be any troubled water between us. Don’t you think it would be better if we could be friends?”

I choked back a laugh. “Friends?”

“I would love to get to know you,” Martine said, as though this were a perfectly reasonable request. I was the woman who had been married to Nathan, the woman whose life Martine’s existence had blown to pieces, and she wanted to get to know me. Of course she did. Why wouldn’t she?

She asked again, and this time, a note of pleading entered her voice. “Just tea. An hour. That’s all. Please?”

Seyed shook his head, cutting a strip of felt. “I still don’t think you should do this to yourself,” he said softly. “Not that my opinion matters.”

That last part wasn’t a barb—it was an apology. He knew he was intruding, knew he was speaking out of turn. And he also knew that his opinion did matter, mattered when no one else’s did. He was allowed to question me. He was allowed to offer opinions. He was allowed to speak during oversight meetings, even when my funding was at risk, even when the meeting was really a battle for survival.

I respected Seyed. He could keep up with me. He was one of the only people who was allowed to have an opinion at all.

“I know I shouldn’t do it, Sy,” I replied, watching him apply glue to the back of the clipboard. “But I’m going to anyway.” I couldn’t turn my back on Martine. I couldn’t escape her, any more than I could escape myself.

CHAPTER

FIVE

The tea shop Martine had chosen was cute. It was small, with mismatched furniture and clumsy velvet couches and a hand-chalked menu behind the counter. Tea-filled jars lined the shelves behind the register. The place smelled like steam and wood polish. There was a bulletin board covered in handwritten fliers for babysitting, yoga classes, free furniture.

It was almost exactly halfway between our houses. A bell over the door announced my entrance, bright and brassy. I tried not to look for her, but I failed, and there she was.

She was already seated, her hands around a steaming mug, her eyes on a book. She didn’t look up, didn’t notice me standing there —too engrossed in her reading. The air in the coffee shop seemed thin. My breath came too fast. I took my time at the coatrack, unwinding my scarf, shrugging out of my coat, watching the way Martine moved. Watching her tuck a finger under the page she was reading for a few seconds before turning it. Watching her blow on her tea before taking a tentative sip.

It was hypnotic. Martine moved in ways that I didn’t, in ways that I had consciously, effortfully trained myself out of. Tucking-in of my arms and legs, ways of making myself smaller, less obtrusive. Delicate flutters that might imply indecision. Little hesitations that could make my colleagues think they had permission to doubt me.

And then there were the similarities. I knew, without having to think about it, that I chewed my lip in that same way when I was reading a sentence that challenged my assumptions about

something. I knew that I took the same care when setting a glass on a table. I knew that my chin drifted toward whatever I was paying attention to.

When I went to the counter to order a tea, the server did a double take. He kept glancing up at me as he took my order. Just when I thought I might scream, he shook his head and apologized. “Sorry,” he said, “it’s just are you here meeting someone?”

“Yes. Her.” I pointed to Martine’s back, anticipating the follow- up question.

“Are you guys twins?” the server asked, pouring hot water into a mug to warm it. “It’s uncanny.”

“Yes, twins.” The lie was easy. “Can you bring that to the table when it’s ready?”

“It’ll just be another minute,” he said. But I was already walking away, my skin jumping. Twins. Sure.

It was stupid, stupider than anything in the world, the way I’d caught Nathan. A cliche: I’d found a hair.

My own hair is watery, the kind of blonde that doesn’t catch the light, that vanishes at my temples and makes my forehead look Tudor-high. My mother’s hair.

The level of coincidence that led to me finding the otherhair was absurd.

It was the kind of thing that couldn’t have happened if I’d remembered just a minute earlier or a minute later. I wouldn’t have known. I wouldn’t have had a clue.

I’d been on the way out the door, headed to work, and I realized at the last moment that I needed a hair to demonstrate a sampling technique to some visiting grad students who would try to leave résumés on my desk. I let the lab send me a batch of them a few times a year, a show of goodwill on my part, and this was a technique I could let them see without worrying that anyone would

faint. The method I was going to demonstrate could make use of old, dead tissues, and a hair was perfect for the task—small, annoying to keep track of, difficult to manipulate.

It was midsummer and my hair was up, tucked away from my face and off my neck so it wouldn’t stick to me in the humidity. But I spotted one of my loose strands on Nathan’s coat as I was leaving the house, and I grabbed it, pleased to not have to go upstairs and harvest one from my hairbrush. I’d folded it into a receipt from my own pocket, a receipt for butter and brussels sprouts and cotton swabs.

When I demonstrated the sampling technique to the wide-eyed students, I noticed that something was wrong. My sequencing result showed the trademark Seyed and I used to flag specimens, a goofy line of code that, when translated, spelled out it’s alive. Our little joke. Our little signature.

I wish I could say that I’d felt even a moment of knee-jerk denial, that any part of me had insisted it couldn’t be so—but no, that would be a lie.

I knew. I knew right away, like knowing the doctor has bad news to share. I remember the way my stomach dropped, the way heat flooded my throat.

Thisisbad,I thought, and I wasn’t wrong.

I didn’t try to pretend. I just verified. Once the students were gone, I sequenced the sample again. There was plenty of the hair left to use. I sequenced it three times, and the third time, I showed it to Seyed to check my own observation. He immediately spotted the signature line.

I sat back in my chair and let out a long, slow breath. “Well, this is awkward, Seyed,” I said, my voice shaking. “But I don’t think this is my hair.”

What had followed—a private investigator, an envelope full of photographs of Nathan walking into a strange house, late nights spent scrolling through his text messages and emails looking for something, anything, a name, a reason—was less crisp in my