“How do you feel today?” Holly asked.
Laney managed half a smile. “Same.”
So many things going on in that face, in that tone. I don’t want to lie to you, but I also don’t want to make you feel bad. I know you’re doing everything you can.
Holly returned the smile. “Same is better than worse, right?”
One of her professors at NYU had told her doctors weren’t supposed to get attached. Not very attached, anyway. That was better left to nurses. Her attending physician during her residency at Anne Arundel, in Annapolis, had said something similar. In the decade since, Holly had never taken the advice.
Laney was playing the video game again. Its name slipped Holly’s mind, but she was familiar with how it worked: The player existed in a 3-D world made up of small, discrete cubes—cubes of grassy earth, exposed dirt, sand, and rock. You could dig shafts deep into the ground or into the sides of cliffs, and use the freed material—also in the form of cubes—to build things with. For three days now, Laney had been creating a replica of Egypt’s Giza Plateau in the game. The three largest pyramids and the Sphinx. It was absorbing work. Which qualified it as a godsend.
“I found a new Neil deGrasse Tyson video on YouTube,” Laney said. “He was talking about Europa—that’s one of Jupiter’s moons. He said the whole thing is covered with ice, but under the ice there’s an ocean of liquid water, and there might be life down there.”
Before her time here, Laney had been about as serious an astronomer as a sixth grader could be. She had shown Holly pictures from her blog, of herself and her little sister at the Hayden Planetarium in New York. Once Laney had even been to the Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona. What she’d liked most of all, though, was just lying on the rooftop deck of her home, in farm country north of Tulsa. It’s a long way from city lights, she had told Holly. It’s dark enough that you can see satellites going over, if you watch long enough. They don’t blink or anything. They look just like stars, except they move. They slide right across the sky in a minute or so.
Holly’s phone beeped with a text message. She took it out and looked at it.
Karen Simonyi: Lab just sent the new numbers for Laney. Not what we hoped for.
Holly kept her expression blank. From Laney’s point of view, it might’ve been a text about dinner plans. Still, when Holly met the girl’s eyes, it was possible to imagine she knew otherwise—to imagine Laney could tell what she was thinking.
Holly almost shivered at that idea.
That all too familiar idea.
Laney looked puzzled. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Sorry, just spacing out.”
The girl offered another smile, this one a little closer to full. “Doctors aren’t allowed to space out. Too many responsibilities.”
“That’s why we space out.”
Holly kissed her forehead again and left the room.
Two minutes later she was standing at her office window, looking out over the Texas flatlands in the rain. The numbers for Laney were on her computer screen. She’d looked them over twice. She leaned her head against the windowpane. Far below, one of her bodyguards walked out under the entry overhang. He turned and surveyed the road in both directions, then headed back to the door. He did this several times per hour.
Holly went to her desk chair and sank into it. She shut her eyes. In the silence were all the memories that always came to her. Like old acquaintances. These days, just about anything could trigger them. Could send her back to when everything had gone wrong—to when it could’ve gone right if she’d done things differently. If she’d been stronger.
She squeezed her eyes more tightly shut. Felt the pressure against her eyeballs. Saw little pops and flashes of light in the black. She’d found long ago that this helped her deal with the other feeling—the sense that regret could be a physical thing. That it could stand behind you with its hand on your back, and that sometimes it could reach inside you and clutch your heart in its grip.
“Rachel,” she whispered. She braced her elbows on the desk and put her face into her palms, and the name echoed in her thoughts as if she’d spoken it in a catacomb.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN