What happened to you, Elsie?
I square my shoulders. “You’re right. Greg’s the one I need to talk to.” Warn him that Jack might ask questions. Give him time to prepare answers. Greg’s the reason I was keeping secrets all along. He’s the one who deserves protecting. “In the meantime, no more Faux.” I look at Cece. “Should you quit, too? You’ll be on the job market once you’re done with your thesis—what if this happens to you, too?”
“It won’t be until next year. We might be dead by then.”
“Would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
We exchange smiles. “I must say, the situation is making me reconsider Faux. Then again, the number of dollars in my bank account is making me reconsider my reconsiderations.” She taps her chin. “It’s a good reason to keep working with Kirk.”
I frown. “Kirk?”
“Yeah, that guy who—”
“I know who Kirk is. I just thought . . . You’ve been talking about him a lot. And you refer to him by his first name.”
“How else should I refer to him?”
“Historically, your clients have been, you know . . . Big Nostrils Jim. Not Anderson Cooper. Doomsday Prepper Pete. Anchovy Breath One. Anchovy Breath Two. Deep V-Neck. Anchovy Breath Three—”
“I get the gist.”
“Kirk is always just Kirk, which has me wondering if . . .”
“Whoa.” Her eyes widen dramatically. “Am I being attacked? In my own home?”
“No. I just—”
“At my own table?”
I shake my head. “No, I—”
“On my own chair that I retrieved from the curbside and that used to have bedbugs and maybe still does?”
“No! I didn’t mean to—” I notice Cece’s sly smile. “You’re evil.”
She laughs. “Is Greg still on that hippie retreat where you pay to weed their flower beds? When’s he coming back? And when is the search committee voting on the candidates?”
Is she trying to change the topic? “I have no idea. I don’t even know if George has already been interviewed. Greg should be back by the weekend, but he’ll have tons of messages, and . . .”
“And he’ll see a million texts from you. He’ll call the second he turns on his phone. You’ll calmly explain what happened, and you’ll come up with a plan together. Don’t worry about it, okay?”
I nod.
As it turns out, Cece is right—I do get a call from Greg the moment he comes back to civilized society. But she’s also wrong, because things don’t go the way she predicted. Not at all.
Not even a little bit.
* * *
? ? ?
My first thought when I read Unknown Boston Number is that I’m going to be offered the job. It must be the sheer depth of my desperation making an optimist and a fool out of me. For a moment, I see myself holding back tears as I accept an appointment letter. I would like to thank the Academy, my roommate, and the girl who runs the WhatWouldMarieDo account—my rocks during the harrowing years of grad school. I owe this to you.
It makes the fall back to reality that much harder.
“Do you know someone named Gregory Smith?” Whoever’s on the other end of the line sounds so angry, I briefly forget how to talk.
“Um—”
“I sure hope so, because there are forty unread texts from you on his phone. And if you’re his stalker . . . you’ll still do. He was brought here an hour ago for emergency dental surgery, and we need someone to come pick him up.”
“Pick him . . . up?”
“Yes. It means that you come here. Get him. Then take him where he lives.” She’s speaking very slowly. If I told her about my doctoral degree, she would not believe me. “With a vehicle such as a car. Or a wheelbarrow, for all I care.”
“I—I don’t own a car. And I don’t know where he lives. Can’t you call him an Uber and—”
“Honey, he’s drugged out of his mind. I cannot let him walk out of here alone—he just mumbled something about walking into the Charles River to hang out with Aquaman.”
I close my eyes. Then I open them. I glance at the lecture I’ve been preparing, then at the time (6:42 p.m.), then at Hedgie glaring at me from the kitchen counter.
I sigh and hear myself ask, “Where are you located?”
11
CENTRIPETAL FORCE
If Greg were a dog, he’d be peeing all over the waiting room.
In my twenty-seven years, no one has been happier to see me. He leaps (albeit sluggishly) out of his chair, tries (and fails) to spin me around, effusively compliments my stained “May the Mass Times Acceleration Be with You” shirt, and finally sandwiches my face in his palms and says, “I’m about to blow your mind, Elsie. Did you know that quinoa is not a grain? It’s like, a sprout. Oh my God, let’s do the Harlem Shake!”
Behind the reception counter, the nurse shakes her head and mutters, “High like a hot-air balloon.”
“I—thank you for calling me.” She looks less pissed than she sounded on the phone, but more exhausted. The place smells like mint, potpourri, and that air hygienists blow into the mouth during cleanings.
“Sure. Get this idiot out of my waiting room, please. I gotta go home and feed my own brood of idiots.”
“Of course.” I smile reassuringly at Greg, who’s petting a strand of hair that escaped my bun. “Like I said, I don’t know his home address. Do you have it in your paperwork? Or I could bring him to my place—”
“I’ve got it.”
I turn to the door even though I’m well familiar with the voice—from the past three days of interviewing, from my worst fears, from that weird, intrusive dream I had last night. Greg’s already running to his brother, giving him the same unabashed welcome he gave me.
My first thought is a familiar one: I can’t believe they’re related. If they played siblings in an HBO Max miniseries, I’d call bullshit on the casting director. My second is, of course, Fuck.
Fucking fuck. Why is he here?
I look to the nurse. “Did you . . . did you call both of us to pick Greg up?”
“Yup. Because the first person I called was his mom, who told me she’d be here in fifteen and then canceled because of a mani appointment.” Her lifted eyebrow is 100 percent judgment. I blame her 0 percent. “I decided to hedge my bets.”
“Right,” I say. Greg yaps on about his fantabulous quinoa discovery, and I don’t want to meet Jack’s eyes. I cannot bear for him to see me, not after yesterday’s mess at Monica’s and that last look. “Understandable.” I smile weakly at the nurse. Then I turn, meticulously keeping my eyes on Greg. “Your big bro’s here to take you home, so I’m leaving. I’ll call tomorrow when you’re feeling better, and—”
“Oh, no.” Greg looks at me like I’m pouring liquid glue on a brown pelican. “You can’t leave. That’d be awful!”
“But—”
“You have to come!”
“I suggest you do what he says,” the nurse tells me. “His tooth was abscessing. They pumped him full.”
“Greg, I—”
“Come on, Elsie. I’ll pay the usual rate—”
“No. No, no, I—” Shit. Shit. I chance a look at Jack, expecting to see . . . I don’t know. A sneer of disgust. The usual smirk. A SWAT team barging from behind him to handcuff me for solicitation. But he’s waiting patiently, hands in the pockets of his jeans, the dark blue of his shirt pulling out the color in his eye. He’s not wearing a coat, because he’s physically unable to feel cold. Born without thermoreceptors—a tragedy. “Sure. I’ll come for a bit. Let’s go, Greg.” I turn to the nurse, whose interest perked up at usual rate. “Is there anything we should know?”
“Here are his meds—starting tomorrow morning. Just put him to bed to sleep the drugs off. And don’t let him make any major life decisions for the next four to six hours—no puppy adoption, no MLMs. Also, I googled it: quinoa’s a seed.”
Greg gasps. “We should get a puppy!”
Jack presses his lips together, but the dimple is right there. “My car’s this way. I’ll drive you to the humane society.”
Buckling Greg up in the back seat of Jack’s hybrid SUV takes so long, I contemplate never having kids. As the other not-under-the-influence adult, I’m probably expected to ride in the passenger seat next to Jack, but . . .
Nope.
“I’ll sit in the back in case Greg needs anything.”
Jack’s look clearly says, I know you’re avoiding me, because of course he does. He knows everything—and what he doesn’t know is his for the taking, because I’m translucent. Fun.
I realize how bad an idea this was twenty seconds into the ride: whatever they gave Greg is messing with his working memory. He’s able to focus only on what’s right in front of his eyes, and catastrophically, 70 percent of his field of view happens to be me.
The other 30 is, of course, Jack.
“You guys, this is fun. Is it not fun? Just the three of us. No Mom, no Dad, no Uncle Paul.”
“Very fun,” Jack says, navigating out of the lot.