“I have no idea,” I have to admit. The man you were with me might simply be a fiction. Someone you created—or I did.
Jax looks young and frightened in the dim light of the room. She’s not the powerhouse she usually is, the ass kicker, the influencer, the woman-up guru with all the answers. She’s just my friend. Someone who needs my comfort and love as much as I need hers. Someone who, at the moment, is as lost in this crazy modern world as I am, as all the people who come to us for advice.
I have no idea who you really are, Adam.
But I am going to find out.
I tuck her in and kiss her on the head like a child. She’s asleep before I leave the room.
I change and get into my own bed, turn on the television.
More bad news. That virus, it’s spreading from China to Europe. There’s talk of a lockdown, borders closing for containment. Wildfires rage out of control in Australia. The honeybees are disappearing, no one knows why. When did the news become worse than any dystopian fiction we could imagine?
As I open my laptop and dig into the virtual lives of Melissa and Bonnie, I find myself thinking that maybe my father, the end of the world prophet, the doomsday prepper, had it right after all.
seventeen
Bailey Kirk walked up the street quickly, aware that Wren Greenwood might watch him go. He found his way to the truck he had parked around the corner and climbed inside. The interior was cold; it had been sitting all day. He cranked the heat and rubbed his hands together until the cold air from the vents started to blow hot.
He checked his phone. Five voice mail messages to which he didn’t want to listen. Eleven texts he didn’t bother to read.
He scrolled through. Mostly they were from Nora. A couple from Diana. His bosses. He was in the doghouse.
Three were from Sabrina:
Hey, what are you doing tonight?
Netflix and takeout?
So—what? Are you ghosting me? She finished it with a ghost emoji.
He typed in what he hoped was a not-too-curt, but clear response: Not ghosting you. Out of town. Call you tomorrow.
Sabrina. She was a nice girl, sweet and funny—a superhot redhead with a big laugh, and a bombshell body. But their encounter had been a mistake, the result of too much to drink and not enough foresight after a company happy hour. He’d been trying to disentangle himself ever since.
He watched the screen, little dots pulsing.
Whatever, B. No biggie.
He wondered how to respond and then didn’t, deleting the text chain, as he did with all nonprofessional communications on his phone. He was often confounded by modern communications, relationships, how they worked and didn’t work. The only thing that really made sense to him was the job.
When Bailey Kirk was sixteen, his mother, Lauren, lost her engagement ring—which she’d been wearing every day for the twenty years since his father, Matthew, proposed.
She knew it had been on her hand in the morning when she was cleaning the breakfast dishes, because she’d noted how it caught the light streaming in from the kitchen window, casting rainbow shards on the wall. She’d taken Bailey and his younger sister, Ellie, to the high school they attended—there was no bus. She’d gone to the grocery store, done some laundry, then went out to prepare the fallow garden for spring, which the groundhog had just predicted was coming early.
The ring was loose. She’d lost a bit of weight lately thanks to cutting out carbs and going from two glasses of wine in the evening to one and sometimes none. She was never a thin woman; she was strong and fit, a powerful tennis player, a yogi, a walker. She was always looking for a way to cut this or that, lose this or that.
Bailey Kirk thought his mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. So did his dad.
You’re perfect, his dad told her often and loudly. Kids, your mom is perfect.
Far from it, she’d demure, smiling.
She had glittering brown eyes that always smiled, soft skin, warm arms always waiting to hug and hold. She had a heady laugh that filled Bailey with happiness when he earned it through his jokes or his antics. She made a killer banana bread. She got mad. Bad grades, messy room, back talk, broken curfew, dirty clothes on the floor—you were going to get a tongue-lashing. But there was no anger, not really. Never yelling. Rarely was there even punishment—which was probably why he never really learned to clean his space. He’d just pile all the mess in the closet or under the bed, knowing what she couldn’t see, she wouldn’t go looking for. Now, a grown man, he was neat to the point of being fastidious. But then, he was an unapologetic slob.
By the time Lauren was making dinner that night—a one-pot baked ziti with ground turkey that everyone liked—the ring was gone. She was still wearing her wedding band. But the engagement ring with the big two-carat diamond was not on her finger.