In a way, Amie thought, wasn’t that incredible?
She was well aware of the pain the strings had wrought—Nina’s girlfriend, Maura, had a short string. But Amie still hadn’t opened her own box, so she could see the world through unsullied eyes, and though she would never admit this in front of anyone, there was something almost . . . thrilling . . . about the strings’ arrival. Frightening and confusing, of course, but also, perhaps, wondrous? As a child, she imagined herself swept up by adventure, stepping inside the magical wardrobe, touring the chocolate factory, tessering through time. （Once, when she skinned her knee while playing outside, she even pressed her finger in the tiny wound and smeared a few droplets of blood on her cheek, envisioning herself as a warrior princess in a faraway land, to Nina’s germophobic dismay.） And now, the fantastic, the unbelievable, had suddenly entered her world. And she was there to witness.
Amie stood up slowly from her bedroom floor, Atonement in her hand. She had a few more papers to grade, then she was eager to finish reading. But she realized, as she placed the novel atop her dresser, that this was the first time the world outside of her books had ever rivaled the stories with its very own plot twist.
Nina
Nina and her colleagues were shocked, their eyes fastened to a computer screen in the middle of the office bullpen. The footage showed a group of police officers assembled near a bridge in what looked like a medieval village, cordoning off photographers and curious onlookers.
An incident in Verona had just made its way into the news cycle in New York. A young Italian couple, recently married, had jumped off a bridge together, hand in hand, after opening their boxes on their wedding night and discovering that the bride possessed a devastatingly short string. The groom survived the joint suicide attempt, while his wife of three days did not.
Nina winced when she realized that the tragic act, set in fair Verona, would undoubtedly spark an onslaught of tasteless Shakespearean puns in the tabloids.
“It’s so horrible,” said one of the reporters.
“But you know what’s really crazy?” asked a fact-checker. “The guy knew he wouldn’t succeed in killing himself. They looked at their strings, so they knew that hers was short and his was long. Even if he did something completely dangerous, he knew he wasn’t going to die.”
“Well, maybe he knew he wouldn’t die, but obviously he was pretty messed up about it. He still risked paralyzing himself by jumping off a fucking bridge.”
“Oh, yeah, of course. But it’s weird to think about.”
“I don’t know, to me it’s just more proof that nobody should look,” said the reporter. “Clearly, seeing their strings drove them both insane.”
They weren’t insane, Nina thought. They were heartbroken.
But she didn’t expect her coworkers to understand. They couldn’t look past the dramatic spectacle to see the ordinary, everyday anguish that lay just underneath it.
Their staff was small, dwindling every year in tandem with the magazine’s budget, and as far as she knew, Nina was the only member of the office with such an intimate connection to a known short-stringer.
Her colleagues had been timid at first, understandably wary of breaching any work-life boundaries, but the team had always been close enough to speak freely about breakups and weddings, pregnancies and deaths, and eventually they opened up about the strings.
A third of the staff hadn’t looked in their boxes; the rest seemed fairly content with their findings. After learning about Maura, several coworkers even offered to cover Nina’s desk, should she ever need some time off.
But for Nina there was no such thing.
Surrounded by the news all day, Nina could never escape the strings. She found herself begging Deborah to assign her to some other story, any other story, but it seemed as if there weren’t any. The field of presidential candidates was taking shape and global temperatures were rising, but nothing captivated readers the way the strings could. There was hardly an hour in the day when Nina wasn’t thinking about them, wondering if she would ever know the truth.
Maura often described Nina as a lovable control freak, always needing to store the Tupperware containers with their proper lids, never buying a new skirt unless she already owned a matching top. Part of what Nina loved about being an editor were the rules, the clear and comprehensible laws of grammar and linguistics, and she loved wielding the power of the red pen to enact them. Before her promotion, when she was still trying to prove herself as a reporter, she reveled in seeking out the facts, burying herself in piles of research, charged with the hunt for the truth. But everything about the strings unearthed an even deeper desire for knowledge, for control. The lack of answers—where did the strings come from? why now? do they actually control the future, or simply possess the knowledge of it?—kept Nina from sleeping through the night. Everything was too murky, too gray. She needed things in black-and-white.