Fiercely, Sarah told herself to forget what she’d heard. She’d gotten moving again, striding down the path, making as much noise as she could, calling Owen’s name, and Owen had come running out of Little Bear, smiling just for her. They’d spent the afternoon at Ballston Beach, riding the waves, then they’d gone to the drive-in, then back to the beach. As midnight and Sarah’s curfew approached, they’d made love again, with the sound of the wind and the waves in their ears and hundreds of stars burning in the sky above them. “I love you,” Sarah whispered, so low that Owen could pretend he hadn’t heard. He’d put his thumb beneath her chin, lifting her head for a kiss, and she’d thought her heart would burst wide open when he’d said, “I love you, too.”
The next morning, Owen went home. “I’ll email you my phone number as soon as I get to school,” he’d said. Only, instead of a phone number, five days into her tenure at Wellesley, she’d gotten a breakup letter. Or, rather, a breakup email, from Owen’s AOL account. I’ve met someone here and I want to be with her. I’m sorry, but it’s for the best. We should both be free.
She’d written back immediately, begging him to call, to explain it to her, to give her a chance, but he hadn’t, and she didn’t have a number to reach him at school. After two days of crying, she’d called information in Connecticut, thinking she’d reach Sass and beg for Owen’s number. But when she’d tried, a computerized voice told her there was no such listing: not for Owen’s mother or his stepfather or any combination of their many first and last names. The same voice gave her the same bad news when she’d tried to find a listing for the family camp on the Cape. She’d held out hope for nine months, but when she’d finally come back to Cape Cod after her freshman year, when she’d made her first trip across the pond that summer, the Camp was abandoned; the buildings razed, nothing left where they’d been but holes in the ground. Owen, and his entire family, had disappeared.
* * *
That night, Sarah lay in bed with the brownstone silent around her, trying not to think about those summers. The boys were sleeping, one floor above her; Eli, presumably, was one floor above them, tucked into Ruby’s old bed.
Sarah rolled over onto her left side and shut her eyes. She flipped to her right side, then onto her back, where she stared helplessly at the ceiling. She counted backward from one hundred; she played scales in her head, from C major to A-flat minor. Finally, she swung her legs out of bed, earning an irritated look from Lord Farquaad, who’d been snoozing on Eli’s side of the bed, which, in Eli’s absence, he’d claimed for himself.
“Apologies, Your Highness,” she muttered, and grabbed her purse off the chair. Owen’s card was in her wallet, tucked in deep, behind ticket stubs from shows she’d seen with Ruby, receipts from the dry cleaner’s, and loyalty punch cards from the place she’d gotten her manicures before the pandemic. She typed in his number and tapped out a text. I’d love to get that coffee sometime this week.
When she woke up the next morning, to the sound of the boys getting themselves dressed overhead, there was a text waiting. Thursday afternoon any good? Can you meet at the Guggenheim? I could use some culture.
Sarah felt the strangest tangle of emotions—hope and sorrow and guilt and excitement, all twisted together, as she tapped her answer. YES.
Eli
In the month since his banishment, Eli had developed a routine. He’d wait until he heard the soft chirp of their home alarm, the front door opening and closing as Sarah left for her morning walk. Then he’d collect his belongings and slink down to the bedroom before the boys could wake up and see him. On a Monday morning, he’d just finished shaving when his brain informed him that there was less than a month until Ruby’s wedding, and he found himself gripping the sink and groaning out loud.
“Eli?” He hadn’t heard Sarah returning, but he could hear her now, through the bathroom door, sounding worried. “Everything okay?”
He put on his hearty, jolly voice. “Fine!” he called as he opened his eyes and stared at his reflection in the steamy mirror. He still looked, to his own eyes, normal, and not like a man who moved through his days a single heartbeat away from a scream. “Everything’s fine!”
But of course, nothing was fine, and he was, he knew, running out of time to come up with a solution. That morning, at work, he waited until his office manager had gone to lunch, then opened an anonymous browser on her laptop （too afraid to use an anonymous browser on his own） and googled “DNA Paternity Tests.” Judging from the bloom of ads and links, Eli wasn’t the first person to do a search on this particular subject.