timeline, seeking the mental age where she’ll best be able to handle the reality of the situation.
Finally, in a small voice, she says, “I was right.”
“You were,” he agrees.
“We’re related.”
“Yes.”
“We’re not . . . right. We’re different. Something about us was made, not born.”
“Yes,” he says again. Letting her be the one to fumble her way through the words seems exactly right. He would be too accurate, and right now, that could kill them both.
“All this time . . . we were looking for each other, because they weren’t supposed to split us up. Whoever arranged our adoption wasn’t supposed to split us up.” A note of anger seeps into her voice. How dare they? How dare some long-ago bureaucrats decide making two families whole was more important than preserving a unit that already existed, something sealed in blood and bone and the water of the womb? Both of them loved—and will always love—their adoptive families, and she can no more imagine giving hers up than she could ask Roger to desert his, but just because a thing is loved, that doesn’t mean the thing should have been made. They wouldn’t have loved those people if they hadn’t been given to them. One of their families could have found another child to love and treasure and care for, and the two of them could have grown up together, the way they were meant to all along.
“Probably not,” says Roger. He’s done his share of reading on adoption law and the psychology of adoption. He thinks it’s one of the most selfless things a parent can do, giving their children up for someone else to raise and care for. He’s never regretted not knowing his birth mother. She loved him enough to give him to people who’d love him even more. Right now, however, he wishes he could ask her a few questions. Like whether she’d been aware that she was having two babies, not just one.
Like whether she’d approved of breaking up the set. Like whether it had been her idea, whether she’d thought “if I can’t have this family, neither can you” when she looked at two purple-faced, screaming newborns, and willingly signed the papers that would send them to opposite sides of a continent.
He’s not sure he wants to hear the answers.
“We’re really related.”
“Yes.” He can tell Dodger will be circling this for a while: she’s like this sometimes, incapable of moving on until she’s cracked her latest obsession open to get to the soft parts hidden inside. This was her idea, this was her hope, and yet she’s the one who’s stunned when it proves to be true; she’s the one who couldn’t conceive of her math being as real as she always wants it to be.
But maybe it’s not the relation that’s the shock. Maybe it’s the underlying strangeness, the confirmation that their quantum entanglement is somehow biological in nature. They’re twins, and they aren’t, and they’re something more. It should be terrifying. Maybe it will be, when the shock wears off.
Roger sits on the bench next to her, his own weight shifted back, creating as much space between them as he can. He has a good view of her face from this angle. He can see the tension in her cheeks shifting upward a split second before her neutral bemusement turns into a smile, before her chin tilts down and her eyes slant up and everything is different.
“I guess you can’t get rid of me now, huh?” she asks, and her tone is something like laughter and something like tears and something that isn’t either, something deep and primal and pure. He’s been waiting to hear that note in her voice for his entire life, even though five minutes ago he didn’t know it was possible, and five hours ago he didn’t know he needed her with him as badly as he does, and time is a concept invented by men who didn’t want everything to keep happening at once. Time is irrelevant.
“Nope,” he says, and moves closer, eliminating the space between them. She puts her head against his shoulder, and nothing has ever fit there this perfectly; nothing has ever been this intended to happen.
Everything is perfect.
Everything is doomed.
CONSEQUENCES
Timeline: 21:33 PST, December 8, 2008 (that night).
The rain has come. Berkeley is being washed clean of its sins, buried in a deluge of water so heavy it looks like a moving silver curtain, like fish should swim past the window at any moment, blissfully suspended