stood. She closed her eyes and let it wash over her, balled herself against the wall.
“You’re right about everything,” Ellis said. “Except the last part. I don’t underestimate Marlow. I estimate her exactly right. I have her eggs. Did you think of that? No? Well, she will, sooner or later. At the end of the day, she’s a woman. She’s not going to abandon her children.”
Honey snorted. “Eggs are hardly children.”
“Try making children without them,” Ellis said calmly.
Marlow was shaking so hard against the brick, it began to scratch pulls in her sweater. She thought of Ellis with her at the doctor’s office. In her physical long-term absence, one form she had signed said, he was authorized to deal with her frozen eggs as he saw fit.
“If you don’t take my deal,” Honey said, “and I let Marlow go to Atlantis, she will not get back out. You’ll never see her again. Your current shitshow? That becomes permanent. But say the word, and when her driver shows up tomorrow, I’ll send him to your hotel instead.”
“She won’t go through with Atlantis,” Ellis said.
“That is a stupid bet,” Honey said. “I told you, it appears that her biological mother is there. Marlow wants to find her. Biology is a powerful motivator.”
“Biology’s power to motivate,” Ellis said, “is precisely what I’m betting on.” It seemed to Marlow his voice was fading. He must have been walking away. “I’m sure she’d like to meet her mother, or whoever this woman is,” he said. “But not at the expense of meeting her child.”
“Ellis,” Honey called after him. “What if Marlow doesn’t want a child?”
The question rang in Marlow’s ears as she wrapped her arms around herself. What if she didn’t? What did it say that she didn’t know, that she hadn’t thought once of her eggs, defrosting on the opposite coast? They would not keep forever. Shouldn’t that have made her panic and turn back, as Ellis expected? Marlow felt around in the dark well of her thoughts, searching for instinct. When nothing surfaced, she felt her fury turning on herself for the first time. She dug her teeth into her lip. Decide!
Ellis had warned her, right up front: he liked exploiting the flaws in things. And now he read her thoughts through the wall.
“Maybe she doesn’t want them,” he said, and Marlow knew, from his tone, he was smiling. “But she won’t be able to tell. That’s the thing about her, that’s how I know she’ll fall in line. She doesn’t know how to know what she wants. The girl needs some direction.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Orla
Gros Islet, St. Lucia
2016
Orla left for St. Lucia on December 23, the night before Floss and Aston’s wedding. In the dark, per the agreement she had signed.
Amadou drove her right up to the stairs of the little white plane that was waiting at Teterboro. She struggled out of the door he opened and let him take her arm. They climbed the stairs to the mouth of the plane, their faces and Orla’s swollen stomach pressing into the wind. She could feel Amadou’s concern, his reluctance to let her go. But Orla had to go. Floss had insisted, had cajoled a doctor into agreeing with her, into scribbling a note. “You’re be flying private,” Floss said to Orla, “and you’ll have a doctor with you 24/7. You’ll be totally safe, and besides, like, who says pregnant women can’t fly this late? Women can do anything.”
After Amadou helped her step onto the aircraft, after the door had been closed, Orla sat and nodded while the pilot showed her the map. It was Orla’s first time to the Caribbean, and she had imagined all the countries bunched together. But she saw, as the man pointed to St. Lucia, that the one she was headed to was farther than she thought, almost all the way to South America. Later, she would be certain that this—the long distance—was why Floss had chosen the island.
* * *
Orla hadn’t said yes right away. She had ignored Floss and Aston for weeks, even though they wrote her daily: short, pleading texts that also asked after her health, and long, pleading emails about their metamorphosis into grounded people, about the upstairs room they were saving, in case. Floss attached a photo once, and Orla couldn’t resist. The room was tiny, and already lavender. It had a round stained-glass window with a rose carved into its middle.
Aston had been right: the baby was a girl. A nurse had slipped up