the midst of the swelling pile of drivel, a real-looking headline caught Orla’s eye.
THIS JUST IN: FLOSS IS ALSO WRITING A BOOK.
She clicked on it and waited. “Come on come on come on,” she muttered, shaking her phone.
A press release filled the screen of her phone. At the top was the cozy logo of a publishing house. “Floss Natuzzi, Reality Star, Influencer and Mother-to-Be, to Pen Book of Essays and ‘Life Wisdom,’” the top line trumpeted.
The seven-figure deal had been brokered by Polly Cummings.
The tan phone on Orla’s nightstand rang so loudly, she dropped her cell on the duvet. She picked the rattling handset up, trembling. “Hello?”
“It’s Melissa.” Orla could hear that she had been crying. “They only told me this morning, and I quit right away. They’re monsters.”
“But why are they doing this?” Orla put her mouth right on the phone. “Why?”
“It’s the network,” Melissa said. “Craig the dickless wonder—he laid the whole thing out for me. Months ago, Floss and Aston went to the network. They begged for another chance. They asked what it would take. They brainstormed. A reinvention. A new chapter. A family. A baby. They were impatient. They wouldn’t listen to Craig about adoption, or working with Floss’s, whatever, condition. Your baby was right there, they said. They said your baby was ready.” Melissa blew a bitter breath into the phone. “And then, Polly,” she said. “I hate telling you this part. They brought Polly in on it.”
“What do you mean?” Orla’s eyes slid to the screen. Craig was stepping back. Floss and Aston were kissing.
Melissa sighed. “Polly knew a book by Floss would make fucking millions,” she said. “She would have done whatever they asked. And they figured if you thought you were finally going to get to be an author, you’d be more likely—to go along with it. So Polly helped them. She said she’d pretend to represent you. She set you up. Oh, God,” Melissa whimpered. “I need you to go on your laptop right now and email me what you signed. Everything you signed. Okay?”
“But I did what they wanted,” Orla said. “They got everything they wanted. Why are they pretending she’s the pregnant one?”
“Oh, that.” Melissa laughed. Orla heard what Melissa wished in that laugh: that her whole life had been different. That she never met Orla, never got into publicity, never liked English more than math. “Because the network didn’t love the storyline,” Melissa said. “They didn’t love the idea of someone else’s baby. They told Floss and Aston to fix it. And as you see, they did.”
Orla gripped the phone. “So she’ll never know,” she whispered. “They’ll never tell her she’s mine.”
Melissa’s breath was ragged on the other end. “Oh, I’m sure that’s not true,” she said. “It’s just TV. I’m sure in real life...”
Orla hung up. She put on the only shoes that still fit her. She lugged her suitcase to the door.
It took Dr. Kodali a moment to answer her knock. When he did, he was tying a hotel robe over a pair of swim trunks. Water rolled off his shins and pooled on the burnt-orange tile. “I apologize for the delay,” he said. “I was testing out the hot tub. Is everything all right?”
“We’re going home,” Orla told him. “Now.”
* * *
People asked, after awful days that split time, turning present into long-gone past overnight, “Where were you when it happened?” When the first plane hit the World Trade Center, Orla was in first period, ninth-grade geometry. “A shame,” said the teacher, squinting, bent over a beige computer that faced away from the students. “Sounds like a little two-seater ran into a building in New York. Or something. Now, where’d we leave off yesterday? Prisms.”
With the Spill, things were different. The question would always be: “What were you looking at?”
For Orla, it was the microwave. She remembered the last time she saw it before: 6:17 p.m. She had just gotten home from St. Lucia. She was sitting on the couch, watching television. All that seemed to qualify as news, it being Christmas Eve, were recaps of Floss and Aston’s wedding. The reveal of Floss’s belly. Aston’s crazy toast: he said, with a verve that made him seem unhinged, that he and Floss were “reclaiming the story of Jesus’s birth—we make it hot. We make it sexy.” At that, Craig clapped him on the back and took the mic.
As Orla was watching, her phone rang on her bed. When she heard the rippling chime that meant