Though the machines were right on schedule, the humans were running behind. Floss was in the house somewhere, probably doing her makeup-before-the-makeup act. She would show up powdered with bronzer soon, claiming to be bare-faced. Jacqueline was on her way, set back by a drama with one of her daughters. Ellis was surfing with his sisters’ husbands at a simulator facility. Its website promised to make the men feel like they were riding waves on the Gold Coast, then in Oahu, then off the Canary Islands, all inside a warehouse fifty miles from the Pacific.
As Marlow sat waiting, a message cut through the noise in her brain. Urgent, for Marlow Clipp, from Liberty Family Planning—Can you stop by the office ASAP?
Sure, Marlow responded. She slipped out of the kitchen without saying anything to the bots. They went on working, half smiles in place.
She drove to the center and stepped inside, finding the office dark and quiet, the chipper nurse nowhere to be found. Someone was waving at her, backlit, at the end of the hall.
Marlow walked toward the figure, its features falling into place as she got closer: a serious-eyed woman her age, thick-limbed in her blush-and-gray scrubs, with warm brown skin. Her ponytail was tied back tightly. The second Marlow saw it, her fingers tingled with a deep-seated memory of what that hair felt like: thick in her hands because there was so much of it, but brittle in her fingers, each strand highly breakable. Marlow knew the feeling of trying not to snap a single one as she coaxed them into braids and then elastics at the end.
“Grace,” she breathed. “You work here?”
Grace swallowed. She looked anxious. “We need to give you a quick exam,” she said loudly. “Your Pap came back abnormal. Please follow me.”
“No problem,” Marlow said. And just like that, for the first time ever, she was in violation of her contract. There was a clause in it that forbade her to talk to any of the children who had been there that night. But they weren’t children anymore, were they? She hadn’t seen Grace in twenty years.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Orla
New York, New York
2015
“Hey,” Floss said at brunch one Sunday, rolling the stem of her glass between her fingers. “You know that singer, Aston Clipp?”
“Is he a singer?” Orla said. She took a sip of her mimosa, tasting virtually nothing. The mimosas at their regular brunch spot—a cheesy rooftop bar in Midtown that still smelled of bleach and liquor when it opened for eggs on Sunday—were advertised as bottomless. But Orla and Floss were pushing it; they had been there for nearly three hours. The angry waiter had started bringing their glasses back a shade darker each time, until Orla was sure that there wasn’t a drop of champagne in the cup. Now he was even cutting the orange juice, with water. At least, she hoped it was water.
“Whatever he is—” Floss shrugged “—I think he’d be perfect. Don’t you?”
They had been talking for weeks about the next step: coupling Floss with someone who would up the wattage of her star. Orla thought of a recent, blurry video they had run on Lady-ish: Aston Clipp’s fist rising above the scrum of a crowd in Ibiza, coming down on a guy he thought had jostled his manager. Except the guy turned out to be a fourteen-year-old girl.
“I don’t know,” Orla said. “He could be trouble.”
“Oh, he’s trouble.” Floss did the thing that Orla had come to know as her attempt to wiggle her eyebrows. Thanks to the injections she got, it only made her temples pulse.
Orla imagined Floss at a party on Aston Clipp’s lap, ducking her head to hear him whisper, and felt preemptive jealousy shoot through her. She was lost in thought as Floss stood and led her out of the restaurant. They were almost to the door when Orla realized they hadn’t paid. She looked back, mortified, and caught the waiter’s eye. He stared at her, but didn’t come after them. He mostly looked relieved that they were gone.
* * *
Aston Clipp was born Austin Kumon, the fourth son of Lee, a Kentucky single mom who bleached her jet-black Japanese hair and dreamed of seeing her best-looking kid on the Disney Channel. She showed up in LA a couple of times a year, prodding Austin into rooms where boys his age ducked their heads and mumbled the lines of kid detectives with talking dogs, kid surfing prodigies with talking dogs,