Kappa. Shannon assumed Sam had gotten one too. Sam tried to hide her disappointment. She went to her adviser’s office and asked why she hadn’t been picked. Her GPA was as high as Shannon’s and she had taken all the classes she thought were needed. He told her it probably had to do with fulfilling more requirements and said he’d look into it.
There was at all times this pressure to be the best, to have everything figured out. Sam admired Elisabeth’s laid-back attitude about such things. She aspired to be more like her. Elisabeth spoke of waitressing to support her writing career in the early days and made it sound fun. The things that weighed on Sam—her loans, her job prospects—were all hurdles Elisabeth had cleared, and now she assured Sam that she could do the same.
When the pressure got to be too much, Sam took solace in Clive’s plan for the two of them. She pictured the country house he described. She pictured herself baking bread from scratch. She never admitted either of these things to anyone but him.
Sam looked around the room now. A clear plastic dry-cleaning bag full of dark suits hung on the back of the door. The floral wallpaper was peeling in the corners.
One of her professors had said he feared for the future of art because this generation didn’t know how to look. They didn’t take notice of their surroundings—of light, shape, space. Ever since, Sam was determined to prove him wrong.
Today she had been surprised on arrival, pleasantly so, that this was the sort of house Andrew grew up in. Seeing a person’s childhood home gave you more insight into him than days of conversation ever could.
Sam was raised in a house like this—perfectly nice, but not fancy or done up. It didn’t get great light. The beige carpets were old and stained in places. The furniture didn’t match. Faye and George had a leather La-Z-Boy recliner and an overstuffed paisley sofa in the living room, and the biggest TV she had ever seen.
This guest room doubled as an office. A heavy wooden desk too big for the space had been jammed in by the window, with a spare kitchen chair pulled up to it. On top were several dozen overstuffed folders, stacked in haphazard piles. There were Post-it notes all over the wall behind.
Sam got a familiar, tingling feeling in her stomach. The sensation that always preceded snooping. She felt herself pulled toward the desk, listening as she walked, to determine if anyone was outside the door.
She had been trying to cut back, though she still sometimes checked out what Isabella was looking at on her laptop in the minutes after she left the room to shower. Isabella treated Google like a Magic 8 Ball. A couple weeks ago, after her conversation with Elisabeth about it, Sam saw that she had googled Will I regret selling my eggs?
Whatever Isabella found must have convinced her that Elisabeth was right, because after she came out of the shower, she asked Sam to go for a walk. Isabella poured them each a mug of tequila, the only booze they had on hand. She gathered up her needles and hormones in a shopping bag and flung the whole thing into the pond when they passed, without so much as slowing down.
(The fertility clinic sent a bill for two thousand dollars, stating that, since Isabella had canceled the deal, she was now responsible for her medical expenses. Isabella called her father. “Daddy, I need two grand. No, you don’t want to know what for.”)
Babysitting had always presented the best snooping opportunities. People tidied their houses the first few times a new sitter came, but once they were used to her, they’d leave everything out in the open. Pills. Bills. Angry letters. Lingerie.
Sam vowed not to snoop at Elisabeth’s house. She had twice walked into the master bedroom, only to turn right back around. But she hadn’t been able to stop herself from looking inside the plain brown paper bag she found under the bathroom sink when she opened the cabinet to get more toilet paper. The bag contained ten maxipads, each as thick as her thumb; a can of antiseptic numbing spray; and four pairs of giant disposable underwear, all of which she recognized as the accessories a woman required after giving birth. It seemed impossible that someone as elegant as Elisabeth could be subjected to such degradation. But Sam reasoned that, much like death, bringing