He was irritated with me, and rightly so. I debated telling him everything—telling him why I couldn’t say no to Martine, what I owed to her, why I needed to see her. But it was too much already, him knowing who Martine was. Him knowing Nathan had been unfaithful.
The idea of telling Seyed who Martine really was caused my entire mind to recoil. “I’ll be in by ten,” I said.
“Have you ever seen this woman in person before?” he asked. “What if she’s, like, a murderer?”
I grimaced at the memory of my knuckles on the red-painted front door of Nathan’s second, secret house. The knob turning. Martine’s face, smiling out at me, eyes blank and polite in the few seconds before recognition struck us both. “I’ve seen her before,” I said. “She’s very sane.”
Seyed shook his head, cutting a strip of felt. “I still don’t think you should do this to yourself,” he said softly. “Not that my opinion matters.”
That last part wasn’t a barb—it was an apology. He knew he was intruding, knew he was speaking out of turn. And he also knew that his opinion did matter, mattered when no one else’s did. He was allowed to question me. He was allowed to offer opinions. He was allowed to speak during oversight meetings, even when my funding was at risk, even when the meeting was really a battle for survival.
I respected Seyed. He could keep up with me. He was one of the only people who was allowed to have an opinion at all.
“I know I shouldn’t do it, Sy,” I replied, watching him apply glue to the back of the clipboard. “But I’m going to anyway.”
I couldn’t turn my back on Martine.
I couldn’t escape her, any more than I could escape myself.
CHAPTER
FIVE
The tea shop Martine had chosen was cute. It was small, with mismatched furniture and clumsy velvet couches and a hand-chalked menu behind the counter. Tea-filled jars lined the shelves behind the register. The place smelled like steam and wood polish. There was a bulletin board covered in handwritten fliers for babysitting, yoga classes, free furniture.
It was almost exactly halfway between our houses. A bell over the door announced my entrance, bright and brassy. I tried not to look for her, but I failed, and there she was.
She was already seated, her hands around a steaming mug, her eyes on a book. She didn’t look up, didn’t notice me standing there—too engrossed in her reading. The air in the coffee shop seemed thin. My breath came too fast. I took my time at the coatrack, unwinding my scarf, shrugging out of my coat, watching the way Martine moved. Watching her tuck a finger under the page she was reading for a few seconds before turning it. Watching her blow on her tea before taking a tentative sip.
It was hypnotic. Martine moved in ways that I didn’t, in ways that I had consciously, effortfully trained myself out of. Tucking-in of my arms and legs, ways of making myself smaller, less obtrusive. Delicate flutters that might imply indecision. Little hesitations that could make my colleagues think they had permission to doubt me.
And then there were the similarities. I knew, without having to think about it, that I chewed my lip in that same way when I was reading a sentence that challenged my assumptions about something. I knew that I took the same care when setting a glass on a table. I knew that my chin drifted toward whatever I was paying attention to.
When I went to the counter to order a tea, the server did a double take. He kept glancing up at me as he took my order. Just when I thought I might scream, he shook his head and apologized. “Sorry,” he said, “it’s just—are you here meeting someone?”
“Yes. Her.” I pointed to Martine’s back, anticipating the follow- up question.
“Are you guys twins?” the server asked, pouring hot water into a mug to warm it. “It’s uncanny.”
“Yes, twins.” The lie was easy. “Can you bring that to the table when it’s ready?”
“It’ll just be another minute,” he said. But I was already walking away, my skin jumping.
Twins. Sure.
* * *
It was stupid, stupider than anything in the world, the way I’d caught Nathan. A cliche: I’d found a hair.
My own hair is watery, the kind of blonde that doesn’t catch the light, that vanishes at my temples and makes my forehead look Tudor-high. My mother’s hair.
The level of coincidence that led to me finding the other hair was absurd.
It was the kind of thing that couldn’t have happened if I’d remembered just a minute earlier or a minute later. I wouldn’t have known. I wouldn’t have had a clue.
I’d been on the way out the door, headed to work, and I realized at the last moment that I needed a hair to demonstrate a sampling technique to some visiting grad students who would try to leave résumés on my desk. I let the lab send me a batch of them a few times a year, a show of goodwill on my part, and this was a technique I could let them see without worrying that anyone would faint. The method I was going to demonstrate could make use of old, dead tissues, and a hair was perfect for the task—small, annoying to keep track of, difficult to manipulate.
It was midsummer and my hair was up, tucked away from my face and off my neck so it wouldn’t stick to me in the humidity. But I spotted one of my loose strands on Nathan’s coat as I was leaving the house, and I grabbed it, pleased to not have to go upstairs and harvest one from my hairbrush. I’d folded it into a receipt from my own pocket, a receipt for butter and brussels sprouts and cotton swabs.
When I demonstrated the sampling technique to the wide-eyed students, I noticed that something was wrong. My sequencing result showed the trademark Seyed and I used to flag specimens, a goofy line of code that, when translated, spelled out it’s alive. Our little joke. Our little signature.
I wish I could say that I’d felt even a moment of knee-jerk denial, that any part of me had insisted it couldn’t be so—but no, that would be a lie.
I knew. I knew right away, like knowing the doctor has bad news to share. I remember the way my stomach dropped, the way heat flooded my throat.
This is bad, I thought, and I wasn’t wrong.
I didn’t try to pretend. I just verified. Once the students were gone, I sequenced the sample again. There was plenty of the hair left to use. I sequenced it three times, and the third time, I showed it to Seyed to check my own observation. He immediately spotted the signature line.
I sat back in my chair and let out a long, slow breath. “Well, this is awkward, Seyed,” I said, my voice shaking. “But I don’t think this is my hair.”
What had followed—a private investigator, an envelope full of photographs of Nathan walking into a strange house, late nights spent scrolling through his text messages and emails looking for something, anything, a name, a reason—was less crisp in my memory. It all blurred together into a frenzy of bitter anger and determination.
What stayed sharp was the confrontation: the moment when I knocked on the door of the strange house.
The moment when the other woman answered the door, and the observable data confirmed my hypothesis.
The moment when I was faced with a mirror image of myself, wearing a strand of pearls and a blank, welcoming smile.