The Possibilities by Yael Goldstein-Love

Author:Yael Goldstein-Love [Goldstein-Love, Yael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

Back in the stairwell in my own world, I was sitting on a concrete step. My nose was bleeding again. I tilted back my head and found a tissue in my back pocket, applied firm pressure to my nostrils, and the bleeding slowed, then stopped.

As I dabbed at the last rivulet, I thought of Hannah42, of her Jack, who’d died. A spasm of grief shuddered through me, for him, for her. She’d lived out my worst fear. And now, in some sense, I was living hers. Because she, too, had learned to ride the possibilities, and when she did, Jacks disappeared. I needed to figure out what was disappearing them. I needed to figure it out quickly. I didn’t know exactly how long I had before Jack fully disappeared, ten hours more or less, but time was not my friend here. And all I had to go on were two names: Grace and Akio Reggio-Watanabe.

I stuffed the sodden tissue back into my pocket, then took out my phone and looked up Grace. It wasn’t clear to me which one of them Hannah42 was suggesting I approach, Grace or Akio. Akio made more surface sense because string theory seemed more relevant than brain science to my situation. But Grace was the one who always looked at me as though she knew my face. Whereas her husband, when I’d accosted him at Baker and Commons, had stared at me without a flicker of recognition.

This was a shame, because Akio’s office was less than a mile away, on the campus of UC Berkeley. Grace’s lab was in Mission Bay, across the bridge in San Francisco. Traffic there and back across the bridge could eat up ninety minutes when time seemed of the essence.

If I went to Grace, she might not be there. If she was there, she might not be willing to speak to me, a total stranger showing up uninvited. But all my instincts were saying she was the right one to approach, and I was trying to trust my instincts.

As I pushed up off the step and toward the sliding doors, a group of people surged out of the elevator and gave me a wide berth. I looked down at my milk-and-blood-stained T-shirt and realized my appearance was a problem. No driver was going to pick me up like this. Nor was this a look likely to win me the confidence of Grace Reggio-Watanabe. I veered off toward a restroom, where I dabbed at my clothes with a series of disintegrating paper towels, my breasts so full and aching now that the friction made me flinch. The results of my cleanup were not great, but at least I no longer looked like biohazard. Plus, I was a woman nearing forty with the soft paunch of a childbearing stomach, so I was basically invisible anyway. It at least seemed safe to summon a Lyft.

Outside, the weather had done a full one-eighty. The sun was shining, the clouds were thin puffs in

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