The Perfect Ones by Nicole Hackett

Author:Nicole Hackett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CROOKED LANE BOOKS

CHAPTER

27

Hollie

The Day Before

Vík, Iceland

HOLLIE SHOWERED IMMEDIATELY when they got back from the glacier hike, wanting to wash the day from her as soon as she possibly could. Now Katherine was in the shower, and Hollie was on her bed, glad to be alone.

Katherine had spent the entire drive back from the glacier providing her own unrequested commentary on the day’s events. “I’m going to be honest with you,” she had said at one point, feet propped up on the dashboard. “How happy Alabama seemed about that crevasse was one of the weirdest fucking things I’ve ever seen.”

Hollie hadn’t said anything to this because Hollie had decided she was done thinking about Alabama. In fact, she longed for a time when she would never have to think about Alabama again.

Hollie leaned forward. Her injured leg was extended in a lazy hamstring stretch, although rather than actually tending to her injury, most of her focus was on her phone. After she had tackled a few easier emails—one annoying email from Robin, one less annoying message from her manager—she had opened the message from Nick. She had, genuinely, intended to answer it. So far, she had come up with: Hi.

From out in the hall, there was the faint shush of a door creaking open. Hollie looked up, anticipating Katherine storming into their bedroom, dripping wet. Yesterday after Katherine had taken a shower, she had marched back into their room without knocking. She had then proceeded to drop her towel before pulling on her underwear and bra, like they were two men in a gym locker room. (Hollie wasn’t a prude, but she also didn’t need a full frontal of Katherine Livingston without warning.)

Hollie waited a few more seconds as silence settled back around her. Finally, deciding that it hadn’t been Katherine after all, she refocused on the phone.

She had never imagined herself getting a divorce. Perhaps no one did, but Hollie had been especially sure. She had assumed that a failure of this magnitude was impossible in her life, impossible for someone like her.

Hollie had failed in so many ways lately, but a divorce from Nick still seemed unfathomable somehow. How would they even do it? How would they decide who got the house, the Peloton, the car? Would they divvy up the houseplants too, or would they just let them die? How did one draw a line down the middle of something so entwined as their lives?

Hollie had once unintentionally watched a documentary about a pair of conjoined twins. She had just turned on Netflix when the preview had caught her attention. The sight of two tiny bodies with two tiny pairs of arms, two tiny pairs of legs, bound together by a stretch of skin pulling at their two tiny torsos. It had been so easy to see how it had happened, two bodies pulling apart like a sticky piece of taffy in their mother’s womb, not quite making a clean break.

Hollie had watched in quiet fascination as the doctors had

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