stirred within him. Don’t stay, his father whispered. Leave now. Don’t ground yourself with Molly, fly away.
“I’m leaving ISIS,” Orion said again.
This time Molly heard him differently. He saw the knowledge in her face, which seemed to swell with pain: He’s not just leaving ISIS. He’s leaving me.
“I’m sorry,” Orion told her. “I don’t deserve you—obviously.”
He was sorry, but that last qualifier carried a sullen little sting.
“You’re in love with her, aren’t you?” Molly said wonderingly. “You’re in love with that girl. The one in the lobby.”
“No.”
“You’re sleeping with her, aren’t you?”
“No!” Orion answered truthfully.
“You are such a coward,” she gasped. “Standing there like you’re having some kind of existential crisis! You’re totally involved with her.”
“I’m not,” Orion lied.
“You were afraid I would find out, and you got scared.”
“I’m not scared at all,” Orion said.
Before dawn, he knocked on the door of Sorel’s house. When she didn’t answer, he dialed her number, and her phone rang, but all he got was voice mail.
He stood on the porch and tapped on the window. Then he banged on the door until he heard her sleepy voice on the other side. “For God’s sakes.”
“Sorel,” he said, “it’s me. Open up.”
“No,” she groaned on the other side of the door. “I’m too tired. I’m too sleepy. I’m drunk.”
“It’s an emergency,” he said.
“Then why didn’t you call me?”
“Sorel, please.”
She opened the door and stepped outside, shivering. She was wearing woolly socks, and a long Phish T-shirt with a sweater over it.
“I missed you.”
“Is that an emergency?”
“I’m going away.”
“Where?”
“Don’t know. I’m leaving ISIS.”
“And Molly?”
“Yes.”
For a moment she didn’t speak. Then she asked, “Are you sure?”
“Oh, yeah. Everybody’s sure.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Really?”
She nodded very slightly and she kept her eyes fixed on him, so that even without her white robes and wings and paint, she looked like the angel in the square. “You’re at sea,” she said.
“I’m not,” he told her. “I’m not at sea at all. Not when I’m with you.”
“I like living alone,” she said. “And I like traveling. I’m planning an opera! And I’m spending the weekend working on a film in Somerville. A bunch of us from MIT are putting it together. I’m a twelve-foot bride.”
“I’d support you in all that,” he said, and he was totally serious.
“I have stilts,” she said, matching his earnest tone. “I don’t need support.”
He laughed and folded his arms around her.
“It’s a silent movie,” she told him. “I wrote the script. It’s sort of a feminist
“Do you have a permit?”
“No! Of course not. Do you think we have that kind of money?”
“So when the cops come you … what?”
“Run away.”
“On stilts?”
“I’m quite fast,” she said.
“Wait, let me get this straight …,” he began.
She pulled him toward her and kissed him freely, joyously. “What was the question?”
“I don’t have a question.” He sighed. “This is so much better than the stairwell.”
“You liked stairwells.”
“I did, but—”
She interrupted him. “Come in.”
30
While the family slept, Emily tiptoed out of the guest room she shared with Jess, down the hall past her father and Heidi’s bedroom door, past Maya’s, past Lily’s. Softly, she glided down the stairs to the glassed-in sunroom where she wrapped herself in the pink and purple afghan on the couch. There she sat and gazed at her sisters’ plastic groceries, their books piled on the floor:
Jonathan had concealed his plans for the future, and Gillian had concealed her past. She had loved them both, and this news made her feel entirely alone.
Or had she loved them? She had loved aspects of Jonathan, and tested him; adored her idea of Gillian, and studied her. She doubted now that she had known either. In the end, she was not a good judge of character—least of all, her own. How strange that people had looked up to her. She was supposed to be the sage one, the stable one. Emily had always told Jess what to do.
She turned and turned her sparkling diamond ring. She could not quite bring herself to take it off. What proof would she have, then, what physical evidence, that what she and Jonathan had was real?
She thought of her mother’s ring clinking against the bowl as she kneaded dough. Emily had been the conservator of her mother’s memory, keeping the birthday letters on her computer. Reading and rereading them. In the end what did those letters say?
Emily had assumed a transparency in people, expected it of everyone, even herself. But why? What basis did she have for such assumptions? She saw in her own case that they were ungrounded. She herself, supposedly so careful and straightforward, so reasonable, had betrayed Veritech’s secrets to Jonathan, made a gift of them, a token of love mixed with hope mixed with doubt. In the end her motives were hardly rational, hardly clear. That realization frightened her, but she was reflective, rigorous in her thinking, and she tried to think her way out of this morass. Bewildered, adrift in her father’s house, she tried to find a way forward. She was her father’s daughter, and she thought like an engineer.
First thing in the morning, she resigned from Veritech. She sent an e-mail to Milton, Alex, and Bruno:
