“Hey!” Arianna answered.
“Hi.”
“Are you feeling better?”
“Umm, yeah. Look, Arianna, you have to come to my place right now.”
“What? Why?”
“Just trust me. Leave right now.”
“But Sam just left, and I was going to lie down.…”
“Listen to me. You have to leave this minute. And don’t bring your cell.”
“Why not? You sound panicked.”
“Just come over and I’ll explain. Don’t make any calls. Hurry.”
* * *
With a sense of dread, Arianna tossed her phone onto the kitchen table, grabbed her purse, and wheeled herself out the door. She felt woozy, as if she were high on the most disparate drugs. One moment, Sam was here and they were marveling at his achievement, at the extension of her life, and then the next, Trent was shattering her newfound peace with some strange crisis of his own. And what did her cell phone have to do with anything?
All she wanted was to hoist herself out of her sedentary jail and lie down on her bed. At this time of morning, the sun would be slanting through her window, bathing her red comforter in warmth. She had been looking forward to resting with the gentle light on her face, as soothing as chamomile tea.
But as soon as she left her building, she saw that it was pouring rain. With a sigh, she wheeled to the street corner to wait for the rare van cab, which could accommodate her chair. As raindrops pelted her and cars zipped past, her irritation toward Trent mounted. Why did he have to go and upset her now, of all days, and drag her out into this mess? She wanted to be there for him, of course, but it was difficult enough to manage her own situation right now, let alone his. And, seriously, she thought, why couldn’t he have come to my apartment? It was so much easier for him to hop on the subway than for her to wait in a downpour for the right cab.
Finally, a yellow van taxi pulled up, and she wheeled up its ramp into the roomy backseat. She instinctively felt for her phone to call and tell Trent she was on her way, but then she remembered it was on the kitchen table, that he had bizarrely told her to leave it at home. Something in his voice had warned her not to disobey his instructions. Her heart thumped against her chest. She hated the anticipation of bad news, which was often worse than the news itself.
Trying to discard her mind’s wildest scenarios—her cell phone was somehow an explosive device or spreading radiation—she stared out the window at the raindrops zigzagging down the glass, blending together into larger drops. As her eyelids drooped, she realized she was exhausted. Last night, instead of sleeping, she had talked on the phone to Megan about vacations they had always meant to plan—Hawaii, the Grand Canyon, Napa Valley, Switzerland. To be able to swim, hike, climb, and snowboard again seemed a miracle. At 4 A.M., she had hung up the phone and spent the next four hours grinning into her pillow, twirling atop the apex of happiness. And now, she felt herself crashing.
When the cab arrived at Trent’s building, she hurried up to his seventh-floor apartment and rang the bell. He must have been waiting at the door, for it opened instantly. She gasped, forgetting both her annoyance and fatigue. Adrenaline shot darts of fearful energy through her veins.
He was crying.
“Oh my God, what’s wrong?” she asked, reaching up to him.
He shook his head and closed the door behind her. He wept quietly, sniffling and wiping his cheeks with the palm of his hand. It was distressing to see any man cry, but especially him; Arianna had never seen him so distraught.
“Baby, what’s going on?” she asked gently, as catastrophic thoughts took over: he was ill; a family member was dead. “I came as soon as I could.”
“Thank you,” he mumbled. He drew a deep, shaky breath. “I don’t know how to tell you this. But I can’t hold out any longer. You have to know.”
She felt her eyebrows knit together. “Know what?”
He grimaced.
Louder, she asked: “Know what?”
“I’m not a novelist,” he choked out. “I’m a DEP agent.”
A buzzing. That’s all she heard in her ears, as if her brain were reverberating from a solid whack, and all logic and sense and order had been upended. She clutched the cushioned armrests of her wheelchair, feeling insane.
“Huh?”
Trent fell on his knees to her level. She backed away. He bent over the ground she had cleared, elbows planted on the floor, as a silent sob shuddered through him.
“What the—what the hell is going on?” she sputtered.
He snapped back up, and his reddened eyes widened. “It’s not what you think. I’m working against them now, but they don’t know it. Just let me explain.”
She backed away farther, nearly to the door. “I have to get out of here.”
“No, please, give me two minutes. I’ve been helping you for weeks, please just let me explain.”
“Do it fast before I get the hell out of here.”
“I’ll tell you everything.” He barely paused as the words began to tumble out. “For the past three years, I’ve been an agent there, but I hated my job and all of its damn paperwork and I only did it because I thought it meant I was doing something good with my life. I was trying to be a good Christian, even though I never felt like one and I hated myself for that.
“Then back in October, my boss got suspicious of your clinic because you were reporting these incredibly high numbers that went against all precedents. So he had me do some research, and when we found out who your father was, and about your rallies in college, we got even more suspicious about what you might be doing with all those embryos. But you had never messed up an inspection or
