I try to google a few of the names whose numbers are red, but it’s no use.
I lean my forehead against my hand, scrolling back and forth on the test results page as if the numbers will suddenly make sense if I look at them long enough.
“What the fuck does this mean…?”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
CHRISTINE
As the sunhits high noon overhead, gleaming off Auckland’s harbor, the hotel’s rooftop bar is empty on account of being closed. All I had to do was call the front desk and ask about the hours, and they offered to send someone up to let me in. I bought a bottle of wine—the first one I saw when I glanced at the menu—and now it’s half gone.
Today was a light day for me anyway, so I managed to convince Lana to move some things around so I didn’t have to come in.
It’s leverage I could have used for something much longer lasting than a bout of day drinking, but it was either this or quit.
So, here I am.
My phone rings facedown on the table, and I silence it, thinking Lana’s calling. When it rings again, I go to send Lana a text—then see Gia’s face on the screen.
I pick up. “Hey.”
“You on set?” she asks.
“No, I have the day off.”
“You alone?”
“Yeah.”
There’s a pause. “Tee, are you drinking again?”
“No,” I answer too fast.
Gia gives a ragged sigh. “I took so many steps tonotbecome a relationship counselor, and yet…”
“What relationship?”
“Don’t give me that. Actually, you know what?Fuck you. You could have told me youbit him.”
The words hit me like ice, shocking me back into a semblance of sobriety. “He said it wasn’t the right spot,” I breathe. “Said it didn’t… there wasn’t… What the fuck are you telling me, Gia?”
Gia sighs. “I’m telling you that you need to tell me everything.Every. Thing.”
“Shit. Let me get back to my room.”
I pick up the bottle of wine and take a swig directly from it as I leave the rooftop restaurant, nodding at the employee who’d let me in.
I take the stairs down a floor—I swear I can still smell his lingering scent in the elevator—and head into my room, plopping down by the window.
“Alright,” I sigh. “Fuck, where to even begin…”
I catch Gia up in a meandering and probably incoherent narrative that she nevertheless parses. I guess that’s par for the course for a psychiatrist.
“…So, yeah. Now I’m day drinking in my hotel room because I don’t know what I’m going to do when I see him again. I think he’s fine, though. His heat seems to have run its course.”
Gia’s quiet for a moment. Then she says, “Alright, I think I know what’s going on here. His test results are showing low-level bonding hormones, just above the limit of detection. It’slow enough that it could be written off as a testing error, but we rarely see this kind of false positive.”
