Influenced Eva Robinson (polar express read aloud .TXT) 📖

“Oh, well. You tried to kiss me.”

“Oh. Is that it? I thought it was something embarrassing.”

“Yes, and I almost fell off the balcony. But I didn’t,” said Hannah. “Most exciting thing that’s happened to me in years. Now I’m just back to killing ants in my house. I’m the death queen of the ant world. The Somerville insect goddess. And Luke has his date tonight.”

“Forget Luke. Daniel is obviously better. So it appears that when I came home, I took a naked photo and uploaded it, and my snatch is all over the internet with an apple on it. And to make it worse, I didn’t even use a good fill light.”

Hannah burst out laughing. “I wasn’t sure what to say. I’m glad you brought it up.”

Pure humiliation crawled over Rowan’s skin. “What do I do? Hannah, how do I handle this? I’ve just killed my whole career, haven’t I? I had a very carefully cultivated brand of artistic photos. And how do I manage the whole teen center thing after this?”

“You haven’t killed your career.”

“Should I just delete it and pretend it never happened? I want to jump into the river—” She cleared her throat. “Sorry, poor choice of words.”

“Delete it, yes. But the way you just described it to me—the way you said, ‘I didn’t even use a good fill light’—I don’t know; it was funny. I think you should make a joke of it. Nearly everyone has done stupid things when they were drunk and regretted it. It might be relatable. Just own it. Admit you got drunk and made a terrible decision, but show you have a sense of humor about it.”

And that was the missing ingredient, the thing even Marc wouldn’t have come up with. “Hannah, you are a genius. You’re right: I never claimed to be a saint. Okay, before I post anything new, can you look over the caption?”

“Of course I can.”

“I’m terrible at grammar. Well, reading and writing in general.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, it takes me ages to write anything normally. I couldn’t read until I was in the fourth grade. Despite where I went to college, I’m afraid I’m not really brilliant.”

“Rowan. Having trouble reading or spelling doesn’t mean you’re not smart. Trust me. I evaluate learning disabilities for a living. It’s not like speaking. Humans didn’t evolve to read or write. It’s a technological skill that’s relatively new in human history, and it doesn’t reflect your ability to reason logically.”

“Oh, good. I love that. I could use more of your clear thinking in my life.”

“Hmm. I’m not sure I’m clearheaded. I was awake all night thinking about bugs and the sheets being wrong.”

“What?”

“Nora was at Luke’s house, and I wasn’t sure he’d put the sheets on right in her crib. If they’re not in right, she could get her head stuck and suffocate.”

“What? You can die from sheets being on incorrectly?”

“Well, I don’t know. But there are warning signs on everything. Put the sheets on wrong, and your child dies. Buy pajamas that are too loose, and she’ll catch fire and burn to death. There are warnings everywhere.”

Being a parent was clearly an endless nightmare. “No wonder you can’t sleep.”

“Nora’s still at Luke’s house, but I’ve been up since four a.m. anyway. She turned out to be fine, by the way.”

Rowan wasn’t sure what to say about the news that the child had survived the night after several dangerous hours spent with a crib sheet. “Oh, well, that’s good. But a four-a.m. wake-up is brutal. I was apparently making art at that time. Oh, and there’s something else weird that happened. I just had a cop show up here for the interview about Arabella.”

“What did he want to know?”

“He wanted to know if I was having an affair.”

“With Arabella?”

“No, me and Adam. We weren’t, by the way. He’s like the margarine sandwich of humans. But the cop said Arabella didn’t die of natural causes. And for some reason they think I have answers for them.”

Something stopped Rowan from telling her the rest—that the police had asked about Hannah specifically. It seemed best to keep that a secret.

And Rowan was used to secrets, wasn’t she? Because so much of her life was a lie.

Twenty-Five

Sunlight washed over Michael as he sat on one of the colorful chairs in Harvard Yard. A coffee sat on the chair next to him, waiting for Ciara—three espresso shots.

He stirred his own tea—a deep tan, strong tea with milk. Sixteen swirls of the spoon before he popped the top on again, wincing a little as a drop spilled on his trousers.

He stared at the drop, thinking of what he’d read about Arabella—what her last hours would have been like before she’d slipped into a coma. The thallium would have affected her nervous system, her heart, her lungs. She would’ve been gasping, nauseated. Her legs would have been paralyzed, her hands numb. Drowning in terror.

Guilt tightened his chest, and he wondered if he should have done something differently when she’d come to see him.

He’d spent the night going through her recent coursework. It only confirmed his original impression of her, and now he was certain that she wasn’t psychotic. Her writing was coherent and logical, concise. Psychosis was easy to spot, and he had enough firsthand experience with its strange rhyming and associative language that he could recognize it right away. But her pace of production had slowed down in the past few months, and her colleagues said she’d grown disillusioned with academia. And in her pictures with Rowan, beautiful as she was, she just looked sad. Like she was trapped.

Possibly the result of being married to a complete tosser.

He pulled out his phone and brought up the photo again—the one of Rowan and Arabella together. In her older photos especially, Rowan seemed to have a charmed life. An actual fairytale. But the woman he’d met in her apartment seemed like a train wreck.

And since he’d found TOI.com, he’d been able to read every little transgression in detail.

There were