The Soulmate Equation by Christina Lauren

TWENTY-TWO

IN THE PAST twenty minutes, River had asked her four times whether she was okay.

Of course he had; any creature with a pulse could sense that there was something Not Right about her at the moment. But she couldn’t talk about it yet, and couldn’t talk about it here at the office, and even if she could—she wasn’t sure she was prepared to hear his answer to the simplest question: Did you know this whole time?

So she put on a flimsy blissful mask and answered Aneesha’s questions. But River’s quiet concern repeatedly reminded Jess that her stress was as clear on her face as a fever. The shock felt like the flu.

They took some photos together outside; they took some in the lab, laughing and gazing adoringly into each other’s eyes. But behind her smile, the question rammed into Jess’s thoughts like the piercing siren of a police car. Until she knew the answer, she couldn’t even let the next question slot into place, though it pressed against the glass anyway: Is what I feel even real?

Statistically speaking, she and River were many thousand times more likely to find their soulmate in a Base Match than they were to ever get an authentic Diamond Match, so even if their true score was a twenty-five, it wasn’t like they couldn’t be right together. But it was so much easier to trust those early, deep reactions when the numbers supported her.

But she was getting ahead of herself, and without information—without data—it was the last thing she could let herself do. Jess mentally crumpled the thoughts into a wadded-up ball of paper and set it on fire. One moment at a time, and now was not the moment for a meltdown.

Aneesha finished up on-site and gave Jess and River time to say goodbye before he had to leave with the People team to meet up with David and Brandon. Even thinking of David right then made Jess’s stomach sour. And if River knew … she didn’t know what she would do; her emotions would be too hot and giant and impossible to manage.

The moment they were alone, River pulled Jess into an alcove, bending to look her directly in the eye.

“I feel like I’m missing something,” he said quietly. “Are you mad at me?”

This one she could actually field. Are you okay? had been too big to answer under her breath with Aneesha and her photographer ten feet away.

“I’m not mad at you. But can we get together later?”

He laughed, confused. “Of course. I assumed we’d—”

“Just us.”

The smile evaporated, and a frown lined his forehead. River took a step closer, sliding a hand down her arm and linking his warm fingers with her cold ones. “Have I done something wrong?”

Jess hated to say “I don’t know,” but it was true.

“Something happened,” she admitted, “and I need to ask you about it, but now isn’t the time.” She swallowed. “I know it sucks, and I’m sure you’re going to be worrying about this until we can talk about it.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“I will, too. You just have to trust me that we can’t do it here, and we need more than the ten minutes we have before you and Aneesha have to go.”

River gazed down at her and seemed to decide this was the best he was going to get right then. “Okay. I trust you.” He pulled her into his chest. There was honestly nothing Jess wanted more than to be able to confidently put her arms around his waist and lose herself in the clean citrus smell of him. But her joints were locked, posture stiff. “We’ll talk later?” he asked, pulling back to look at her, cupping her elbows.

“Yeah.” Her phone buzzed in her back pocket and she retrieved it, expecting notification of some work email, or a text from Pops about dinner plans.

But it was from Fizzy, and worry immediately pushed all of the tightness in Jess’s chest up into her throat.

I need you ASAP.

Best friend bat signal.

“Sorry,” Jess whispered. “It’s Fizzy. She …”

Jess quickly replied:

Are you ok?

I am safe and not injured.

But no. I’m not ok.

Heart pounding, Jess looked up at River. She didn’t like leaving things like this, but she was going to have to. “I really need to go.”

His voice was a low blend of exasperated and worried, and he reached for her arm. “Jess—”

“She needs me. Fizzy never needs me. Call me when you’re all done?”

He nodded and took a step back, letting her go.

Turning away, Jess typed as she walked:

Where are you?

My place. Are you coming?

Yes. Be there in 20.

FIZZY’S FRONT DOORwas open; the interior of the house was shaded behind the screen door. Jess didn’t hear sobbing or screaming—which was reassuring—but Bon Iver played quietly from the living room speakers. For someone like Fizzy, whose general mood leaned more upbeat bop than quiet ballad, Bon Iver gave Jess a legitimate reason to worry.

And like that, River was put aside for later. Jess had a great deal of experience compartmentalizing. Jamie had shown up at Jess’s high school graduation toward the end of a four-day-long meth bender and stalked the aisles looking for her among the sea of classmates. About thirty seconds after she loudly climbed over Jerome Damiano and Alexa Davidson to get to her daughter, Jamie was escorted out by the campus security guard. Even so, Jess stood and made her way to the front of the auditorium when her name was called.

And, Jess remembered, she and Alec broke up about an hour before she presented her thesis to the entire mathematics department, when she was six months pregnant with Juno. She’d shoved all of her anger and disappointment aside, gone into the presentation with an enormous smile and beautifully designed slides, and gotten an A.

One look at Fizzy curled up in a ball on her couch, eyes red-rimmed, hair in an uncharacteristically messy bun, and a familiar wall slid into place.

She sat down, pulling one of Fizzy’s bare feet into her lap. “Tell me.”

Reaching up to wipe her nose, Fizzy said simply, “He’s married.”

“Who’s married?”

Fizzy turned her watery dark eyes up to Jess’s face. “Rob.”

“Banker Rob?”

“Yeah.”

“Married? To a person?”

“Yeah.”

Jess stared at her, disbelieving. “Wasn’t he Daniel’s brother’s friend? How did no one say anything to you?”

“Apparently he’s, like, a friend of a friend of a friend, and Rob got married sometime in the past two years, when they hadn’t been hanging out as much.”

“What a—a garbage human.” Jess’s jaw hung open. “How did you find out?”

“He found me at Twiggs and told me.”

“He told you in public?”

Fizzy nodded, grim. “He sat in your chair.”

She gasped. “How dare he!”

“I know.”

“So what did you do?”

Fizzy took a deep, fortifying breath. “I got up, asked Daniel for a pitcher of ice water, and dumped it in Rob’s lap.”

“Applause,” Jess whispered, impressed.

“I think he started to freak out that he was going to get caught. One night in Little Italy we ran into someone he knew, and he introduced me to the guy as his ‘friend Felicity,’ which at the time, I was like—‘That’s fair, we’re pretty new still,’ but now I know why.” Fizzy’s face crumpled. “I really liked him, Jess, and you know me,” she said, hiccupping, “I never like anyone. I cooked for him, and talked about books with him, and we had inside jokes—and he’s fucking married. And I swear he wanted credit for coming clean with me. Like, he was genuinely shocked that I was so pissed.” She wiped her nose again.

“Come here.” Jess shifted Fizz’s foot away and pulled the whole Fizzy into her arms, squeezing tight while her friend cried.

“You know the crazy thing?” Fizzy asked, her voice muffled by Jess’s shirt.

“What?”

“We just sent in his spit samples.”

“To GeneticAlly?” Jess asked, and Fizzy nodded. “I thought you weren’t going to do that.”

Fizzy wailed. “We weren’t!”

“God,” Jess said, “what a dumbass. What was he expecting to happen?”

“Right?” Her best friend laughed through a sob. “And now, what if I find out that we’re, like, perfect for each other, and it doesn’t matter because he’s married? I don’t want to know if we’re supposed to be together!”

The feelings from the other room peeked around Jess’s neat little compartmentalized corner, asking if it was time to come out yet. Jess shook her head. It was not.

“Well, logistically, you can request that his account never be linked to yours so you never have to know, but I’m fairly sure that he doesn’t belong anywhere near your perfect, kind, sassy ass, anyway. Anyone who would do something like that is rotten from the inside. I bet his DNA looks like black bathroom mold.”

“Like long strings of mucus,” Fizzy agreed.

“I could keep this metaphor going, but it’s only going to get grosser.” Jess squeezed her again. “I’m sorry, cutie. I want to know where he lives so I can go shove his head up his ass so far he can lick his own ear.”

“His wife would be there,” Fizzy said quietly. “I guess that’s why we never went to his place.”

“Garbage human,” Jess whispered angrily.

Fizzy wiped her nose on Jess’s shirt before pulling back and inspecting it. Suspicion straightened her frown as her attention moved up Jess’s neck to her face and hair. She sniffled. “Why are you all dressed up?”

“We did People today at the offices.”

The watery, puffy version of her best friend groaned, falling dramatically back on the throw pillows. “I sent the bat signal when you were with People magazine, oh my God.” After a thoughtful beat, she sat up and threw her arms around Jess again. “And you came!”

“It would be in my best interest to take these golden friend points and not tell you that we’d already finished when I got your text,” Jess said. “But the lying would negate the golden friend points. And I swear I would have come anyway.”

“But you could be off having celebratory sex with your soulmate, and I could have just used wine and cheese for emotional support.”

Soulmate.

Jess shot a warning look at the feelings now plotting their escape. “I would always rather you lean on me than on wine and cheese.” She paused before adding, “And River isn’t done with the interview.”

“I’m honored to be your second choice.”

“Third,” Jess reminded her.

Fizzy leaned back and laughed. “You suck.”

“Maybe, but I love you.”

“I love you, too.” She glanced at the clock on the wall. “Speaking of, do you need to pick up your first choice from school?”

“It’s Monday,” Jess said. “Pops’ll get her, and they’ll do the library thing. I have three hours to do whatever I can to make you feel better.”

FIZZY AND JESSlounged on the couch with Sense and Sensibility playing quietly alongside their cheese-and-cracker feast. Eventually, Jess gave her one last squeeze, headed home, and got Juno fed, bathed, snuggled, and tucked in—and then got a full glass of wine in herself—before she opened the proverbial floodgates.

But then they were open, and thoughts of River drowned out everything else. The upside to pushing it all behind a wall was that she’d been able to function pretty normally all day; the downside was that she wasn’t at all mentally prepared for the conversation awaiting her.

There was no use putting it off. Jess pulled out her phone, texting him.

Can you come over?

He answered immediately, almost like he’d been waiting with his phone in his hand:

Yes. Now?

Now is good.

She hit Send and then immediately replied again.

Wait.

She typed as fast as she could because she knew the Wait had probably sent him panic-spiraling.

This may sound strange, but did you ever see our raw data?

Of course.

Jess chewed her thumbnail as she considered how to phrase what she wanted to say next without giving him time to prepare an excuse if he had been in on the data fabrication all along. She wanted to be able to read the truth on his face. On the other hand, if he had a copy of the data at home, she wanted him to bring it.

Luckily, River saved her the trouble of phrasing the question.

I have the plot here.

Want me to bring it over?

Jess exhaled a slow, hot stream of tension.

That would be great.

I should have offered that ages ago. I’m sorry. Is that what this is about?

She chose not to answer this.

Are you leaving now?

Yes.

HE LIVED ONLYten minutes away, but River was at her door in eight. Before, if he’d shown up at her apartment after Juno was asleep, Jess would have been in his arms immediately. But tonight, they both seemed to know that affection was on hold.

Wordlessly, he stepped inside, breathless from what Jess could only guess was a jog from his car. “Hey.”

She swallowed back a sob that seemed to rise out of nowhere. “Hey. How was the rest of the interview?”

He nodded, wiping a hand over his forehead, still catching his breath. “Good. Yeah, I think it was good. Is Fizzy okay?”

Shaking her head, Jess walked over to the dining table and sat down, shoulders slumped. “Rob is married.”

River slowly removed his messenger bag from his shoulder, setting it down on the table. “You’re kidding.”

“No. And I guess they just sent in his DNADuo kit.”

River winced. “Shit.”

And then they fell quiet. The proverbial elephant was standing directly on top of them. With a mumbled “Well …” River pulled out a sheet of paper from his bag and handed it to her. It was well-loved, wrinkled and worn, like it’d been picked up and put down again and again, studied a thousand times.

“Our data.” He reached up, wiping his forehead again. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

The colorful scatter plot was printed in a landscape view and took up the entire page. A masterful display of computational skill, and a statistician’s best friend: principal component analysis. After only a handful of seconds, Jess could tell it captured every data point she saw on the tables in David’s office.

The plot had two axes: The vertical Y-axis was labeled zero to four—the composite scores Jess was already familiar with. The horizontal X-axis had twelve different labels. She assumed they represented the categories of the gene families included in the DNADuo: Neuroendocrine, Immunoglobulin, Metabolic, Signal Transduction, MHC Class I/II, Olfactory, Regulatory Proteins, Transporters, Heat-Shock, SNARE, Ion Channel, and FGF/FGFR. And on the graph itself, there were thousands of tiny dots, seemingly one for each of their scores on each individual gene, color-coded and clustered by category.

It was a much easier way to look at the raw scores—Jess could immediately see trends here that she couldn’t in the table—but because there was so much data, it was clear to her that if this was all River had seen, it would have been almost impossible to decipher that it was nearly identical to a plot he’d seen years ago.

And, most importantly, the information that tipped her off—the run end time, the date, the DNADuo machine—wasn’t included in this plot. This graph only had client numbers, the compatibility score, and, in the lower right corner in tiny print, the date this plot was generated.

Maybe River didn’t know. Hope was a weak light shining on the darkness of her mood. As casually as possible, Jess asked, “Is this the way you always look at the data?”

He laughed quietly. “I’m sure for a mathematician, it’s maddening to not look at actual numbers, but we’ve come to rely on these scatter plots. It’s easier to see outliers this way and to know if we need to rerun the assay for any reason.” He leaned in, pointing to a large cluster of dots in their plot. “See, you can tell that we are particularly well aligned in metabolic genes and immunoglobulin. And our lowest scores seem to be for regulatory proteins, but that’s not a very meaningful conclusion because even those scores are all pretty high. Once you get a score above eighty, most of the plots look similar.”

She swallowed back a relieved gasp. It confirmed that it might not immediately jump out to him that the data had been manipulated. “How do you generate these?”

“This actually is the raw data. Everything in a table is shown here. Tiffany just worked with the Caltech guys to have the neural network create this plot for us as a team because it’s way easier to look at. But we can generate one of these for any couple who matches.”

“So Fizzy would have a million of these,” she said.

He laughed again. “I mean, in theory. We don’t upload these to the apps or even routinely generate them anymore unless requested because the files are huge, but sure, you could theoretically create scatter plots like this comparing you to every other individual in the world. That just wouldn’t be very useful.” He met her eyes, almost shyly. “But of course we did one for our assay. I wanted to look at it really closely. At first because I was skeptical, and then because it was sort of amazing.”

Tears filled her eyes, and she bent to rest her head on the table. Relief washed over her like an analgesic, a paralytic. Jess’s head felt so heavy, and before she could stop it, a sob ripped from her throat.

“Holy— Jess.” River leaned over, pulling her into his arms. “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?”

He’d never called her “sweetheart” before, and it only made her cry harder. She was relieved that he hadn’t been lying to her this whole time. But now she had to tell him that they weren’t a ninety-eight. She was in love with him—and Jess hated how much this was going to hurt him. His trust in David was going to be irreparably damaged. Until she’d come along, GeneticAlly had been River’s entire life.

“I hate what I’m about to tell you.”

He went still around her. “What is it? Just say it.”

She moved away from him, standing and going to the kitchen to retrieve the photos she’d printed earlier. Her hands shook as she handed them over.

River seemed familiar enough with the tables to immediately know what he was holding. “Where did you get these?”

“David’s office,” Jess admitted. “Be mad at me after you look at them. They were on his desk when Lisa put me in there to wait for my part of the interview. It wasn’t my intention to snoop, but when I saw our client numbers, I got really excited. Like you said, it’s sort of amazing to look at it and know it’s how we started.” She bit her lip. “And then there were some things about it that were strange to me.”

He frowned, looking down, not seeing it yet. “Like what?”

Jess reached up, wiping her eyes. “Just look at them for a few minutes.”

She left him to study, walking into the kitchen to get a glass of water. Ice-cold, it burned a frigid path from her lips to her stomach.

About thirty seconds later, a quiet “What the fuck?” came from the dining room.

Jess closed her eyes. Papers rustled with renewed urgency, and the sound of them spreading out on the table was rushed.

“Jess.” She could tell from the strain in his voice that his jaw was clenched. “Can you come back here, please?”

Taking a deep breath, she set her glass in the sink and joined him in the dining room. He was standing, arms braced on the table as he bent and stared down.

“Who circled these values?”

“I don’t know.” She put her arms around his waist from behind and rested her forehead between his shoulder blades. Relieved that he knew, Jess thought they could start to figure this out together. “You okay?”

A dry laugh, and then, “No. What am I seeing? Is this for real?”

“Did you know?” she asked quietly.

His voice came out tight, as if through clenched teeth. “Of course not.”

Closing her eyes, Jess squeezed him tighter. But he didn’t turn around; in fact, Jess realized he remained completely stiff in her embrace. And for the first time it occurred to her—how was it only occurring to her now—that although Jess trusted the magic in statistical anomaly, River might look at their doctored score and see that they were never meant to be.