The Soulmate Equation by Christina Lauren

FIVE

JESS ADJUSTED THE elastic strap beneath her chin. Was this what thirty felt like? Spending her birthday in a coffee shop with a madwoman who would get the entire room to belt “Happy Birthday” if Jess tried to take off this sparkly birthday hat?

Fizzy looked up abruptly. “You goblin. Leave the hat alone.”

“It’s itchy! Tell me about your date with Aiden B.”

Fizzy waved this off, already over it. “He lives with his sister.”

“Is that an automatic disqualification?”

“I mean, they live together as in they share a bedroom.” She shook her head, clearly not wanting Jess to ask more. “It’s uncharted territory for me. I’m unwilling to explore what it means.”

Jess laughed. “Fair enough. If I remember, he was only a score of, what? Thirteen? What about … ?” She was blanking on the other guy’s name.

“Antonio?” Fizzy prompted. “He was hot.”

“He was the twenty-one?”

“Yeah. We had dinner, we had sex.” Fizzy shrugged, summarizing. “We won’t be seeing each other again, though.” As if she remembered something, she picked up her notebook and jotted down a couple of words.

“What did you just write down?”

Fizzy’s lip curled. “Dick tattoo.”

Jess’s curled, too. “What? No.”

“Also,” Fizzy said, “he wanted me to talk dirty, so I did, but apparently I went too dirty.”

Jess burst out laughing again. “You went too dirty for a guy with a dick tattoo? Felicity Chen, my God.” She lifted her coffee to her lips. “But to be fair, you’re setting yourself up for this. Why are you casting the net so wide? Just filter the results. I don’t get it.”

Fizzy got that look she had when she was about to get real intense. “Listen. Tinder is the biggest dating app in the world for a reason. Sometimes people just want to have fun. The benefit here is that we get to choose what level of investment we want, and right now, for me, that level is hovering somewhere around sex with people I don’t feel obligated to call again.” She lifted her chin. “I’m testing the waters without all the pressure of forever.”

Holding up her hands in defense, Jess said, “I’m not judging. Write this dissertation and mail it to Americano.”

Fizzy gave her a casual middle finger. “Anyway, I’ve got a date with a twenty-three named Ted tomorrow—who is himself only twenty-one—and on Saturday I’m having dinner with a thirty-one named Ralph.”

“Thirty-one? Wow, that’s a Silver. Moving up in the world.”

Fizzy opened her mouth to reply when, on the table between them, a phone delivered a telltale chime.

Jess assumed it was another mediocre compatibility score hitting Fizzy’s inbox, and Fizzy seemed to assume the same, reaching for her phone—

So it took them both a second to register that the sound had actually come from Jess’s phone … and it took Jess another to remember she’d sent her “sample” away for analysis.

Betrayal widened every one of Fizzy’s features. “Jessica Davis. I’m over here telling you about dick tattoos and you don’t even tell me you sent your spit!”

Jess barked out an uncomfortable laugh. “I can explain!”

“You’d better!”

She was unable to control her bubbling laughter. Fizzy looked genuinely furious in a mildly cartoonish way. “It was last Thursday, remember? I called you from the toilet. On impulse, I put it in the mail after we hung up, downloaded the app and filled out the basic info, and then totally spaced on it.”

Fizzy picked up Jess’s phone, tapping it awake with a punitive jab of her index finger. Entering the passcode, she stared in confusion down at the screen while Jess stared with similar confusion at her. “I don’t remember giving you my passcode.”

“Juno’s birthday. You should choose a more secure code. Never know what brand of crazy can get into your phone.”

Jess raised a wry eyebrow. “You don’t say.”

Fizzy turned the screen to face her. “It’s red. What does that mean?”

“What’s red?” Jess’s amusement at the situation was fading, quickly replaced by the realization that her DNADuo app had just pinged her with an alert.

She’d excluded matches below seventy percent.

She had a Platinum or higher match.

She suddenly understood Fizzy’s desire to dip a toe in the soulmate waters rather than dive headfirst. Jess wasn’t ready. She wasn’t even sure she was curious.

“The thing,” Fizzy said, pointing aggressively. “The little—circle notification thing over the app icon that means you have a result!”

The prospect of making a decision based on a numerical score made Jess immediately tired. She took her phone back, tempted to delete the app along with whatever impulse had told her to spit in that vial in the first place. “Is red bad?”

“All of mine are green,” Fizzy explained. “Whether it’s a compatibility score of twelve or thirty-one, the match notifications have been green.”

Okay, if the match notifications were green, at least Jess knew a potential soulmate wasn’t just casually hanging out in her inbox. “Might I suggest your intensity about this is now at an eleven?”

Fizzy shot back: “To my romance-loving heart, this app is the most fascinating game ever. Humor me.”

“Most likely it means there was something wrong with my sample,” Jess said, relief expanding in her. “I did it after I brushed my teeth, and it says to wait an hour after eating or drinking anything before spitting.” She put her phone back on the table, screen-side down. “I’ll deal with it later.”

She should’ve known better. “Uh. Nope.” Fizzy immediately handed the phone back to her. “I want to know what red means.”

“It’s my birthday, and I can ignore it if I want to.”

Fizzy shook her head. “What’s a better birthday gift than a soulmate?”

With a sigh, Jess clicked on the DNADuo icon. No notifications under the tab labeled Compatibility Scores, but she did have a small red bubble indicating a new message. Jess’s eyes quickly scanned the words, but her brain was slow to process them. Starting over, Jess read it slowly, word by word, even though there were only eight of them: Please call our office at your earliest convenience.

“What does it say?”

Jess handed the phone over. “It’s from GeneticAlly. I need to call them at my earliest convenience. That’s weird. Isn’t that weird? Like, why not just tell me another sample kit is required?”

Fizzy read it, frowning. “They sent it in your app inbox, so you can reply, right? Let’s just ask what this is about.” Instead of handing the phone back, she did it herself, dictating each word as she typed. “May—I—ask—what—this—is—concerning?” Fizzy stared at the screen, and after only a few seconds, her brows shot up excitedly. “Someone’s typing back!”

Meanwhile, Jess’s stomach was crawling into her throat. She already hated how intense it all felt; this was way too much investment and expectation for something she’d done on impulse in a crappy mood. “I’m sure it’s just a sample thing, just—”

“Shh.”

“Fizz,” Jess said, “just give me my phone. I don’t care about any of—”

Fizzy held up a hand. “They’re typ— Oh.” Her brows furrowed. “Okay, you’re right. This is weird.”

She handed the phone back, and Jess’s stomach twisted as she read the note.

Do you mind coming in?it said. We’ll send a car.

THEY’D SEND Acar?

Good grief.

Jess managed to find about a thousand important things she needed to do immediately. She made a DMV appointment to renew her license, scheduled her and Juno’s annual physical exams and dentist appointments. She went for a run; she took a long shower. She even bought herself a new sweater as a birthday indulgence. She had lunch with Nana and Pops, cleaned her apartment, folded every piece of laundry she could find, picked up Juno from school, and read almost an entire Judy Blume novel with her before Juno urged Jess to leave the apartment so Nana and Pops could come over and get the surprise party ready.

Surprise!

With two hours to kill and the notification like a splinter in her thumb, Jess gave up and called Lisa Addams.

The GeneticAlly building was dark from the outside, but a light in the lobby flickered on as the town car pulled up to the curb. Lisa emerged, walking briskly out and opening the car door.

“Jessica,” she said breathlessly. “Thanks for coming in on such short notice.”

Even in the dusk, Jess spotted the flush on Lisa’s cheeks, the way her hairline seemed just the slightest bit sweaty. She tumbled one more tick down the Uneasy Scale.

“No problem. I only have about an hour, though.”

“Of course. Come on in.”

Lisa turned, leading them into the empty building. None of this seemed like normal protocol, which made Jess feel like she’d swallowed battery acid. “I have to admit I’m really confused about why this is so urgent.”

“I’ll explain everything once we’re inside.”

Jess followed her through the double doors and down the long hallway she’d walked the last time she was here. Everyone was clearly done for the day; the offices were dark and vacant in that way that made even innocuous spaces seem creepy.

In the conference room, Lisa gestured to six people seated around a large table. River wasn’t among them.

“Jessica, I’d like to introduce you to our executive team.”

Their what now?

“This is David Morris, the principal investigator in charge of the original research, and the CEO of GeneticAlly.”

A man to her right stood, stretching out his hand, and Jess recognized him as the person she’d met after overhearing River call her “entirely average.”

“Jessica. It’s so great to see you again.”

“You too.” She wiped her palm on her pants before shaking. And then it sank in: Original research. CEO. “Right. I guess I didn’t realize who I was meeting in the hall the other day.”

He laughed a big, open-mouthed laugh. “Well, it feels a little douchey to say, ‘I’m CEO David Morris.’”

“Maybe,” Jess said, “but you’ve earned the right.”

“I’m friends with Alan Timberland over at Genentech,” he said, still smiling, “and he’s mentioned some analytics help he had. After looking at your intake information from the other day, I put two and two together and realized you’re the brain behind their new high-throughput screening algorithms.”

Jess was a wine bottle, slowly uncorked. Oh, this is about data? Had GeneticAlly brought her here to talk about algorithms?

“Alan’s great,” she said carefully. At the prospect that she was here for consulting, not because she had lemur DNA, the nausea slowly cleared.

Lisa gestured to an overly tanned man to David’s left. “Brandon Butkis is our head of marketing.”

Another hand closed around Jess’s, another face gave her an urgent, vibrating smile. All she could see was blindingly white capped teeth.

After Jess had shaken every hand in the room, Lisa gestured for her to sit down in the direct center seat at the table.

“It’s probably unexpected to walk into a full room like this,” Lisa started.

“A little,” Jess agreed, “but I know how important it is to get data organized, and how hard it is to do that when the data set is as big as yours.”

David and Brandon exchanged a quick look. Lisa’s smile slipped for only a second, but Jess logged it. “That’s definitely true. I’m sure you know that better than anyone.”

A man—Jess thought his name was Sanjeev—on the other side of the table caught Lisa’s attention. “Is Peña coming in for this?”

“He’ll be here,” Lisa said, and then turned to Jess. “Sorry to make you wait, Jessica.”

“Jess is fine,” she said, adding unnecessarily, “I mean, calling me Jess is fine.” Another awkward pause. “I wasn’t referring to myself in the third person.”

After some courtesy laughter, the room fell into a pin-drop silence. It seemed that everyone but Jess knew what this was all about, but no one could tell her until River had arrived. Unfortunately, no one knew where he was (“He said he was on his way up from his office ten minutes ago,” Sanjeev told the throat-clearing, paper-shuffling table).

Nor could anyone think of something to say. So of course, her mouth opened, and words tumbled out. “You all must be very excited for the launch.”

Heads bobbed around the table, and Brandon Butkis delivered an enthusiastic “Very!”

“Have you all given samples as well?” she asked.

There was a strange exchange of looks around the table before David said carefully, “We have, yes.”

Jess was just about to break and ask for some bloody information when the door burst open and River made a grand entrance much like his irritating, sweeping arrivals at Twiggs. “I’m here. What’s up?”

A tangible energy filled the room. Everyone sat up straighter. Every eye followed him as he moved to his seat. Yes, he was great to look at, but there seemed to be more to the weight of their attention, like the low, humming vibration of hero worship.

River’s gaze passed over the group, sweeping past Jess before pausing and jerking back to her face. “Why’s she here?”

“Have a seat, Riv,” Lisa said, then turned to a petite Asian woman to her right. “Tiff? Do you want to hand out the data?”

Data. Yes. Great. Jess’s shoulders eased, and she took a sheet when the stack came around.

The handout contained much less information than Jess would need to give useful feedback on a commercial undertaking of this scale. Two client IDs were listed at the top left and a red circle around a number in the upper right corner. Ninety-eight. Beneath was a table with a simple summary of a data set: variable names, means, deviations, and P values with many, many zeroes after the decimal.

There was a highly significant finding in this data; the urgency of this meeting was becoming clear.

River released a breath that sounded like it’d been punched out of him.

“Wow,” Jess said. “Ninety-eight. Is that a compatibility score? I realize I’m new to this, but that’s huge, right?” She flipped back to her memory of Lisa’s presentation. “Diamond?”

The nervous energy at the table doubled; all but one head nodded. River was still staring at the piece of paper.

“Yes,” Lisa said, and her smile was so intense the skin had grown tight around her eyes. “The highest we’ve seen in the DNADuo is ninety-three.”

“Okay, so are we asking about a way to confirm this interaction?” Jess leaned in, looking at the variables. “Without the raw data, I can only guess, but it looks like you’ve customized your stats using an N-type analysis—which is exactly what I would have used. But I’m sure you know the biggest problem with this is that the bounds we would normally use for a typical algorithm become less effective. Though”—she chuckled—“looking at this P value, I’m guessing with this pair the interactions are everywhere, even with stricter bounds. I could create a non-Euclidean metric, something like a multidimensional data structure—like a k-d tree or cover tree …” She trailed off, looking up. No one was nodding excitedly; no one was jumping in to brainstorm. Maybe there wasn’t another statistician in the room. “I’m more than happy to dig into your post hoc analyses, though with the number of genes in your array, I might need a couple weeks.”

Self-conscious now, she put the packet down on the table, smoothing it with her left hand. The room had grown so quiet, the sound of her palm over paper seemed to echo around them. But no one else was actually looking at their handout, or even seemed to be listening. They were all looking at River.

And when Jess looked at him, at the raw shock in his expression, a current of electricity ran through her, almost like she’d just touched a live wire.

He cleared his throat and turned to Tiffany. “Tiff, did you look through the raw data?”

She nodded, but she was staring at David, who was exchanging another heavy look with Brandon. The room felt deeply, meaningfully silent, and Jess realized she was missing an important context for the gravity here.

Awareness sank as quickly as a weight in water. Jess glanced down again at the client information.

Client 144326.

Client 000001.

Oh, God.

“Um … who is client number one?”

River cleared his throat; he’d gone sheet white and gripped the paper in two hands. “Me.”

Oh. Well, Jesus Christ, no wonder he wanted to confirm the analysis. A Diamond Match for the original scientist on the project was huge news, especially this close to launch.

“Okay, I get it.” Jess took a deep breath, leaning back, ready to get to work. “How can I help?”

River looked at Lisa then, his eyes heavy with the obvious question. Literally everyone else in the room was staring at him, waiting for him to say it: Have we confirmed the assay? Have we replicated the finding with a backup sample?

But that wasn’t what he asked. In a low, shaky voice, River murmured, “Who is 1-4-4-3-2-6?”

Every head swung Jess’s way and—

When she realized what was going on, why they were all there, why they had sent a car, why they hadn’t made her sign an NDA for data purposes, why River hadn’t known she would be there, and why everyone else was looking at Jess with that fevered, vibrating force in their expressions, it felt a little like falling off a curb, except she was sitting.

It was genuinely so absurd she started laughing.

Ninety-eight!

“Oh.” Jess was still laughing as she stood on shaky legs. Her heartbeat was a pulsating cacophony in her ears. “I’m not here to advise on your statistics.”

Ninety-eight. P values with at least ten zeroes after the decimal.Her brain scratched around, looking for a way out of this.

“Jess—” Lisa began.

“This isn’t right,” Jess cut her off, fumbling for her purse.

“We ran the data through all of our standard analysis programs,” Tiffany added quietly.

“No, I mean I’m sure your stats are—” Jess started, but realized she couldn’t finish the sentence because it would be a lie. Clearly their statistics were garbage and they were all delusional. And unfortunately, Jess hadn’t driven herself here. “I can call someone to come pick me up.”

Jess glanced at River—who was already watching her with wild, dark eyes—and then at surfer-chic Lisa, and Toothy Brandon, and Jeff Goldblum’s Benedict Cumberbatch, and every other person in the room who’d also never dealt with this particular situation. “It was so nice meeting everyone. Thanks so much for having me. Sorry for the ramble about N-type analyses.”

She turned, opening the door with a hand she wasn’t all that sure was going to cooperate, and practically sprinted back the way she came.