Page 26 of Under Story

“They’re beautiful.”

“I think so, too. The people, I mean. When Gloria lived here, the house was full of artists. Seymour inherited it from a madcap uncle who liked to upset the apple cart. All of Seymour’s siblings were straitlaced people with families, and Uncle Morty signed it away to two childless men! It’s inexcusably large, as you can see”—Laurel peered down a many-doored hallway—“so we filled it with a different kind of family. The neighbors have never liked us. Nob Hill has a lot of old money, you know. Well, here we are.”

He had stopped in front of the octagonal turret. Each window framed a different vision of the city. A man in a checkered bow tie offered Laurel another drink. When Julian left, she felt shy, still troubled by what she’d learned about Gloria. But he had been right—this did seem to be where the younger people were congregating—and Laurel soon worked up the courage to introduce herself. Slowly, her self-consciousness eased; she wove in and out of conversation, feeling grown-up and emboldened.

At one point, two new people entered the room: a man and a woman, who stopped just inside the door. The woman was striking, with a Crawford mole and a single wave of sleek dark hair. The man was dark-haired, too, and tall, with full lips and a distinctive nose.

Adrenaline sobered Laurel immediately. She refocused on the person in front of her, a mathematician who was interrogating her about psychedelics, but it was no use: she barely heard him.

It would not have mattered if she had been facing the opposite direction. Laurel would have known Eli’s voice; she would have felt his presence. And though she tried not to look, he must have felt the force of her attention.

“Laurel?” he asked.

Her throat seized. The woman next to Eli glanced at him inquiringly, and Laurel understood that they were a couple.

“It’s Eli. We went to high school together,” he said. He had mistaken Laurel’s paralysis for confusion.

“I remember,” said Laurel, an understatement so prodigious that it might have been a lie.

Eli was six years older and twice as handsome as he’d been in August of 1998: grown into his features and relaxed in his body. He wore his height with graceful command.

“I can’t believe this. Are you here for the conference?” he asked. When Laurel nodded, he added: “Botany?”

She smiled. “Mycology.”

“Mycology,” said Eli. The richness of his interest made her heady.

“Fungi,” she translated.

“Not a straight line from apple trees.”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’d like to hear it.”

The mathematician blew his nose emphatically, and Laurel emerged as if from underwater.

“I’m sorry. Eli Rosen, physics, Stanford,” Eli said, offering his hand to the mathematician. “And this is Angela, my fiancée.”

“Also physics.” Angela shook hands with the mathematician, and then with Laurel. “Also Stanford.”

Laurel set her martini glass down beneath a Tiffany lamp and said, “Would you excuse me?”

She veered into a bathroom and ran the water cold, patting her chest, her forearms, her face. She told herself that she was being melodramatic. She and Eli had never been in a relationship. They hadn’t even been friends, had never interacted except for that evening in Upper Orchard, where place and circumstance had conspired to create a kind of portal: surely they wouldn’t have had the same conversation if not for the weather and the apples and the fact that they were weeks away from college.

And now he went to Stanford; now he was engaged. Well, why shouldn’t he be? Laurel hadn’t expected Eli to pine for her, though she often wondered what had happened to him, and even hoped, when the web became widespread, that he might look for her. Every couple of years, during a breakup or a bout of loneliness, she tried unsuccessfully to find him. Sometimes she drove by the house in the field, but she never saw the Rosens.

Eventually, Laurel told herself that she’d magnified her feelings for Eli, but now she saw she hadn’t. The city, the party, the conference—everything that had charmed her minutes earlier—bleached in comparison to the thought of going home with him.

Laurel couldn’t bring herself to talk with him and Angela. Instead, she walked downstairs. From the living room, glass clinked and voices murmured musically. She turned right, into the hall.

There were four doors, two on either side, and none of them were locked. Through the first, she peeked into a bedroom: four-poster bed and grandfather clock, pillows embroidered with strawberries. Behind the second was a library that stretched to the ceiling, a wooden ladder propped against the tomes. The third disclosed a closet filled with boxes, one of them half open. Laurel spied a crowd of candlesticks, an antique pocket watch, and an unusual felt patch: blue wool, with an appliqued polar bear.

The last room was the lower floor of the turret. Where the upstairs octagon was polished, this one was dusty and unused. A threadbare rug, once crimson, held the center. In the windows, she saw her own reflection.

“Thought I’d lost you.”

Eli stood in the doorway. His voice was tentative, as if she’d turned him down.