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Then she backtracked and introduced herself, clunking herself on the forehead because that’s typically what people dofirst,right? She lived down the hall; she didn’t know the couple throwing the party particularly well, but she and the guy were at the mailboxesat the same time, and he’d invited her. She’d debated over coming. “Me, too,” Sadie admitted.
Gillian said she posted regularly on an Instagram account about her terrible dating life. “Well, technically, it’s more about my social anxiety—there’s a whole community of us out there—but there’s dating stuff in there, too.”
“Like social anxiety awareness, or something?” Sadie asked.
“And support,” Gillian said. “I have almost eleven thousand followers suffering with the same things I do. We’re there for each other. It’s a private group, though.”
“Can I join?” Sadie asked. Gillian said she could, but Sadie never got around to sending a friend request.
Still, once she let down her guard, Gillian was fun to talk to. Smart, and good at analyzing people at the party with her startlingly accurate observations. The woman over by the chips and dips clearly had a drinking problem, as she kept pouring vodka into a water bottle when her husband wasn’t near. Sadie knew this to be true: The husband, another man she’d gone to med school with, had expressed worry himself. And a couple by the window was on the verge of breaking up; you could tell by their body language. This was also correct: Sadie knew this couple, and her whole circle was pretty convinced their relationship was doomed.
“I’m good at observing,” Gillian admitted. “Mostly because I’m usually hiding in the shadows, hah. And people aren’t that hard to figure out, when it comes down to it. You just have to know what to look for.”
What really roped Sadie in, though, was the fact that Gillian was just another one of those lost birds Sadie couldn’t help but scoop up and coddle. Gillian wore her anxiety on her sleeve; it seemed to debilitate her, but at the same time, she flew it like a flag. They continued to talk after the party; every time, Gillian consulted Sadie as though she were some sort of social etiquette expert,recounting every little conversation she had with people at the place she worked, as she was sure everything she said was mortifying or just plain wrong. Sadie took it upon herself to dive deeper with Gillian intowhyshe felt so scared of social situations—did something happen in her childhood? It was in Sadie’s nature to home in on the thing that was broken and attempt to fix it.
“My childhood was fine,” Gillian said. “Idyllic, really. This is just how I’m wired.”
Sadie had taken this at face value—and felt relieved by it, actually. Little did she know it was a lie. That Gillian lied abouteverything.
One morning, when she and Sadie met at a coffee joint between Sadie’s appointments, Gillian announced that her current roommate wanted her to move. “She wants her boyfriend to move in. It sucks—I’ve gotten used to her, I’m comfortable around her, and now I have to start all over again with someone new, and that’s so scary. Is it hot in here?” She looked around the coffee shop. “I think I’m having a heart attack.”
“You’re okay,” Sadie said. “It’s just anxiety. Try to breathe.”
“No, this has happened to me before. It’s something to do with my heart. I need to go to the ER. I can go myself, don’t worry about me.”
“Gillian,I’ma doctor,” Sadie reminded her. “And I sometimes get panic attacks, too. I know what they look like.”
Gillian wiped her eyes. “Why doyouget panic attacks?”
Sadie looked around the busy coffee shop. Was this a safe space? She took a breath. “I was sexually assaulted last year. He was a Tinder date—it was going well—but I was stupid and got into his car to go to another bar. Instead of going to the bar, he drove into the hills, and stopped the car on this deserted stretch of road, and…you know.”
Gillian’s eyes were round. “Shit. Did you report him?”
“No. I should have. IknowI should have. And then when I got myself together, afterward, I realized he’d given me a fake name and his Tinder profile had been deleted. I had no idea who he was or how to find him.”
It was hard to admit. It wasn’t even just about what he did but also what he said when he was doing it. He called Sadie a dried-up bitch and ugly as fuck. He said no one would ever love her. He said thisashe was penetrating her—like it was part of the kink. In therapy, after, she expressed that she understood she shouldn’t take the words personally, but she still kind of did. It was the words that sent her into the panic more than the memory of the assault, actually. She worried they were true.
“Oh, Sadie,” Gillian whispered, taking her hands. “This makes my stupid roommate problems seem so small.”
“That’s not why I told you.” And then she added, for reasons she still questioned, “Why don’t you come stay with me for a little while? So you won’t have to jump into a strange new roommate situation so soon. I have the space.”
Gillian pulled her hands away. Her breathing slowed. “Really?”
“Sure,” she said, figuring it would be temporary. “It’ll be fun.”
It was fun…for a little while.
Two days after Gillian’s mysterious call about “Len,” Sadie was leaving another house call. Her phone rang again. This time it really was the fertility clinic, calling with the results. She stared at the number, her heart rising to her throat.Here we go.
“Dr. Wasserman.” It was her doctor’s voice. “How are you this morning?” His tone was steady, giving nothing away.
“Fine?” Sadie said shakily. She was on the 10 in the middle lane of traffic. Not even on Bluetooth, instead holding the phone up to her ear. Cars shimmered in her peripheral vision.
“Well.” He sighed. Sadie’s throat started to close at his foreboding tone. “I’m afraid I have some bad news. You had a few eggs fertilize, but none of the embryos have made it to blast.”
“Oh no,” Sadie whispered.
She knew what that meant. The IVF round had failed. They wouldn’t be injecting an embryo inside her in hopes it would become a fetus. They hadn’t even gotten that far.
