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“No.” I rolled my eyes. I wasn’t opposed to black magic in principle, but I’d never use it, or any other type of magic to inflict my will on another human. Or their boobs.
“What did the cards say?”
“How did you know I read the cards?”
“Because you don’t make any decisions without at least a quick card pull. And ifyouact impulsively, I know there’s got to be something behind that.”
I sighed, but leaned closer, my eyes wide. “The cards told me to act impulsively.”
“You don’t even swipe on someone on the dating apps until you’ve fully vetted their C.V. But why the suddenness? Why does it have to happen so fast? You do recognize there’s a high likelihood of disaster here, right?”
“He’s been itching to start his work in the church.”
“He’s already been working for the church.”
“He’s been fixing up their website, answering phones. Nothing in a ministerial capacity. He wants to get ordained. It’s been years.”
“He doesn’t need to wear the robes in order to start his ministry. He can start counseling people. Everyone knows he’s a seminarian. He’ll be a priest soon enough. It’s not like they aren’t taking him seriously in the meantime.
“I understand him. I want this to happen for him.”
Bethany took a breath and opened her mouth to say something, but stopped herself. Her eyes narrowed as she looked at me, quiet for a moment. “And what do you want foryou?”
“What do you mean?”
“What kind of marriage do you want to have? Is this anI’m marrying you to stay in the country so we’re sleeping in separate bedroomsmarriage?Or is it anI’m proposing to be romantic because we’ve swept each other off our feetmarriage?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should probably think about that before you sacrifice the rest of your life, just so a dude can get his dream job a few months faster.”
“Well, I mean. It’s not my whole life. If it sucks, we can just—”
“No, you can’t,” Soula said, reentering the conversation after putting Athena down for a nap. She tightened her high ponytail. “At least not without him losing that dream job. What I don’t understand is why Gus would say yes. I know he wouldn’t want you to throw your life away for him. He’s not selfish like that.”
I wasn’t throwing my life away, was I? My shoulders curled inward. “I kind of took his response to mean he was interested in a bit more than just a marriage of convenience,” I said meekly. Now I was second guessing everything those damn tarot cards had shown me.
“You’re a weird person.” Bethany prodded. “Only you can figure out what you want.”
“Thank you.”
Bethany sighed pointedly in my direction. “Weird people make weird choices that sometimes work out, despite pesky things like logic, and common sense, and societal norms. Besides, all three of us are weird. That’s why we’re a family. If anyone can arrangethemselves a marriage and have it last fifty years, it’d totally be you.”
“Thank you,” I said, earnestly this time, squeezing Bethany’s hand. I might not have been looking forward to dropping this bomb today, but deep down, I knewmy familywould help sort everything into the right boxes and make sense of my situation.
I’d met Bethany and Soula in the worst place imaginable: the Body Farm, a one-acre patch of woods in the heart of the University of Tennessee campus, where forensic anthropologists placed real, donated corpses in simulated situations to study the effects of weather, insect activity, temperature, et cetera, on human decomposition. In doing so, the program revolutionized and standardized forensic science.
Naturally, the three of us smartypants weirdos bonded over the academically rigorous, aesthetically gruesome graduate program. We’d all originally planned careers as forensic anthropologists, but after a short stint in the Forensic Anthropology Center—its official name—my friends found themselves called down alternative paths in deathcare.
Soula discovered she was better suited to public health. Less fighting crime; more combating disease. After finishing that first year, she left us to attend medical school at Vanderbilt. She spent the better part of the next decade completing the required training, internships, and fellowships to become a forensic pathologist, performing postmortem exams—autopsies—to determine cause of death when cases were more immediate than mine. She published frequently in science and medical journals and worked with hospital pathologists and researchers to determine the exact point in which diseases killed. Now she was chief medical examiner and had started taking on fellows in the morgue.
Bethany was different. Fiery and gregarious.
And also, gorgeous.
It was an objective truth. The men’s nudie magazines thought so too, at least enough to award her centerfold of the year—three times. She was already famous by the time she set her booted feet on the sacred ground of the Body Farm, though none of us had any idea at the time. Even the few men in our program were more familiar with theJournal of Forensic SciencesthanPlayboy.
But she had something else the rest of us didn’t: Sofia, her then four-year-old daughter. And while Bethany continued doing the sex work she loved—she even started her own retro, female-gaze, pulp-smut nudie mag—she wanted a faster route out of the spotlight to give her daughter a normal life.
