Page 59 of Omega’s Fold

I have been sleeping the way I slept the first time I got sick as a teenager, fevered, wrong. I have been hungry at strange times and not at others. The smell of coffee has been bothering me for two weeks.

I have been refusing to think about it, the same way that I’ve been refusing to think about the mortgage.

I get out of the truck.

I walk the four doors back up the street. The bell above the drugstore door jingles as I enter. There is a teenage girl behind the counter doing a crossword in pencil, and she glances up, and she goes back to the crossword. The aisles have those big square overhead signs in plastic with the categories in big block letters, and I find the one I need, which is at the back near the pharmacy counter.

I do not look at the boxes for very long. I pick up the first one I touch. I take it to the counter. The girl scans it without looking at it.

“That’s twelve eighty-four.”

I pay in cash.

She puts the box in a paper bag and folds the top.

“Have a good one.”

“You too.”

I walk out. The bell jingles.

The gas station is on the south side of town, the way I have to drive home anyway. For some reason, I don’t want to do this at home. After so long denying the obvious, I don’t want to wait another minute. I need to know. The bathroom is round the back, accessed by a key on a wooden block that the man behind the counter hands me without looking up from his phone.

The key is sticky and I try not to think too hard about what it might be sticky with.

The bathroom has a single stall and a sink and a fluorescent light that flickers. The door of the stall does not lock all the way, and the floor has a long damp patch by the urinal that I am very careful not to step in.

I go into the stall. I push the door closed as far as it will go.

I open the box.

The instructions are printed on a folded piece of paper in three languages. I read the English, then I read it again although the instructions aren’t that complicated. The test is a stick with a window in it and a cap on the end. You pee on one end, wait three minutes, and the window tells you.

I pee on the stick, then cap it. I sit down on the closed toilet lid with the stick on my thigh, and I look at the back of my hand, counting three minutes off my wristwatch.

The minute hand of my watch moves.

When it has moved enough, I look at the stick.

Two lines. Dark and clean and even.

I think — and this is the first clear thing I think, and I do not try to stop it — Julian’s.

Then I think: No, mine.

16. Julian

“Julian. Sit.”

I put my briefcase down and take the chair on front of Richard’s desk. He slides a single sheet of paper across the desk. It’s a letter on the firm’s letterhead addressed to me. It begins with the words We are pleased to offer you, and the next words are the position of partner, and the words after that I do not, for a moment, take in at all.

I glance at him. My boss is grinning from ear to ear.

I read it. The numbers are at the bottom. The numbers and buy-in terms are good. Really good. The start date is the first of January. All I need to do is accept.

I set the letter down on the desk between us.

“Thank you. This is amazing.”