Chapter_26

She tried to orient herself in her bedroom. The window was in the wrong place.

Then, the sound of a cabinet door closing. Jordan must have woken up before her. The stove clicked. He was making the coffee. Rosie swallowed, her heartbeat in her ears, her situation quickly sharpening into focus, the details of the night before hurling themselves at her. Dylan was beside her. She was in the fold. “Fuck,” she whispered. “Shit, shit.”

Dylan murmured and reached an arm around Rosie, pulling her closer.

“No, no,” Rosie said, moving her arm.

“And that’s a wrap,” Jordan said on the other side of the door. Although, no, it wasn’t Jordan’s voice. It was the sound of the radio in the other room. She sat up in bed, willing her eyes to adjust to the light.

“Someone is here,” she whispered, shaking Dylan. A dark, fuzzy figure shifted on the other side of the fluted glass. “Someone is in the kitchen.”

“Hm,” Dylan said, turning over, her eyes closed.

Rosie froze, watching the doorknob. “It’s Lark,” she whispered. “I think Lark is home.” She threw off the covers and pulled on her jeans. There was no closet to hide in, and the bedframe was too low to the ground to fit beneath it. She opened the window, and cold air blasted in.

Dylan groaned.

“Will you please—” Rosie said. She remembered her phone in the wooden box by the front door. It was clear they’d overslept. She stuck her head out the window and looked for Jordan’s car, wind hitting her face. The details of the evening were now entirely available to her: Dylan’s mouth against her ear; Dylan’s thumb against her throat; Dylan’s fingers pushing inside her. She found her shirt crumpled on the floor and pulled it on. The front door yawned open and shut. Then came the sound of a car starting, an engine rumbling, then fading.

The fold was quiet. Slowly, she eased open the bedroom door. No one was there except the dog, who greeted her with a happy whine. Two ceramic mugs sat on the kitchen counter, blooming with rose water–scented steam. Beneath one of the mugs was a handwritten note.

Enjoy—

L

Each time Rosie read it, she heard a different inflection. She stared at the punctuation. Was an em dash aggressive or poetic? She grabbed her phone from the box by the door, where several missed texts from Jordan were waiting.

Soft-launch was a total success

On my way home

Have a surprise for you:)

He’d sent the texts two hours earlier; he’d be home any minute. She slipped out the front door and through the cold to the house. Her bones felt like metal. The wind forced her to keep her head bent.

Without a fire, the inside of the house was frigid. With a paper towel, she wiped off her boots and the dirty, icy tracks they left inside, positioning them neatly next to Jordan’s.

Upstairs, she ruffled the covers on the bed, then got beneath them, shivering. She brought Jordan’s pillow to her face and inhaled, her stomach a pit. How long did she lie there? Two minutes? Forty? Then came the creak of the door. “Babe?” Jordan called. “Rosie?” She heard the thunk of shoes, the slam of the door, laughter, and the words “fucking cold,” “Jesus,” “fire,” and, for some reason, “secretary.” One of the voices belonged to Jordan, and she tried to identify the other—others? When she couldn’t, she got out of bed, adjusted her hair in the mirror, and went downstairs.

Jordan, Alice, and Noguchi were in full ensembles of flannel, puffer vests, and selvedge denim. Their cheeks were rosy. Jordan was in the kitchen, adding protein powder to a smoothie. “Surprise!” he said.

“Alice!” Rosie said. “Oh my god!”

Alice pulled Rosie into a tight hug. “I missed you!”

“Me too,” Rosie said, squeezing her back.

“You smell good! What is that?” Alice inhaled by Rosie’s ear.

“Oh, I don’t know, nothing special,” Rosie said, pulling away.

Jordan pressed a button on the blender, and it whirred loudly. He kissed Rosie with surprising vigor. “I thought you might like a little reminder of home,” he shouted, one hand on the top of the blender.

“All right, you two, break it up,” Noguchi said. He gave Rosie a hug. “Bring it in, bring it in. Both arms.”

“This is such a nice surprise,” Rosie said. She wondered if the whiskey was still on her breath. She regretted not brushing her teeth.

“I thought we could go to a petting zoo,” Jordan said brightly. “Give Alice and Noguchi a little taste of our lives.”

“A petting zoo?” Rosie said. “Is there one? Do they let adults go without children?”

“Alice looked it up in the car. It’s actually pretty close.” He poured the smoothie into four glasses and handed them out. His own smoothie left behind a light purple whey mustache. “Ahhhh,” he said dramatically, refilling his glass.

“Sounds great,” Rosie said, clutching her glass. She had no appetite.

They piled into the car. Rosie offered Noguchi the front seat, which he immediately accepted, and she sat in the back with Alice. Dylan emerged from the fold with a bucket and disappeared inside the guinea hen coop. Rosie’s stomach turned a full circle.

“Is that...” Alice whispered. Rosie pinched her hand.

Jordan took the scenic route. The pearly winter landscape unfolded around them. Alice lowered her window a crack and dramatically wafted the air toward her. “Yes,” she said. “Give me that sweet, sweet clean air.”

Noguchi pointed at every cow, sheep, and horse they passed, shouting the names of the animals. Alice wanted to stop for coffee, so Jordan pulled into the general store. To Rosie’s distress, Dylan’s truck was in the lot, and from the car, she could see Sasha and Lark by the register.

“Rosie? You coming?” Jordan said.

“Yep,” she said quickly. She was the last one out of the car.

Lark and Sasha looked up from the register. What was the expression on Lark’s face? Rosie tried to decipher it. Sasha squeezed Lark’s hand.

“Hello, hello,” Noguchi said loudly. Jordan whispered something to him that made him go quiet. Noguchi glanced at Sasha and Lark, then back at Jordan, who nodded.

“The donuts are really good,” Rosie said, trying to distract everyone, including herself.

“You had me at ‘the donuts,’?” Noguchi said, reaching for a pair of tongs.

Alice filled her basket with local honey, local cheese, and artisanal buckwheat polenta. “And a cup of coffee, please,” she said at the register. Rosie tried to swallow her dread. Lark and Sasha regarded the group with unrestrained interest. Sasha began filling a cup of coffee.

“Hi, Rosie,” Lark said.

“Hey,” Rosie said. She forced herself to make eye contact.

“Did you enjoy your evening?”

“What? Yeah, I guess.” She cleared her throat and shoved her hands into her pockets. “How about you?”

“That’s eighty-three dollars even,” Sasha said.

Alice gasped. “Are you fucking with me?”

Sasha blinked at her.

“Never mind on everything except the coffee.”

“Sorry,” Rosie said to Sasha while Alice reshelved everything.

“So those were...” Alice said when they got back into the car.

“Rosie’s friends,” Jordan said.

“Really? They did not seem very friendly,” Noguchi said.

Jordan looked at Rosie in the rearview mirror as he eased onto the road. She fantasized about opening the door and rolling onto the pavement.

“It’s because they hate me,” Jordan said.

“That’s not true,” Rosie said.

“They think I’m corporate and materialistic.”

“Well,” Rosie said, “you used to work for a robot that tells people what to buy.”

“She got you there, man,” Noguchi said. “Anyway, what’s so wrong with being a little materialistic? I’m pro-materialism these days. You just gotta lean into it. I’ve changed my Instagram so that I only see ads now, no people. I hated feeling like I was losing a battle. It’s much better this way.”

“It’s been nice to spend time with people who aren’t so focused on consuming things,” Rosie said. “They’re actually creating things.”

Jordan scoffed and reached his hand into Noguchi’s bag of donuts.

“That’s why I’m so excited about what we’re building, man,” Noguchi said, punching Jordan lightly in the arm. “We’re empowering people to make things. I feel good about that.”

“These are just OK,” Jordan said, through a bite.

According to a digital sign at the entrance of the farm, it was the last weekend the petting zoo would be open to visitors until February. The path to the animals was crowded with families and flirtatious groups of friends who were dressed in vests, scarves, flannel jackets, and leggings. A toddler wobbled on a man’s shoulders. A woman linked arms with two men, one on either side of her. Either a throuple or siblings, Rosie thought. “Tourists,” she said darkly. “You know, I bet petting zoos are horrible for the animals. All day they have toddlers shoving food in their mouths and shrieking at them.”

“Thanks for getting us amped!” Jordan said.

“I still want to pet an alpaca,” Alice said. “The website said they have alpacas, and goats with four horns.”

Jordan and Noguchi walked a few yards ahead. Noguchi stuck his head through a hole in a painted plywood farm scene featuring an alpaca and demanded Jordan take his photo. Rosie turned to Alice. “Don’t freak out,” she said.

Alice froze. “Is there a bug on me?”

“No.” She waited for Jordan and Noguchi to walk farther ahead. “I spent the night with Dylan.”

“Dylan...” Alice said.

“Our tenant.”

Alice’s eyes widened.

“Be cool.”

“OK, I’m cool. I’m cool,” Alice said. “How? When?”

“Last night. It sort of just happened. It was—” Rosie flushed at the memory. “It was amazing. But I’m ninety-nine percent sure Lark knows.”

“Which one is Lark?”

“Dylan’s girlfriend,” Rosie said. “The curly-haired one at the general store. But Lark has another girlfriend. Actually, it’s the cashier at the general store. The one who made your coffee.”

Alice looked bewildered. “How does she have the time for that?”

“And the cashier has another girlfriend who was our broker.”

“I can’t keep up,” Alice said. “I need a spreadsheet.”

Rosie rubbed her eyes. “I’m stressed.”

“Is Lark mad? I mean, if she’s allowed to have a few girlfriends, can’t Dylan have one?”

A woman walked by them carrying a screaming child in her arms. Another child walked ahead of her, backward, tapping the screaming child with the end of a long stick. “I said, stop that,” the woman yelled to the walking child over the screaming child’s wails. “I’m taking away your dessert!” She smiled apologetically at Rosie and Alice.

“Well,” Rosie said, “they have rules about what’s allowed between them that I don’t totally understand. They say the word ‘boundaries’ a lot. It’s hard to tell. But that’s not the point. The point is, it was—oh God, Alice, it was really good.”

Alice looked wide-eyed at Rosie. “Did she come on to you?”

“I made the first move. That’s part of what felt so good about it. I felt so sure. I haven’t felt that way with Jordan since the beginning. Do you think the ethical thing is to tell Jordan or to not tell Jordan?”

“Not telling would be very... French,” Alice said. “Was it a onetime thing?”

“I—I don’t know.” Ahead of them, Noguchi and Jordan stood at the front of a line of children waiting to insert a quarter into a gumball machine filled with gray pellets. A row of dirty white goats stood against the fence, blinking anxiously as Noguchi and Jordan collected their pellets and approached them with their palms out. Rosie hadn’t seen Jordan this happy in months. This, she understood, was what he wanted from living upstate. There was a limit to what he was willing to endure. She knew how to slaughter a chicken. She had plunged into an icy lake and baked in a hand-built sauna. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. A text from Dylan: morning:)

She deleted the text and guiltily tucked her phone away. A chill moved through her, the memory of the night before obstructing everything. Every fence post, every cloud and goat, had an erotic charge; every branch stroked the sky. “Jordan hates Dylan,” Rosie said. “This is his nightmare.”

“Then you shouldn’t tell him.”

“I agree,” Rosie said, relieved to have the permission.

“Who knows, there are probably secrets he’s keeping from you, too. Damien didn’t tell me he gets his cousin’s employee discount at Shake Shack until three years into our relationship.”

“Jordan secretly took his mother to meet with our broker about selling our house without telling me,” Rosie said.

Alice cocked back her head. “Really?”

“I know,” Rosie said.

They watched in silence as Noguchi and Jordan traded a dollar bill for quarters at a little machine, then slotted the quarters into the goat pellet dispenser again.

“He doesn’t even like dogs,” Rosie said. “I don’t know why he likes goats.”

“While we’re on the subject of secrets,” Alice said. She turned to Rosie. “I can’t keep it quiet anymore.” She beamed.

Rosie waited.

“I’m pregnant.”

“Oh my god!” Rosie said, panic coursing through her. “Really?”

“What’s up?” Jordan called. “You guys OK?” He dusted off his hands and made his way to them, Noguchi close behind. “What’d we miss?”

“Yeah,” Noguchi said. “What are you two smiling about?” He was smiling too, already placing himself on the inside.

Rosie covered her mouth with a hand. “Sorry,” she said to Alice. “I didn’t mean to cause a scene.”

Alice laughed. “That’s OK!” She turned to Jordan and Noguchi. “I’m pregnant.”

“What!” Jordan said. “That’s amazing! Congrats! Right? I mean you’re happy about it? Can I hug you, or will that—”

“You can hug me!”

Rosie watched as Jordan wrapped his arms around Alice. The hug lasted a very long time, and Jordan closed his eyes, savoring it. When it was Noguchi’s turn to hug Alice, he lifted her slightly off the ground. “Sorry, sorry!” he said, setting her down. “I know I don’t know you that well. I just love great news. Should we take a photo to commemorate this awesome moment?” He positioned his phone in the elbow of a fence post and set the self-timer.

They all huddled together. Jordan stood behind Rosie and wrapped both arms around her, bringing his hands to rest on her stomach, as though she were the pregnant one. Rosie took his hands and held them at her sides, intertwining her fingers with his. She hoped no one was watching them and that it would be over quickly.

Noguchi jogged to the fence to retrieve his phone. “Prawn, you honestly look radiant. You’re glowing.”

Jordan kissed Rosie on the cheek twice.

“Can we see it?” Alice said.

Jordan had a big, wide smile, as though he had just caught a foul ball. In his flannel and work jacket, he looked like the romantic lead in a Christmas movie. Noguchi knelt and held his arms out wide in front of the group. Alice grinned at Noguchi. Everyone smiled with their teeth, except for Rosie, who stood in the center, holding Jordan’s hands, looking sleep-deprived.

“I’m posting,” Noguchi said.

“Tag me,” Alice said.

“With pleasure,” Noguchi said. “Jordan, I can’t find you.”

“Rosie and I deleted our Instagrams,” Jordan said.

“Really? How come I can see Rosie?”

“I sometimes redownload it,” Rosie said.

“What! The betrayal!” Jordan stabbed himself in the heart with an imaginary knife.

“I know, I know, I’m bad. I’m addicted,” Rosie said. “Forgive me.” While Noguchi introduced Alice to the goats, Rosie and Jordan linked arms and ambled down the path. Eventually they reached the alpaca enclosure, which, for five dollars, children could briefly enter with an adult. A sign warned about spitting. Two alpacas walked evasively around every child who entered the enclosure. They did not seem any less suspicious of adults. No one could get close enough to touch them.

“So, what do you think?” Jordan said finally.

“About the alpacas? They seem a little antisocial.”

“About Alice,” Jordan said, glancing behind them. “Pretty exciting, right? How old is she again? Are she and Damien married?”

“I don’t think so,” Rosie said. “Unless they got married and I just didn’t know.” The thought of this made her incredibly sad. “I didn’t know they were trying.” She watched as a stocky, bored-looking teenager escorted a father-daughter duo out of the alpaca pen and ushered in a new pair—a toddler and a mother.

“Feed it some grass!” a man shouted from outside the enclosure.

“Maybe they weren’t trying,” Jordan said, squeezing Rosie’s hand. “Maybe it was an accident.”

“I’m shocked you would have that thought,” Rosie said. When Jordan didn’t respond, she felt terrible. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not making fun of you.” She squeezed his hand back.

“OK,” Jordan said, but he let go of her hand to adjust his zipper, and then put both hands in his pockets. “I feel really inspired,” he said, keeping his gaze on the toddler and the mother, who had cornered the alpaca with a fistful of grass. “I feel really inspired by Alice’s pregnancy.”

What’s that all about?” Alice asked as they pulled up to the driveway. She pointed at a sign Jordan had erected that read private property. He had driven extra slowly on the ride back and had asked Alice repeatedly if the speed and temperature were OK.

“Don’t get me started,” he said. “We had a huge trespassing issue. It had to be done.” He leaned forward, his gaze on Dylan and Lark, who were outside the guinea hen coop. Dylan was stapling chicken wire to the exterior posts while the guinea hens tottered around outside.

“It’s cool you let your tenants build that,” Noguchi said.

“Let?” Jordan laughed. “They didn’t ask.”

Noguchi pressed his face to the window. “It looks really profesh.”

“How many square feet do you think Dylan and Lark’s place is?” Jordan said, looking in the rearview mirror at Rosie.

“A thousand?” she said. “Why?”

“Pretty solid,” Jordan said, squinting ahead. “I think that’s enough space for our HQ. If it’s just the two of us, and your friend’s uncle’s friend, and maybe a QA engineer?”

“For sure,” Noguchi said.

“Your HQ?” Rosie said.

“Potentially,” Jordan said. “We need to figure out what kind of renovations we’d need to do.”

Rosie felt claustrophobic. She wondered what kind of renovations Jordan and Noguchi considered themselves capable of. “I thought you were looking for an office space somewhere in town.”

“We were,” Jordan said. “But then it seemed so obvious—we should just convert the outbuilding.”

“But then we’d have to kick out our tenants.”

“Correct,” Jordan said, and Rosie stared at her lap.

“I don’t want to be offensive,” Noguchi said to Jordan, “but Dylan is gay, right?”

“Yes.”

“Why is that offensive?” said Alice.

“Actually,” Rosie said, “I don’t think she likes labels.”

Jordan rolled his eyes.

Noguchi turned to Jordan. “Dude, we should talk to them. Do a little market research. Let’s invite them over. Like, for dinner or something? Do you guys have Seamless up here? We could expense—”

“No,” Rosie said.

“No to Seamless, or no to inviting them up?”

“I don’t think they would want to do that,” Rosie said. She tried to hide her alarm. The thought of being in a room together with Jordan and Dylan made her head throb. “They’re not interested in tech stuff.”

“Do you not want us to talk to them? Are you embarrassed?” Jordan said. He eased the car toward them.

“It’s not that,” Rosie said. “I just don’t want to impose. They’re busy.”

“That’s interesting,” Jordan said. “They don’t look very busy.” He turned to Noguchi. “They’re literally only ever hanging out.”

“Could you drive a little faster?” Rosie said. “I think it’s weird to drive by them so slowly.”

Dylan leaned against the coop and rubbed her forehead. Lark was speaking, and, for the first time that Rosie could remember, they both appeared distressed.

“Looks like they’re arguing,” Jordan said. Dylan glanced at him, and so did Lark.

“Please just park the car,” Rosie said desperately. “Let’s just go inside.”

For dinner, Jordan combined three boxes of boxed mac and cheese. Rosie made a salad. They hadn’t eaten chicken since their dinner with Jordan’s mother. By the end of the meal, they’d made their way through half a bottle of whiskey. Noguchi poured Alice seltzer on ice in a rocks glass and called her “little lady.”

Jordan began washing dishes. Alice and Rosie got started on an apple pie. Noguchi stared out the window. “They built that coop all by themselves? How did they learn how to do that?”

“They’re really handy,” Rosie said. “You can’t see it from here, but Dylan put in skylights in their place.”

Jordan turned to Rosie. “Did you OK that?” He tossed a handful of utensils into the drying rack. “Did they get permits?”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Rosie said. “You should check out the fold. It’s unrecognizable.”

“The fold...” Alice said.

“Their house. They call it the fold.”

“That is so annoying,” Jordan said. He made his way outside and stared punitively in the direction of the fold, his hands on his hips. Noguchi followed him outside and clapped a hand on his shoulder.

“Wait—what’s Dylan’s last name?” Alice said quietly, pulling out her phone.

“Shepherd,” Rosie said. “Why?”

“I just— The Fold. That sounds familiar. I feel like I’ve seen their house. On TikTok, I think.”

“I don’t think so,” Rosie said. She tucked a dishrag into her apron and preheated the oven.

“No, I’m sure it’s her,” Alice said. “She has this series on seasonal partnerships.”

“Seasonal what?”

“Partnerships,” Alice said. “Like, romantic partnerships. She has a different partner every season. It’s an ethical nonmonogamy thing. I don’t get it, and honestly I don’t know why my algorithm thinks I’d be interested.”

Rosie measured a cup of flour into a bowl. “Definitely not her. She doesn’t even have a smartphone. They leave their flip phones in a little wooden box by the front door.”

“Phone hibernation, yes! I’ve definitely seen this.”

Rosie left the measuring cup in the bowl of flour and looked at Alice’s phone.

“Damien and I tried it for like two seconds,” Alice said. “We couldn’t do it. I found that the phone was very hungry for my touch when it came out of hibernation.” She started scrolling, resting her free hand on her stomach. “Here,” she said, showing it to Rosie. “Isn’t this her?”

Rosie recognized Dylan instantly. She blinked a few times, as if doing so would change what was in front of her face. It was a video of Dylan with 624,000 likes. In the video, Dylan’s hands placed a vintage cell phone in a wooden box. Goodnight, the caption read. She snapped, and the video cut to a series of half-second clips that fired in quick succession. The night sky, a roaring fire, a pot of Bolognese, ice going into a glass. #phonehibernation #screenhygiene.

Before Rosie had the chance to psychologically process the video, Alice had swiped to another one.

First step in building a timber-framed coop: getting dressed, the caption read. #outfit #fashioninspo #model #woodwork #carhartt #ad. A Johnny Cash song played in the background of the video. Dylan stood in a pair of boxer briefs and a sports bra, then snapped her fingers and instantly appeared in a pair of Carhartt canvas overalls, Carhartt work boots, and a Carhartt beanie. She looked down at herself in surprise, as though she hadn’t orchestrated the transition. Then she spun around once, picked a saw off the wall, and walked out of frame. Rosie recognized the bed and desk from the bedroom of the fold. And were the boxer briefs the same ones Dylan had worn the night before? She swallowed and let the video play again. “How many of these...”

“Dozens? Hundreds?” Alice said, handing Rosie her phone. “I started getting advertised this stuff around the time you were looking at houses last summer.” She pressed a rolling pin into the pie dough.

“Why did the algorithm send Dylan’s videos to you but not me?”

“I don’t know, maybe it thinks I’m queer because it hears me talking about queer stuff all day at work,” Alice said. “I do like her content.”

Rosie scrolled. Each video had hundreds of thousands of views. The videos seemed to be as much about woodworking as they were about fashion, home design, Dylan’s toned body, and her love life. Each video began with Dylan putting on an outfit.

“What did I miss?”

Rosie spun around. It was Jordan. He and Noguchi had come back inside, and Jordan peered over her shoulder, the ice clinking against his glass. He took Alice’s phone. “Is this—is this who I think it is?” He could not contain his glee. “I knew it,” he said ecstatically. “I fucking knew it. They are such frauds! Noguchi, you have to see this.”

“Give that back. They’re not...” Rosie started, but she didn’t know how to complete the sentence.

“They branded their own fucking house,” Jordan said. He let out a delighted cackle. “Which is actually our house. No—” He turned to Noguchi. “Which is actually our HQ.” He opened the window and stuck his head out, even though the front door was available to him. “Hey, Dylan!” he called before Rosie could stop him. She saw Dylan shade her eyes in the direction of the house. “Come on over for pie! Bring Larky-Lark!”

“Larky-Lark?” Rosie said.

“I’m a little drunk,” Jordan said, shutting the window.