The Doll Between Us

Nobody kissed the doll on purpose.

That was the thing Lily Chen would keep coming back to, later, when she was trying to trace the exact moment her life had detonated quietly and without warning. It hadn't been intentional. It hadn't been a wish, or a test, or a moment of reckless whimsy. It had simply been Tuesday night, and she had been tired, and the doll had been there on the pillow beside her the way it always was, and she had leaned over and pressed her lips to its small cream-colored forehead the same way her grandmother used to press lips to her own forehead when she was small and the world felt too large.

It was habit. It was grief. It was nothing at all.

Or so she thought.

The apartment was the kind of small that real estate listings called "cozy" and friends called "charming" and Lily called "mine," which was the only adjective that mattered. It occupied the upper half of the fourth floor of a building on Creston Avenue that had been built in 1987 and had not been significantly updated since, if the kitchen fixtures were any indication. The walls were the off-white of old paper. The window over the fire escape looked out onto the side wall of the building next door, which someone had spray-painted with a mural of a heron — inexplicably, beautifully — that Lily had decided years ago was a sign of something good.

She lived alone. She had lived alone for three years, since her last roommate, Priya, had gotten engaged and moved across the city to a much nicer apartment with a man named Gerald who made excellent pasta. Lily had been happy for Priya. She had also, privately, cried about it for approximately four hours, which she felt was a reasonable response to the realization that everyone around you was quietly assembling their real lives while you were still waiting to find out where yours was kept.

The doll sat on the pillow beside her every night.

It was small and slightly lumpy, made of cream-colored cotton that had softened over eleven years of handling. Its button eyes were mismatched — one slightly larger than the other, giving it an expression of perpetual mild curiosity. Its hair was brown yarn, knotted in loops that had grown fuzzy with age. It wore, currently, a small dress that Lily had sewn herself from a scrap of blue fabric, because the original outfit had finally disintegrated two years ago and she had refused to let it go undressed.

She called it Mae. After her grandmother.

"Long day," she told it, dropping onto the mattress with the full weight of eight hours of courier work, four flights of stairs, and one deeply uncomfortable conversation with her supervisor, Derek, who had once again implied that her "potential" was being "underutilized" in a way that meant he wanted her to take on more work for the same pay. The doll regarded her with its lopsided gaze. She pulled it close. "Same to you."

She lay there in the dark of her cozy, charming apartment for a long moment, listening to the city outside — the traffic, the distant bass from the bar two blocks over, the particular urban silence that was not silence at all but simply the aggregate of ten thousand lives happening in parallel. She thought about heating up the leftover rice in her refrigerator. She thought about calling Mara. She thought about the email she had not yet sent to the HR department of three different companies whose job postings she had bookmarked four months ago and never applied to.

She thought about her grandmother's hands.

And then, without thinking at all, she turned her head and kissed the doll on its small cream forehead.

"Good night, Mae," she whispered.

The doll, of course, said nothing.

Forty-two floors above street level, in a glass tower that bore his name on a plaque in the lobby, Ethan Wolfe was standing at the head of a conference table that cost more than Lily Chen's annual salary.

This was not a thought he had ever had, because it was not the kind of thought Ethan Wolfe had. He did not compare. He did not consider. He moved forward, always forward, with the focused momentum of a man who had decided at the age of nineteen that sentiment was a liability and had spent the subsequent thirteen years testing and confirming this hypothesis. The conference table was a tool. The boardroom was a tool. The thirty-one people seated around the table — every one of them in a suit that cost more than most people's monthly rent — were, in the most productive sense of the word, tools.

He was mid-sentence.

"The Q3 projections hinge entirely on the Meridian acquisition closing by the fourteenth, which means the due diligence team needs to—"

And then something touched his cheek.

It was not a hand. It was not the brush of a passing object, not the phantom sensation of a muscle twitch or a nerve misfiring. It was warm and deliberate and unmistakably, impossibly —

lips.

Ethan Wolfe stopped speaking.

In the thirteen years since he had taken over his father's struggling investment firm and rebuilt it into one of the most formidable private equity houses in the city, Ethan Wolfe had never, not once, stopped speaking mid-sentence in a board meeting. He had continued speaking through a fire alarm (drill, as it turned out, but still). He had continued speaking through a power outage, through a medical emergency involving a senior VP and what turned out to be a severe allergic reaction to shellfish, through the single worst quarterly report in the company's history. He had continued because stopping was a signal, and signals were vulnerabilities, and vulnerabilities were things other people exploited.

He stopped.

Thirty-one pairs of eyes fixed on him with the attentive anxiety of people who had learned that any deviation from Ethan Wolfe's normal behavior was a harbinger of something significant.

He raised one hand — the gesture of a man collecting himself, nothing more — and touched the left side of his face. His jaw. The specific patch of skin just below his cheekbone where the warmth still lingered, fading even as he pressed his fingers to it.

Nothing there.

Of course nothing there.

What was that?

"Sir?" Spencer, his executive assistant, spoke from the far end of the table. Spencer was thirty-four and unflappable and had worked for Ethan for six years, which meant he had learned to read the precise gradient of his employer's silences. This one, he apparently determined, warranted a gentle prompt.

"Nothing." Ethan lowered his hand. He found his place in his own sentence with the mechanical precision of a man rebooting a system. "Due diligence needs to be completed by the tenth, not the fourteenth. I misspoke. The Meridian acquisition—"

He continued. He did not stop again.

But for the remaining forty minutes of the meeting, in the locked and guarded basement of his mind, in the part of him that he had trained not to speak out loud about anything it noticed, something kept replaying the sensation. Warm. Deliberate. A pressure that had no business being there.

Lips.

He did not believe in the impossible. He had spent his entire adult life engineering a reality in which the impossible did not occur because it had not been adequately planned for. The impossible was simply the insufficiently prepared for.

This was nothing.

He was tired. He had been averaging four hours of sleep per night for the past three weeks, and four hours was not enough for anyone, regardless of what he told his doctor and his board and himself. He was stressed and sleep-deprived and his nervous system had generated a phantom sensation, which was a documented neurological phenomenon, which meant it was explainable, which meant it was over.

It was over.

The meeting ended at nine forty-seven. By nine fifty-one, the conference room had emptied — Ethan had long ago cultivated the habit of concluding meetings so definitively that lingering felt physically uncomfortable. By nine fifty-four, Spencer had delivered the evening summary and departed. By nine fifty-eight, Ethan was alone in his office with a Scotch he wasn't drinking and the city spread out below him like a circuit board lit up against the dark.

He stood at the window for a long time.

He was, by any objective measure, exactly where he had always intended to be. The corner office with the floor-to-ceiling glass. The company bearing his name. The kind of professional reputation that made grown men straighten their spines when he walked into a room. He had built this. He had chosen this. He had traded for it, item by item, the way you traded in a negotiation — something for something, always.

What he had traded, mostly, was the part of himself that noticed things like phantom warmth on his cheek and could not stop noticing.

He touched his face again. Stopped himself. Picked up the Scotch.

His phone buzzed on the desk. He glanced at it. Diana Holt's name on the screen, followed by a message that read: Missed you at the Morrison event tonight. I told them you were detained. You owe me dinner. He set the phone face-down without responding, which was the answer, and Diana, who had known him long enough to understand his language, would read it correctly.

He went back to the window. To the city. To the thing he could not explain.

At ten-sixteen, he did something he had not done in years.

He sat down at his desk, opened his laptop, and typed three words into a search engine.

sympathetic magic — real or myth

He stared at the search bar for a long moment. Then, with the expression of a man who is doing something beneath his own standards and is fully aware of it, he pressed Enter.

The results loaded.

He read for forty minutes.

When he finally closed the laptop and stood and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, what he felt was not relief or dismissal or the clean satisfaction of a question answered.

What he felt, quietly and without any precedent in his experience, was the beginning of something he could not name.

Across the city, in a fourth-floor apartment on Creston Avenue, Lily Chen was already asleep, her arm around a small cream-colored doll, her face finally, briefly, peaceful.

The doll's mismatched button eyes stared at the ceiling.

If you looked very closely — if you were the kind of person who believed in looking closely at things that could not be explained — you might have thought they held the expression of something that had just begun.