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Wil had been determined that Jasper Greene know she was going to become what she’d told him she would be, which was essentially whathewould have been if he’d never gotten sick. She would be Jasper Greene on a bigger stage than Green Bay, the kind of stage that was presidentially appointed and involved Beanie Greene wearing vintage Bob Mackie and Wil going to parties with senators’ kids.
One of the first things Wil had been forced to grapple with after she got her genetic testing results, once the euphoria wore off, after she’d taken ibuprofen for the headache she’d gotten from crying, was the realization that now she could get back to going after her dream.
Except that she absolutely didn’t want to.
She’d been right to avoid this meeting. She should stand up and walk right back out of Kettle’s. She would, if it weren’t for the fact that she had never been able to resist the challenge of being put on the spot by smart people asking probing questions.
In this way, at least, she was exactly like her father.
“Maybe I don’t have precisely the same idea my dad did,” she said.
Cord nodded. “Good.” He didn’t offer up anything else, not even a clear facial expression.
Okay, then.She was clearly here to prove her mettle to these oldsters. Wil rummaged around in her brain to see if she could pull out exactly what her mettle looked like. Or sounded like.
Mike Jerry cleared his throat. “What we have here, everyone,” he said, “is a graduate of Michigan, summa cum laude in pre-law, one of the point-zero-one percent of undergraduates who had an article published in their law journal, who was admitted to Michigan Law, Stanford Law, and a large smattering of ranked-eleven-through-twenty schools, and is working as an insurance adjuster and entertainer.”
“Wow,” Wil said. “Jump right in, Mike.”
“So goes Beanie, so goes my nation.” Mike tipped his tea mug at Wil.
“Did you defer?” Sam asked.
“Sure. Eight years ago. Deferred again seven years ago. I think I still have some first-look consideration?”
Sam leaned back in his chair. He was not assessing her as anentertainernow. There was some brain there behind the hotness, and it was pointed at her. “Can I ask you a personal question?”
“I don’t have the mutation.” This wasn’t information Wil would normally volunteer, but kissing so many people had made her more attuned to people’s faces and the shifts in their expressions, and she could see that Sam Rafferty had big enough feelings about this question that she wanted to spare him having to ask it.
Although maybe that wasn’t so much Wil’s being hyperattuned to this guy’s emotional landscape as it was her own reluctance to let anyone feel anything about the question of whether or not she had Huntington’s.
When Wil was eighteen—the age it was recommended she get tested—her dad didn’t have a lot of time left, and she couldn’t imagine getting tested while Jasper Greene was dying. Having to tell him that what was killing him would kill her, too, eventually? No.
After he was gone, she still couldn’t face those feelings. Even thinking about the person at the hospital or lab or office who’d have to call her up on the phone to give her the test result, she couldn’t facetheirfeelings.
Until Beanie pointed out to her, at Christmastime last year, that Wil was literally never going to be able to face the feelings. Beanie lost it a little, crying, and reminded Wil that after losing her husband and best friend, she wouldfucking like to prepare herself.
Then Wil stopped thinking about lab workers and started thinking about her mom. She scheduled her test for January.
She still didn’t know what to make of the fact that the results surprised her.
Or of the fact that her mother’s request had made Wil realize that Beanie washerbest friend. Sticking around Green Bay so many years had meant that she’d spent a lot of time with her mom that they might not have otherwise had together. They’d done the hard things, like sorting through Jasper’s possessions and clearing out his office. They’d invented their own traditions and rituals, like going to the Harry Houdini exhibit in Appleton every year and watching all of Katie’s awards shows together.
She’d gotten to know Beanie as an adult, and what she’d realized was that she had a mind a lot more like her mom’s than she’d ever understood. Where her dad took in the world in the broad, systemic strokes of a warrior, her mom was always looking closelyat the minutiae for a way to solve a problem that everyone else had overlooked. It was why she was every attorney in Green Bay’s secret weapon. She could find a single leaf on a tree that explained the whole fucking forest.
So could Wil. She just didn’t know how to turn that into a future that felt like the right fit for her—and she also didn’t know what any of that had to do with the fact that she’d spent the past year absorbed with her project of kissing strangers on the internet.
Although she was starting to have a few ideas about that.
“Do you like being an insurance adjuster?” Sam asked.
“I actually love it.”
“Then tell me what you love about being an insurance adjuster.”
Wil noticed herself sitting up straighter in response to these rapid-fire questions. She was definitelylikingthis. “I listen, document, solve complex problems simply, usually with money, and talk to different people every day, most of them interesting for some new way they’re weird.”
Sam grinned. “That’s what I loved about criminal corporate law.”