Chapter One
Madison
The universe doesn't take turns. It waits until you're not looking, hands you everything you ever wanted, and then breaks you in half.
I know this because of a Thursday in March.
I came home between shifts wearing fryer grease and someone else's cigarette smoke and found an envelope in the mailbox. Cream-colored, thick, expensive paper that had no business sitting in a place like ours.
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicinewas embossed across the top.
My hands were shaking by the time I got it open. I read it until the words blurred into shapes. Then I did something I hadn't done in years—I laughed until I cried, or cried until I laughed, alone on a kitchen floor that needed replacing.
And somewhere in the middle of that I looked around.
The radiator in the corner had never worked, not once in two years, and we'd stopped calling the landlord about it sometime in the fall when it became clear he wasn't going to do anything and we weren't going anywhere. Jack had dragged a space heater up from the basement instead. It sat there now, its orange cordcoiled on the floor like a sleeping snake. Another temporary fix in a life made of duct tape and 'maybe next month.'
The window above the sink had a gap along the frame that let the cold in all winter, and we'd stuffed it with a dish towel and pretended that was fine. Everything in this apartment had a workaround. Everything in this life did.
But in my hands was a letter that said that someday, maybe, I wouldn't have to live like this.
I sat there on that floor for a long time, laughing at nothing, at everything, at the absolute absurdity of my name on that letterhead. Madison Clarke. They'd spelled it right and everything.
I’d written the essay after a double shift, squinting through the spiderweb crack on Jack’s laptop screen because mine had finally given up the ghost last semester. I'd picked up extra shifts for two weeks to cover the application fee, lived on peanut butter and whatever the kitchen at Rosie's was willing to send home with me.
Part of me had always known I was good enough. The rest of me had spent twenty-three years waiting to be proven wrong. And here was Johns Hopkins, of all places, telling me I'd been right all along.
The first thing I wanted to do was call Jack.
He didn't pick up. He was probably shoulder-deep in an engine block, his phone vibrating against a workbench across the shop. I sent him a quick text instead.
Call me when you get this. I have news!
I thought about adding more, maybe typing out the whole thing in one breathless message, with capital letters and some punctuation that’d leave no room for doubt. I didn't. I wanted to hear his voice when I told him. I wanted the real thing.
So I just sent those nine words and took a long, deep breath.
I had to be back at Rosie's in forty minutes. I folded the letter carefully, put it on the counter, and went to check the kitchen drawer where we kept loose change. Quarters mostly, a few dimes, one crumpled dollar bill that had been there so long I'd stopped counting it. I smoothed it out anyway and added it to the pile.
It was barely enough, but it’d do. There was a liquor store on the way, and I had enough time to stop in and grab something with bubbles—cheap prosecco, or whatever they had on the bottom shelf. A splurge, sure, but what the hell.
I grabbed my jacket and headed out the door.
* * *
By nine o'clock Jack still hadn't called.
I stood outside Rosie's with my phone in my hand and typed out another text.
Hey, heading home. You there?
I watched the screen for a moment before putting it away.
The night was cold. I walked home with both hands shoved in my pockets, half-expecting my phone to buzz the whole way. It didn't, and the apartment was dark when I got home.
I hit the light switch and stood in the doorway for a moment. No boots by the door. No keys on the counter. Everything exactly as I'd left it, including the letter, still folded on the counter where I'd put it that afternoon.
"Jack?" My voice went nowhere.