Jess tried to think logically. She pushed back the roaring in her ears. Maybe the machines were programmed to begin and end at the same time to reduce certain variables? It wouldn’t be unheard of.

Except on January 29, River had started the assay almost immediately after taking her blood. In fact, he’d double-gloved and rolled up to the fume hood before she’d even left the room. The following morning, he’d texted her, asking for a date, and said the test had been confirmed. But although the date on the printout was right, how was it possible River had the data in the morning if the assay wasn’t complete until 3:45 that afternoon? Did he lie to her that he’d gotten the confirmation? That didn’t sound like River.

“What the fuck?” Jess exhaled the words, confused. I have… I have to be missing something.

Her lungs hurt. Her stomach rolled. Her eyes burned from the strain of her intense focus. She couldn’t blink. And then—her heart seemed to fill with needles—Jess noticed that all three assays were run on the DNADuo 2. She remembered seeing the two machines the night he ran the blood samples and asking about them.

“Are those the DNADuos?”

“Creatively named DNADuo One and DNADuo Two. DNADuo Two is down right now. Getting serviced next week. It’ll be up and running by May, I hope.”

A thought crashed into her head. She was frantic now. Flipping through the respective pages on the two data sets, she scanned down the columns on the two pieces of paper. She tried to find differences in the data sets between her and River’s ninety-eight, and this other couple’s ninety-three.

She couldn’t; they were identical. Every value—as far as she could tell—was exactly the same. It all went blurry the harder she stared. It was too many rows. Too many tiny numbers. It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack while her hair and the haystack were both on fire. And, she thought desperately, for scores this high, maybe most of the raw scores would be identical? What was she missing?

With dread sinking in her chest, Jess registered that the circled numbers on their first data sheet were circled for a reason. Her gaze slid to a penciled oval on the original spreadsheet from January 19.

Jess brought a shaking hand to her mouth. On her and River’s sheet, she saw:

OT-R GeneID 5021 3.5

But on the other couple’s:

OT-R GeneID 5021 1.2

Inside another circle on their original sheet—for the gene PDE4D—Jess and River had a 2.8. Her heart vaulted into her throat. The other couple had a 1.1.

Jess only had the stomach to confirm two more circled values—an AVP of 3.1 on hers and River’s, a 2.1 on the other couple’s; for DRD4, a 2.9 on theirs, a 1.3 on the other couple’s.

As far as Jess could see, the only values that were different—maybe only thirty in the entire data set of nearly 3,500—were the ones that had been circled in their first DNADuo. To draw attention to them. If it weren’t for the identical time stamp and the DNADuo 2 mystery, Jess could have told herself a lie, that those values were circled because they differentiated her and River from the other assay. But she knew they weren’t circled because they were special. They were circled to keep track of which ones had been altered. Someone had, on purpose, changed a compatibility score of ninety-three into a ninety-eight.