Can you come over?

He answered immediately, almost like he’d been waiting with his phone in his hand:

Yes. Now?

Now is good.

She hit Send and then immediately replied again.

Wait.

She typed as fast as she could because she knew the Wait had probably sent him panic-spiraling.

This may sound strange, but did you ever see our raw data?

Of course.

Jess chewed her thumbnail as she considered how to phrase what she wanted to say next without giving him time to prepare an excuse if he had been in on the data fabrication all along. She wanted to be able to read the truth on his face. On the other hand, if he had a copy of the data at home, she wanted him to bring it.

Luckily, River saved her the trouble of phrasing the question.

I have the plot here. Want me to bring it over?

Jess exhaled a slow, hot stream of tension.

That would be great.

I should have offered that ages ago. I’m sorry. Is that what this is about?

She chose not to answer this.

Are you leaving now?

Yes.

HE LIVED ONLY ten minutes away, but River was at her door in eight. Before, if he’d shown up at her apartment after Juno was asleep, Jess would have been in his arms immediately. But tonight, they both seemed to know that affection was on hold.

Wordlessly, he stepped inside, breathless from what Jess could only guess was a jog from his car. “Hey.”

She swallowed back a sob that seemed to rise out of nowhere. “Hey. How was the rest of the interview?”

He nodded, wiping a hand over his forehead, still catching his breath. “Good. Yeah, I think it was good. Is Fizzy okay?”

Shaking her head, Jess walked over to the dining table and sat down, shoulders slumped. “Rob is married.”

River slowly removed his messenger bag from his shoulder, setting it down on the table. “You’re kidding.”

“No. And I guess they just sent in his DNADuo kit.”

River winced. “Shit.”

And then they fell quiet. The proverbial elephant was standing directly on top of them. With a mumbled “Well…” River pulled out a sheet of paper from his bag and handed it to her. It was well-loved, wrinkled and worn, like it’d been picked up and put down again and again, studied a thousand times.

“Our data.” He reached up, wiping his forehead again. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

The colorful scatter plot was printed in a landscape view and took up the entire page. A masterful display of computational skill, and a statistician’s best friend: principal component analysis. After only a handful of seconds, Jess could tell it captured every data point she saw on the tables in David’s office.

The plot had two axes: The vertical Y-axis was labeled zero to four—the composite scores Jess was already familiar with. The horizontal X-axis had twelve different labels. She assumed they represented the categories of the gene families included in the DNADuo: Neuroendocrine, Immunoglobulin, Metabolic, Signal Transduction, MHC Class I/II, Olfactory, Regulatory Proteins, Transporters, Heat-Shock, SNARE, Ion Channel, and FGF/FGFR. And on the graph itself, there were thousands of tiny dots, seemingly one for each of their scores on each individual gene, color-coded and clustered by category.