He seemed to hear his own rambling and stopped abruptly, blushing.

Self-conscious River was too much to handle. Jess shoved fondness away. “You are deeply nerdy.”

“I’m just saying,” he said, laughing self-deprecatingly, “if actual emotional compatibility tanked at higher DNADuo numbers, it would narrow our range of possible matches, and make it harder to argue that we’d been binning them the right way.”

“But that isn’t what happened,” Jess said. “Right? They’re all together and happy.”

“The ones we know of, yeah. But like I said, there’s only a handful at the top of the scale.”

He sat down at the fume hood, pulling on a fresh pair of gloves, spraying them with alcohol, and pulling on a second pair over the first.

He wasn’t leaving anything to chance. Even Jess knew enough to know he could do this sample prep out on the lab bench, but she wasn’t surprised he was using sterile technique. Still, the anxiety building in her stomach had reached a boiling point: she would need to find a way to explain it if the results came back ninety-eight again.

Even if it was starting to feel like River Peña might not be the worst man alive.

Jess lifted her chin to the two identical hulking machines on the other side of the room. “Are those the DNADuos?”

He followed her attention briefly and nodded. “Creatively named DNADuo One and DNADuo Two.” She could hear his smile. “DNADuo Two is down right now. Getting serviced next week. It’ll be up and running by May, I hope. You’re welcome to stay and hang out,” he added, “but the assay takes eight hours, so the data won’t be analyzed until tomorrow morning.”

“A wild Friday night for you?” she joked.

But with his back to her, she couldn’t tell if he even cracked a smile. His posture took the shape of renewed focus. “I’m usually here anyway.”

“Spoken like a true dream boyfriend.”

He scoffed—appreciating her joke just about as much as she expected him to. Jess realized she was being politely dismissed. Standing, she pushed her sleeve back down. “Think I’ll head home to Juno.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said without turning around. “I’ll call either way.”

ELEVEN

MOM, DID YOU know the first roller coaster was built to keep people away from brothels?”

Jess dragged her eyes away from Google to focus on her pajama-clad seven-year-old, hanging upside down over the back of the couch. Her hair was nearly to her waist, and Pigeon had made herself a nice little nest where it pooled on the cushion. “Hello, small human. How do you know what a brothel is?”

Juno peeked at her from behind her book. “I heard it.”

She lifted her chin to what Juno was reading. “Your library book about lizards mentions brothels?”

“No, it was in a movie I watched with Pops.”

Jess leaned an elbow on the dining table next to her abandoned bowl of oatmeal and slid her gaze over to Pops sitting innocently in the lounger. He scanned his crossword puzzle, saying casually, “It was on some history channel.” He flipped a page. “Practically a documentary.”