Apples Never Fall

“Me too,” said Christina. She bit on the ragged thumbnail she was meant to be leaving alone for her wedding day.

So why, then, were the Delaneys being so cagey?

She said, “Did their mother let them down in some way?”

“Mothers can do that,” said Ethan, and she was wondering if he meant that in a general or specific sense when the arsonist’s mother opened the door, her son’s guilt written all over her exquisitely renovated face.

Chapter 33

LAST OCTOBER

Troy couldn’t make himself care or focus. The market was quiet, but not that quiet. His heart wasn’t in it. He’d made only one trade in the last two hours. That was a signal he should stop for the day, according to his own rules, and rule number one was Follow Your Own Rules.

He looked away from his monitors at the floor-to-ceiling windows where a solitary seagull wheeled across a cloudless pale blue sky. The rippling harbor loomed ahead of him like a landing strip. He’d landed a 747 at Salzburg Airport once. It was a flight-simulator experience. A gift for his thirtieth birthday from his ex-wife. The instructor said he had excellent instincts. Troy was now confident he could land a plane if the pilot got in trouble and the (beautiful, panicked) flight attendant came running from the cockpit begging any passenger with flying experience to come forward.

Could have been an airline pilot. Could have won Wimbledon. Could have been a married soccer dad in the suburbs, who made his mother a grandmother, like she deserved to be, instead of donating his kid to another man, making the other man the soccer dad, standing there on the sidelines, cheering on Troy’s kid, who would be fucking good at soccer, because the Delaneys were good at all sports, not just tennis.

Troy would let his kid play any sport he wanted to play. But not this particular kid, because it wouldn’t be his kid.

It was stupid to get sentimental. If he really wanted a kid he could have one. No problem. Claire had been the one with the problem. Troy had a high sperm count and excellent motility. “That is just so typical,” Claire had said when she read his sperm analysis, back when she still loved him. He’d been relieved. He hadn’t slept the night before they got his results, terrified that the test would reveal a secret hidden failing. His father got his mother pregnant just by looking at her. Of course he did.

Handing over the embryos was the generous, kind, altruistic thing to do, except he couldn’t pretend to be an altruist because if Claire had cheated on him, he would have been vengeful as hell. He would have said, Let those little suckers thaw, give them to science, chuck them in the bin.

He was paying an overinflated price for a not especially satisfying sexual episode with a girl whose name he couldn’t remember, although he remembered her job and her perfume: Pharmaceutical Sales Executive and White Linen. He’d never liked that scent, but now he detested it. He remembered going home afterward in a cab, looking out on rain-sodden city streets, opening the cab window in a fruitless attempt to make the stench of her perfume and his regret go away.

No regrets. That was another of his trading rules. Never waste time thinking about what could have been.

He hadn’t given Claire his answer yet. He’d been holding out hope for a last-minute reprieve: a reason to refuse her. Right now it was dinnertime in Texas. He imagined her sitting down to dinner with her husband. “Any word yet, honey?”

They must hate having their future dreams dependent on him.

The Texan cardiologist would never break Claire’s heart. The guy was a heart specialist after all. He probably treated Claire’s heart with all the specialist loving tenderness she deserved. Troy hoped he did treat her heart tenderly, even as he wished he didn’t.

He wished he hadn’t hurt her. He didn’t understand why he’d done it, except that all through his life he’d been at the mercy of a powerful desire: the desire to blow everything up.

What if I put the tip of my finger against that fragile ornament my mother said not to touch, and not only do I touch, I push? What if, halfway through a boring geography lesson, I stand up and walk out without saying a single word? What if I jump off that bridge with the sign that says NO JUMPING? Take that pill? Go for that impossible shot? What if I pick up a girl at a city bar while my wife is going through IVF to have a baby we both supposedly want? It was like an invisible force took hold of him: Do it, do it, do it.

The girl meant nothing. She was just a girl sitting next to him at a bar, with giant teeth and a harsh laugh. Claire was smarter, funnier, and prettier, her teeth were perfectly sized, and her laugh was beautiful.

His actions were inexplicable. It was all kinds of fucked-up.

“You must have wanted an excuse to get out,” Claire had said, her face ashen. And it was true, he must have wanted an excuse to get out of the relationship, although he wasn’t consciously aware of wanting to get out, but why else had he done it, and more to the point, why had he instantly confessed the moment he got home, before he’d even taken off his shirt? While Claire looked up from her book in their bed and smiled, and the cells of their potential children multiplied and divided in a Sydney clinic? It was called self-sabotage, according to Amy, who was the only one in his family who kind of understood, because she had a tendency toward it herself, although even she took a long time to forgive him for breaking her beloved sister-in-law’s heart.

Enough! Troy slammed both fists on his desk so hard that his three oversized monitors rattled. He did not do this. What was done was done. He walked to the windows of his home office and pressed his forehead against the glass. Every single person in the world who came to his apartment talked about the incredible views, except for his brother. Logan had walked into this room, laughed out loud, clipped Troy on the back of the head, and said, “Jesus, mate.” Maybe that was his way of saying it was incredible, but why couldn’t he just say it was incredible? Why was it funny? Just give him credit for the view, for Christ’s sake. Even their father had said, “Bloody good view.” Although Stan followed it up with, “Hope you can afford it.” Sometimes he wanted to show his dad his bank statements, like a preschooler giving him a finger painting: Look what I did, Daddy. I got rich without tennis, Da

ddy. Except not as rich as Harry fucking Haddad. Troy kept a permanent eye on the dickhead’s net worth.

He went back to his desk, opened his email, typed in Claire’s name, and wrote the message, fast. Dear Claire, I’ve thought about it, it’s fine, go ahead, make it happen, I’ll sign all the forms you need. Love, Troy.

He pressed send. He looked at his hands still resting on the keyboard. What had he just done? Those words were now on a computer screen in Texas. It felt inappropriately futuristic. A message of that significance should have been sent in a handwritten letter that took months to cross the ocean. But everything about this moral dilemma had once been impossibly, laughably futuristic. Frozen microscopic babies waiting to be brought to life.

She could be reading it right now. He tried to imagine his ex-wife’s face. What would she think of the word love?

He would never have said yes if he didn’t still love her.

The thought hit him like a punch in the nose. It wasn’t just about redemption, it was about love. Was the email he just sent his first-ever act of unconditional love? The most unselfish act of his life? To zero out the most selfish one?

His apartment buzzer rang. He walked to the security monitor in a daze.