The Soulmate Equation

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.

It was a much easier way to look at the raw scores—Jess could immediately see trends here that she couldn’t in the table—but because there was so much data, it was clear to her that if this was all River had seen, it would have been almost impossible to decipher that it was nearly identical to a plot he’d seen years ago.

And, most importantly, the information that tipped her off—the run end time, the date, the DNADuo machine—wasn’t included in this plot. This graph only had client numbers, the compatibility score, and, in the lower right corner in tiny print, the date this plot was generated.

Maybe River didn’t know. Hope was a weak light shining on the darkness of her mood. As casually as possible, Jess asked, “Is this the way you always look at the data?”

He laughed quietly. “I’m sure for a mathematician, it’s maddening to not look at actual numbers, but we’ve come to rely on these scatter plots. It’s easier to see outliers this way and to know if we need to rerun the assay for any reason.” He leaned in, pointing to a large cluster of dots in their plot. “See, you can tell that we are particularly well aligned in metabolic genes and immunoglobulin. And our lowest scores seem to be for regulatory proteins, but that’s not a very meaningful conclusion because even those scores are all pretty high. Once you get a score above eighty, most of the plots look similar.”

She swallowed back a relieved gasp. It confirmed that it might not immediately jump out to him that the data had been manipulated. “How do you generate these?”

“This actually is the raw data. Everything in a table is shown here. Tiffany just worked with the Caltech guys to have the neural network create this plot for us as a team because it’s way easier to look at. But we can generate one of these for any couple who matches.”

“So Fizzy would have a million of these,” she said.

He laughed again. “I mean, in theory. We don’t upload these to the apps or even routinely generate them anymore unless requested because the files are huge, but sure, you could theoretically create scatter plots like this comparing you to every other individual in the world. That just wouldn’t be very useful.” He met her eyes, almost shyly. “But of course we did one for our assay. I wanted to look at it really closely. At first because I was skeptical, and then because it was sort of amazing.”

Tears filled her eyes, and she bent to rest her head on the table. Relief washed over her like an analgesic, a paralytic. Jess’s head felt so heavy, and before she could stop it, a sob ripped from her throat.

“Holy— Jess.” River leaned over, pulling her into his arms. “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?”

He’d never called her “sweetheart” before, and it only made her cry harder. She was relieved that he hadn’t been lying to her this whole time. But now she had to tell him that they weren’t a ninety-eight. She was in love with him—and Jess hated how much this was going to hurt him. His trust in David was going to be irreparably damaged. Until she’d come along, GeneticAlly had been River’s entire life.