Hold Me by Courtney Milan
A real password, a good password, is a secret that you don’t even really tell yourself. If someone stuck little bamboo spears under your fingernails, you wouldn’t be able to spell it out. A good password is something you know in your fingers, not your head, and you can’t say it aloud, not even if you want to.
I keep secrets the way I store passwords: I hold them inside me, away from words, away from my conscious mind, away from all possibility that I will blurt out the truth.
I’ve told Tina about Peter. I’ve even told her the truth. Peter was my father’s best friend. He was the chief financial officer at Cyclone. He was like a second parent to me.
Secrets are funny. If you say them aloud in the right way, people don’t hear them. When I tell people that my father’s CFO was like a second parent to me, they classify him somewhere between a mentor or a high school coach.
A good password is stored in muscle memory. And all my secrets are stored in my flesh. Half my life is encrypted, hidden behind passwords, behind conversations that I can’t have about secrets that are not mine to tell. Not to my therapist. Not to my girlfriend.
I’ve told everyone the same thing: Peter was like a second parent to me. I’ve never said that he was like a mentor or a high school coach. I said that he was like a second parent. Even Tina didn’t hear what I had actually said.
She rummages through her purse, her head bent. Tina is the best thing that could have happened to me. She’s down to earth and rational. Without her, I wouldn’t know how much I didn’t know. She’s wearing a T-shirt and jeans—appropriate for a long drive down—but her hair spills around her as she bends her head over her purse, a dark silk cloud that dresses her up into something more beautiful than anything I’ve seen before. With her…
She unlocks the door and steps inside. “Hello? Mom?”
I can hear her mother in the kitchen singing along to B.B. King—a made-up version of lyrics.
“Hello?” she calls a little louder. “Mom?”
The radio shuts off.
“Tina?” Her mother pads out into the front room. There’s a strong family resemblance, only slightly hidden by the decades between them. Tina’s a few inches taller than her mother, which means that her mother is tiny indeed. But her mother has only a few threads of gray hair. They have the same nose, the same eyes.
Her mother’s eyes light up when she sees her daughter.
Mrs. Chen swiftly crosses the distance to her daughter and gives her a hug. “You were supposed to call when you were an hour away.”
“It’s my fault,” I put in swiftly. “I was distracting her.”
Mrs. Chen turns to me. “Blake.” She gives me a hug, too. “Always distracting. It’s good. Tina needs someone to distract her. She’s so serious.”
Tina almost—but doesn’t—sigh.
Mrs. Chen continues. “Mabel is at band practice still. Your father is out with his mahjong group.”
Tina frowns dubiously. “Since when does Dad play mahjong?”
“I know.” Mrs. Chen makes a face. “I went one time, but Zhu Yen makes up all the rules. When I complained, he just said, ‘Oh, well, that’s how it’s played in Taiwan.’”
“Gosh,” Tina says with a straight face. “Those Taiwanese interlopers.”
“In any event,” Mrs. Chen continues, “after I came armed with print-outs from the internet, all over the world, they threw me out. Too much rules-lawyering, they said.”
I nod in what I hope looks like sympathy. “How terrible. I can’t imagine anyone saying such a thing about you?”
Mrs. Chen detects my sarcasm and pokes me in the ribs. “Don’t be smart to me. It’s bad luck.”
“Says who?”
“I read it on the internet.” She says this with no sense of irony at all. “Oh, and Tina? Your fat white friend is here. She said she needed to talk to you. She’s waiting in your room.”
Tina grimaces. “Mom.”
“What? Should I have had her wait out here?”
“I’ve told you a million times. Her name is Bethany. Bethany. Don’t call her—”
“But she is fat. How is it—”
“You know what?” Tina sets her purse on the counter. “We’re not going to have this conversation where she can hear it. I’ll explain later.” Tina takes my hand and pulls me toward the room that she shares with her younger sister.
“So,” I say in a low voice, “I gather your mom calls me the skinny white boyfriend to her friends?”
Tina lets out a little snort. “Uh. No. You’re my rich white boyfriend.”
“Oh.”
“We were going to have drinks with Bethany after dinner, but honestly, she was kind of freaked out at the prospect of meeting you. She probably just came over to get it over with. She’s really nice, though. You’ll like her.” Tina pushes open the door to her room.
“Hey, Bethany. Sorry about…”
The woman who is sitting at the chair at the desk stands as the door opens. Her hair is a wavy blond. She is voluptuous pin-up model pretty, with bright red lipstick. She’s wearing something vintage and blue. And for some reason, when she looks at meI can’t look away.
Tina stops short in her tracks. “You’re not Bethany.”
“I’m sorry,” the woman who is apparently not Bethany says. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t realize your mom thought I was someone else, until she did, and then it felt super-awkward to correct her. She told me to wait here and…I really need to talk to you.” Not-Bethany wrings her hands together.
Tina’s shoulders have gone straight. She steps back, as if making sure I’m still behind her.
We might have just argued in the car, but I’m with her. I put my hand on her elbow, reassuring her. I’m here. I won’t let anything happen to you. It’s going to be okay.
“Who are you?” Tina’s voice is cold.
“Ellie.” She’s talking to Tina, but she keeps looking at me. “I’m Ellie Wise.” She licks her lips and looks at me more earnestly.
Maybe I should know her from Cyclone. My dad never forgets a face. I’m not as good as he is. Something about Ellie seems distinctly familiar, somehow, but I don’t know what. I command my brain to giving up whatever distant memory tickles me. My brain doesn’t comply.
Ellie shuts her eyes and exhales slowly. “Shit. You don’t know who I am.”
“Am I supposed to?” Tina asks.
I’m supposed to. There is something about her that I can’t quite put my finger on. Something that raises the hair on the back of my neck, like a memory of a ghost.
“My mother is Ginny Wise.” Her gaze slides to mine again. “She’s in the hospital. I’m sorry. I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m just really, really nervous. You don’t know who that is?”
I shake my head.
She swallows. “It’s okay. I have a plan B. I always have a plan B.” She crosses the room to me. She’s somewhere between me and Tina in height, and this close…
Yeah, I feel like I do know her. Like there’s something about the shape of her face that reminds me…
It reminds me, strangely enough, of a password.
Secrets are like passwords. You store them in your flesh. You don’t give voice to them, not ever. My dad involved me in every aspect of the company from basically the time I was born, and that means I know all about secrets. By the time I was five years old, I was giving interviews on television. This is how you keep secrets: you don’t stand still. I learned to move my hands if I wanted to tell someone about the new phone Cyclone was working on, to walk around if I wanted to talk about our latest operating system additions. If you think about the feel of fabric against your hands, or the placement of your feet, you can push the urge to tell your secrets right out of your mind. By the time I was five, I was keeping all kinds of things under wraps.
Right now, looking at Ellie, I feel the urge to run. To get out of here, before something I’ve never said, something I never even let myself think, something that’s stored in my mus
It’s too late.
The woman who isn’t Bethany holds out a shaking hand to me. “My name is Eleanor Wise.” Her voice trembles. “And I’m pretty sure I’m your older sister.”
Other Books by Courtney
The Cyclone Series
Trade Me
Hold Me
Find Me
What Lies Between Me and You
Keep Me
Show Me
* * *
The Worth Saga
Once Upon a Marquess
Her Every Wish
After the Wedding
The Devil Comes Courting
The Return of the Scoundrel
The Kissing Hour
A Tale of Two Viscounts
The Once and Future Earl
The Brothers Sinister Series
The Governess Affair
The Duchess War
A Kiss for Midwinter
The Heiress Effect
The Countess Conspiracy
The Suffragette Scandal
Talk Sweetly to Me
The Turner Series
Unveiled
Unlocked
Unclaimed
Unraveled
Not in any series
A Right Honorable Gentleman
What Happened at Midnight
The Lady Always Wins
The Carhart Series
This Wicked Gift
Proof by Seduction
Trial by Desire
Author’s Note
Authors sometimes talk about the book of their heart. Hold Me is the book of my gigantic unending nerdiness, more so than any other book I’ve written. It combines my love for technogadgetry with my love for science fiction, quantum mechanics, and my three years in the Berkeley chemistry department. Writing Jay and Maria was intensely, ridiculously fun.
For those who are wondering about the things mentioned peripherally in this book, most of the technology is real. Quantum computation is real (although in its infancy). Angela Choi’s chickenosaurus really is happening (this is a link to more). There really are people talking about bringing back the wooly mammoth and other species (another link). To the best of my knowledge, I haven’t found any sharks that have had green fluorescent protein spliced into their genes…but there have been glow-in-the-dark rabbits. And while we can’t 3D bioprint spiders (yet) (shiver), we’re getting to the point where we might be able to create organs. There is an impending helium shortage.
It is both weird and exciting to live in the future, and here I am—in mid-October of 2016—really hoping that we get to it.
A few notes on incredibly arcane things: I mentioned briefly the physics/chemistry dichotomy, and that what counted as “physics” in the UK would be chemistry here. This is drawn from something I learned as a graduate student. In Europe, much of statistical physics falls into physics departments. In the US, it falls in chemistry. The historical reason I was given for this (and I have never found a source other than word-of-mouth from people who were there at the time) was that the US got a ton of top caliber scientists who fled World War II—so many, that the physics departments filled up on nuclear and quantum scientists. Those who fell in the statistical physics field ended up filling out chemistry departments.
So if you want to know Jay’s full background, he got a PhD was in theoretical statistical physics—one of the non-experimental fields where you could legitimately manage a three-and-a-half-year PhD. (It would be unheard of in some other disciplines). Partway through this program, Jay attended a month-long course run by the EU in Les Touches, in France, where he met Vithika Chaudhary, who at the time was another theoretical physicist up at Edinburgh. When they touched base at another conference He did a postdoc with someone who was doing laser work to nail down the experimental side of things. Vithika now does theory, and he does experimental verification.
I don’t know how widespread the advice that Jay’s former principal investigator gave him really is (do excellent research, adequate service, and passable teaching), but since I heard it from about five people in a much less research-oriented field, I assume that it would not be out of line based on where he was. The actual line I repeatedly heard when I was in science (in the Berkeley Chemistry department, no less) was that it didn’t matter if you taught badly because the good students would learn anyway. Not everyone believed that, but it was probably fifty-fifty.
Finally, I was originally going to give Jay an experience that I have not had, but that someone close to me had once had—namely, winning a MacArthur Genius Grant fellowship (not the real name). I did a little poking around, and decided that he was way too early in his career to be awarded one. It just wouldn’t make sense. So I gave Jay another experience my older sister once had—being told that she’d get twenty percent of the grants she applied for, and then getting them all. Thanks, Tami.
* * *
A very tiny part of this book stems from something that happened to me as a first year graduate student. Every new physical chemistry graduate student was drafted into teaching lab sections for the introductory chemistry class.
Chem 1A at the time was co-taught by a professor and a lecturer. They were experimenting with multimedia presentations, online components, and video clips to spice up the class. At one point in that first year, the lecturer showed a video clip from a James Bond movie where the Bond girl du jour was a nuclear scientist.
The lecturer made a comment to the entire class that this Bond girl didn’t look like a scientist because of her boobs. (Sadly, I’m downplaying the crudity of the comment he actually made.)
The female graduate student instructors—there were quite a few of us—exploded. We told him in no uncertain terms that he’d messed up and needed to recant and apologize to the class.
The next day, that lecturer stood up and told the class that he apologized for sending the message that women could not be scientists. He had only said what he did, he explained, because he found it unbelievable that she could be a scientist and look the way she did. Women could be scientists, he said, and his only point was that scientists just wouldn’t be the ones with big perky boobs who wore makeup.
I don’t think he ever understood why this apology didn’t help.
But… I actually needed to have that conversation myself. It sucked to hear those words. It was wonderful to have my fellow graduate students affirm over and over why women—all women, any women—deserved respect. And I listened and learned and discovered that I’d had my own internalized issues that I needed to address.
I hope I’ve been doing better since.
Acknowledgments
I’m going to forget a million people in this acknowledgments section, and I apologize in advance.
Lindsey Faber, Martha Trachtenberg, Rawles Lumumba, Eliza Stefaniw—thanks so much for everything you did to make this book better. Louisa Jordan stepped in and helped me with the most annoying part of book construction, and I owe her an eternal debt of gratitude. Thanks to Tami for reading my mind when I asked her to send me over a grant proposal, any grant proposal, because I needed to see how they were structured.
I’m deeply grateful to my many, many friends who have held my hand through good and bad times. Bree, Alyssa, Alisha, Rebekah, Tessa, Leigh, Carey, Brenna, Julio, all the Northwest Pixies who listened to me talk about this book when it was in its infancy, Rose and Olivia, who heard about the version of this book that eventually ended up vanishing… My list is endless and I’m so sorry if I left you off. It’s because my memory is terrible.
Thanks also for Michael Nielsen’s (sadly unfinished) (no, I’m really sad it’s unfinished) YouTube course, entitled Quantum Computing for the Determined. If you want to take it, it’s here. It’s sadly incomplete, but got me up to speed enough to remind me of all the quantum mechanics I’d forgotten so that I could vaguely muddle through his book, which promptly ended up not showing up in this book at all, but oh well, I had fun.
Deirdre Saoirse Moen answered questions about what a product release cycle workload looks like behind the scenes for a company like Cyclone *cough* which is of course not like any other company on the planet, including any other company *cough*Apple*cough that she might have worked for.
Denise Brogan-Kator…thank you for everything. My everything here encompasses so much that I’m not even going to try. But thank you.
To the mathematicians scientists who poured so much effort into shaping me—Adam, Mark, Jack, Bettye Anne, Bob—my undying gratitude. I left one of you off that initial list. For DNMNC—every so often, I think about where my life has gone since I left your lab, and I wonder what would have happened if I’d realized sometime around the summer of my second year that my persistent unhappiness and malaise was depression, not dissatisfaction.
I honestly don’t know. But I think of everywhere I’ve been and everything I’ve done, and I feel incredibly lucky. The person who came to a grinding halt in the Pitzer Center basement is the same person who got to clerk for Sandra Day O’Connor and write romance novels and here we are, almost full circle. It’s been the grandest adventure, and still, I look back on moving through the Little Green Book and the White Set of Notes with affection. And, David, if you’re wondering, and I am 100% positive you are not because how would you do that, Maria’s computer model mentioned in chapter three is a modified Ising Model.
Of course it’s an Ising Model. It’s always an Ising Model. I came up with a computer simulation to model the diffusion of free speech for a class while I was in law school, and if anyone ever tells you that, I’m positive that you’ll nod your head and agree that in fact, this should also be an Ising Model.