“Diane,” I say, “it’s time for you to go.”

Other than Alex, no one’s ever been in this apartment before. I haven’t had a single guest in two years. And these intimate encounters, it’s like they’re not just in my apartment but in my brain, whispering demands.

“But I came to tell you something,” Diane says, straightening. “It’s about the lab. I’m going to be on the PMDD team. I’m one of the two.”

And there it is. I nod, hide the wince expertly. Hide everything, my face still, and still hungover.

“Well, good for you,” I say. “That’s goddamned wonderful for you. You always land on your feet, don’t you, Diane? On floors paved with gold.”

“And you,” she says. “The other one is you.”

She blinks twice. My, does she flash those doe eyes at me.

“That’s not true,” I say.

“It’s you,” she repeats, a hint of a smile there. As close as Diane gets. “It’s both of us.”

I don’t say anything.

“Now do you see what I mean about fate?”

I stand in the kitchenette, waiting for the water to boil in the dented kettle. I’ve never made tea in my life, but the last tenant left a faded box of Red Rose in the cupboard and I need time. I need to breathe.

“So Severin told you this,” I say, returning to her with clinking mugs. “She just decided to tell you before anyone else. That it’s you and me.”

Diane nods, taking the mug. “She told me I’d be on the team when she offered me the job in the lab.”

Of course. An incentive. An enticement, to lure Diane from a very prestigious lab to ours.

“Did she say anything about the others? Maxim or Alex?”

“Alex? The slippery one with the expensive watch?” Diane sets her mug on the table. The way she holds herself, so carefully. Like someone who always sees herself at the same time as she sees everything else. Who always thinks, Careful, careful.

“Yes. I mean, I guess.” My fingers lift to my temples. “Slippery?”

Diane shrugs. “She never mentioned him.”

“Oh.” And I admit, in that moment, the fast-diminishing Alex, the Alex with the secret family connection he concealed from me, diminishes even more.

“But Diane, why is…why are you and Dr. Severin…”

“What matters is this: she wants you.”

I don’t let that sit with me, don’t let myself be flattered by it. It feels like a trick.

“What makes you think I’d ever work with you?” I ask, my mug clattering against the sofa’s rattan arm, the tea spattering red on me, on her.

“If you’re the Kit I know,” she says, “nothing would stop you.”

“What does that mean?” I say, my voice hard.

She looks at me. “It means you’re strong.”

We’re quiet for a moment. Her gaze wanders to the fat stack of papers on the coffee table. The case studies I’d been reading.

“Do you think it’s true?” Diane asks.

“What?”

She nods toward the case studies. “That PMDD made these women do those things? Drive into light poles, shake their babies, throw kitchen knives at their husbands.”

“We don’t know yet,” I say. “But maybe. Some of it. Some of them.” I pause again. “Do you?”

She looks at me and something in her face—I feel a flash of something old, a memory of an ancient nightmare, Diane under my bed, shaking it by the springs.

“No,” she says, turning away from me. “I used to but not anymore.

“There’s so many things,” she adds, “we don’t understand, even about ourselves.”

“Especially ourselves,” I say.

There’s another long pause. A standoff of sorts.

My brain is doing dances. What is this really about? I wonder. Because you never know with Diane until it hits you in the face.

“This isn’t how I wanted this to go,” she says, rising. “I thought you’d be glad. I thought this is what we always wanted.”

What we always wanted; there’s a hoary, uncomfortable truth to it.

That’s when a snaky, swampy thought comes to me.

“You did this,” I say. “You made it happen so that I wouldn’t tell. So Dr. Severin—so no one will ever know.”

Her eyebrows lift.

“You won’t tell.” Her voice low as a man’s.

“I don’t owe you anything,” I say.

She slides on her coat, still wet and carapace-dark.

“I had nothing to do with Dr. Severin’s decision,” she says, reaching for her shoes, which are sitting in a near lagoon on my carpet. “But I know you would never tell for a lot of reasons.”

“I don’t owe you anything,” I say, louder this time. “Not a goddamned thing.”

But Diane only nods, as if crossing off an item on a to-do list or recording a final measurement in her lab notebook.

“I guess you’re afraid,” she says.

“Afraid?” I say, moving toward her now, following her to the door. “I’m not afraid. Afraid of what?”

Buttoning her coat, she doesn’t answer for a long moment, letting me wonder into those endless eyes of hers, making me remember all kinds of things. I can smell Diane’s shampoo, like strawberries and dew, and I can feel her close and remember things.

I shut my eyes for a second and picture myself lying on the carpet, my mouth open, my head jerking, crying out without making a sound.

“Afraid of me,” she says, finally, moving to the door. There’s an unspeakably sad look on her face that I don’t know what to do with.

“I’m not afraid of you,” I say, my voice suddenly rough, hangover hoarse, “but maybe you should be afraid of me. I’m the one who knows what you are. You should be afraid of me.”

But she has already opened the door, crossed the threshold. I stand in the doorway, bare feet curled. I call out after that swaying black raincoat, like a snake’s tail.

“What could you do?” I shout after her. “What could you possibly do?”

She turns, pauses at the stairwell door.

“Nothing,” she says, a look enigmatic and impossible, just like she is. “Bye, Kit.”

The rest of the night, lying uselessly on my sheet-stripped bed, the smell of strawberry everywhere now, I can do nothing but think.

In the lab, everything is separable. Extraction, distillation, centrifugation, crystallization, decantation. Leaching. A funnel, filter paper, a flask, the vacuum outlet under the hood. Feeling for the suction at the end of the tube. The solvent passing through the paper. Whatever is left behind is what counts. Let’s pretend it’s gold. It couldn’t be gold—gold doesn’t work like that—but let’s say it is. In this moment, for me, the PMDD slot is the gold. I want to feel it in my hand. I don’t want to think about that dirty slurry of sand, salt, chalk left on the bottom. I only want to think about that gold—flake, nugget, or flour, raw and heavy.

I want that gold.

I’ve been waiting so long. I’m not like my old man with his lottery tickets and his Herbalife franchise, the Diabetes Solution Kit bought from the man on the TV. I’ve worked for it, neck forever crooked now, eyestrain, fingers numb from pipetting, wrist ache.

I’ve been working for this forever, for a decade anyway, and finally it’s happening: I’m on the PMDD team. Me. I’m one of the two. She picked me. She picked me, as she picked me a dozen years ago, choosing me from a thousand applicants. Dr. Lena Severin, mouth like a razor, brain like a god’s, an ion pump where her heart should be. She picked me.

Does it matter if Diane helped make it happen? Does it matter if I’d have to work side by side with her, shoulders nudged close? Elbow-deep in the purple marrow of the PMDD study?

I try to imagine Diane and Dr. Severin and me in a sturdy dinghy amid the hormonal sea of PMDD, hurling lifesavers, raising breakwaters. Waving from jetties, promising rescue.

So long working, toiling, living monkishly in strip-mall apartments, eating old salad from Styrofoam boxes, English muffin pizzas in the toaster oven, my dad’s famous mayonnaise sandwiches—all to get a chance to be a part of the Thing.

If I’m honest, who deserves it more?

Not Alex, who all his life has had anything he ever wanted and a hundred things he never thought to want.

I want that gold.

So give it to me.

But, Alex said, that familiar sickly look on his face, the one I once wore, maybe still wore. But you told me something really big and I…

Alex, looming and lurching and knowing.

He could ruin everything, couldn’t he? But would he?

I think about what Serge said. And Diane: Alex, the slippery one.

But what could happen even if he did tell? That just opens up another slot. She wouldn’t unpick me because of Diane, would she? Guilt by association?

Scandal is bad for science, Kit. We have enough controversy. This study is controversial enough.

Or: Kit, you are faithless. A lab depends on loyalty. We have no space for a Benedict Arnold.

Or: Kit, you are a coward. I do not want cowards working for me.

Let’s be honest: there are many, many reasons she would no longer want me.

At one a.m., the texts come:

Listen, the text from Alex reads. Then two more:

I’ve been thinking a lot about it and I have to tell Dr. Severin.

ASAP.

They come like that, in three sharp thrusts.

Tell her what? I type, fingers tight. You don’t know anything.

I’ll be clear that it’s secondhand. Don’t worry, I won’t name you.

You CANNOT do this, saying the words as I type them. I was drunk. You’ve got it wrong.

He doesn’t reply. After ten minutes, I call him directly, but it goes straight to voice mail.

“Alex, I was lying,” I say into his voice mail.

“I was drunk and I made it up. I was jealous of her. I always have been.”

My voice shaking now. It seems so funny to say those words.

“Alex, listen, you can’t do this, okay? Call me.”

But he doesn’t call me at all.