Katharine McGee - The Thousandth Floor

“It’s okay,” Eris said softly, though clearly it wasn’t. Her eyes darted nervously around the apartment. Where was her dad?

“No, it’s not okay.” Caroline took a deep breath, and pulled back to look Eris squarely in the eye. Mascara-filled tears etched black rivers down her face. “I’m so sorry.”

“What happened?” Eris scooted back from her mom to sit upright, the movement brusquer than she’d intended. “Where’s Dad?”

“He … left.” Caroline looked down, studying the hands clasped tight in her lap, the crumpled folds of her magnificent crimson dress.

“What do you mean, he left ?”

“Remember that DNA test you took today?”

Eris nodded impatiently. Of course she remembered; she’d taken countless tests, given a cheek swab and peed on a stick, and signed so many old-fashioned paper documents with a real ink pen that her hand had cramped with the unfamiliar movement.

Wordlessly Eris’s mom tapped the coffee table, which, like all the surfaces in their apartment, had touch-screen capabilities. A few quick swipes and she’d pulled an attachment from her message queue. Eris leaned forward to look.

Her DNA was mapped there in all its glory, its strands an unrealistic bubblegum pink, but Eris’s eyes were already skimming past that, to the jumble of medical words and bar charts below. She knew they’d run her DNA against her dad’s, which was already on file, yet she couldn’t process what she was seeing now. What did it all have to do with her?

Her eyes caught on a single line at the bottom—percentage match: 0.00%—and she reached out a hand to steady herself. An ugly, sticky realization was closing around her throat.

“I don’t believe this.” She sat up straighter, her voice gaining volume. “The lab messed up the sequencing. We need to ping them back, get them to redo it.”

“They did redo it. It’s not wrong.” It seemed as if her mom was talking from very far away, as if Eris were underwater, or buried under a mountain of sand.

“No,” Eris repeated blindly.

“It’s true, Eris.”

The finality in Caroline’s tone made Eris cold all over. And then she understood why her DNA wasn’t a match, why her mom wasn’t acting more surprised. Because Eris wasn’t her father’s daughter, after all.

Her mom had cheated on her dad, and kept it a secret for the past eighteen years.

Eris shut her eyes. This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be. If she kept her eyes closed it would go away, like a bad dream.

Her mom reached out a hand and Eris shot to her feet, knocking over the coffee table as she did. Neither of them looked at it. They just stared at each other, mother and daughter, so painfully alike—and yet to Eris they had never felt more like strangers.

“Why?” she asked, because it was the only word her mind could process. “Why did you lie to me all those years?”

“Oh, Eris. I didn’t mean—it wasn’t about you—”

“Are you serious? Of course it’s about me!”

Caroline winced. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just … whatever happens between me and Everett—it’s not your fault.”

“I know, because it’s your fault!”

Neither of them spoke. The silence scraped at Eris’s eardrums.

“Where did Dad go? When is he coming back?” she asked finally.

“I’m not sure.” Her mom sighed. “I’m sorry, Eris.”

“Stop saying that!” By now Eris was screaming. She couldn’t help it; she didn’t want to hear another apology from her mom. Apologies meant nothing when the person you trusted the most had been lying to you your whole life.

Her mom was utterly still. “I know this is really hard on you, and you must have a lot of questions. I’m here to answer—”

“Fuck you and your fucking explanations,” Eris interrupted, enunciating each word.

Her mom drew back in wounded shock, but Eris ignored it. Her mind was shuffling through all her memories of her mom: of when Caroline would come wake her up for elementary school, only to snuggle into Eris’s bed with her and fall back asleep, forcing Eris’s dad to come wake them both up, laughing about what sleeping beauties his girls were. Of the Christmases they had baked cookies to put under the tree for Santa, made almost entirely from raw dough, and then Dad would go eat them in the middle of the night even long after Eris knew Santa wasn’t real. Of every year before her birthday, when Caroline would make up a fake doctor’s appointment and pull Eris out of school to go shopping so they could pick out her presents and then go to Bergdorf’s for tea. “Your mom is so cool,” the other girls always said, because none of their moms ever let them out of school just for fun, and Eris would laugh and say, “Yeah, I know, she’s the best.”

It all felt fake now. Every gesture, every I love you ; all of it was tinted by the great ugly lie underpinning her life. Eris blinked in confusion at her mom’s familiar face. “So you’ve known my entire life,” she said bitterly.

“No. I wasn’t sure.” Her mom’s eyes brimmed with unshed tears, but she managed to hold them back. “I always thought—hoped—that you were Everett’s. But I never knew for certain until now.”

“Why the hell did you let me take that DNA test, then?”

“You think if I knew there was a test I would’ve let you go?” her mom cried out.

Eris didn’t know what to say. She didn’t understand how her mom could have done this to her, to her dad, to their family .

“Please, Eris. I want to make this right,” Caroline began, but Eris shook her head.

“Don’t talk to me,” she said slowly, and turned away.

Somehow Eris stumbled to her round bed, nestled to one side of her enormous circular room. Shock and fear were swirling dangerously in her chest. She couldn’t breathe. She clawed suddenly at the neck of her shirt, still damp with her mom’s tears, and yanked it brutally over her head, then took a desperate, ragged breath. She was pretty sure she’d heard one of the seams rip out.

Can I be of assistance? her contacts prompted, sensing that she was almost crying. “Shut up!” she muttered, and they obediently powered down.

Everett Radson wasn’t her father. The truth of it kept ricocheting painfully against her skull like gunfire. Her poor dad—she wondered what he’d said when he got the lab results. Where was he now? A hotel, the hospital? She wanted to go talk to him, yet at the same time she wasn’t quite ready to face him. She knew that when she saw him—when she truly came face-to-face with it all—that everything would be different, for good.

Eris closed her eyes, but the world kept spinning around her. She wasn’t even drunk tonight. This must be the feeling, she thought bitterly, of her life coming untethered.

She sat up and studied her room with an odd sense of detachment. Everywhere she looked were expensive things—the crystal vase with its ever-young roses, the closet filled with delicate, colorful dresses, the custom-made vanity cluttered with gleaming pieces of tech. All the trappings of her life, everything that made her Eris Dodd-Radson.

She started to lean back onto her pillows and cursed aloud as something sharp dug into her ear. Her mom’s earrings. She’d forgotten all about them.

Eris unscrewed the right earring and held it out on her palm. It was so beautiful; a glass sphere glowing with whorls of color, like the eye of a coming storm. A beautiful, rare, expensive present from her dad to her mom. Suddenly the earring and everything it stood for struck Eris as unbearably false.

She pulled back her arm and hurled the earring against the wall with all the strength she had. It exploded into a million pieces, which scattered over the floor like shards of glittering tears.