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CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWO

Lex leaned on the doorframe, feeling tired and drained from the day’s events as well as the drive halfway across Boston. She nearly fell inside the apartment as the door opened, revealing her boyfriend of the last six months, Colin. He had a grin on his freckled face to see her, but it soon faded as he met her eyes.

“Lexie?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

She sighed and hung her head to look at the carpet before answering. “I lost my job. Can I come in?”

Colin stepped aside immediately and ushered her past him, closing the door behind her and then stepping close for a hug. Her head came to rest on his shoulder, her nose filling with the patchouli scent of his clothes that always made her want to cough or sneeze. She twitched her head and tried to get enough room to breathe clean air, and Colin stepped back, evidently taking this as a sign that she was done with the embrace.

“I thought you were up for that award,” he said, leading her through to sit on his sofa. It was strewn with copies of a magazine he subscribed to on unsolved mysteries and conspiracy theories, and she pushed a few aside to clear a space.

“The book was, not me,” Lex corrected him. “And it still is. Apparently, I wasn’t making them enough money.”

“Aw, babe,” Colin said, wrinkling his nose and shaking his head as he slumped down next to her. His unruly brown hair tumbled into his eyes as he did so. “I’m sorry. You want to get a pizza and some beers, watch a terrible movie, maybe cry on me later?”

That brought a smile to Lex’s face at last. He knew her well enough by now to know that comfort food and bad cinema was a reliable cure for almost all of her ills. “Sounds great,” she agreed, wanting to at least end the day on a more positive note.

Colin grinned, then leaned across and planted a kiss against her temple. “I’ll grab the menu.”

While he was searching through his kitchen drawers, Lex picked up an open magazine from the coffee table and sighed. There was an article about the latest alternative history shows available on streaming services, and Colin had circled one of them in red pen:

Hitler’s Death—Myth or Reality

? Lex threw it to one side in disgust, completely done with her quota for nonsense for the day.

She picked up the remote instead and started flipping through the movie adaptations section, trying to find a film she would want to watch. There were plenty of titles that sounded good, but she wanted to leave them for a day when she could appreciate them more. In the end, she settled for a silly young adult book that had been turned into a film last year—not, thankfully, one of Matt’s properties.

“You want the usual, Lexie?” Colin called from the doorway with his cell phone against his ear. “I’m getting a tub of ice cream for later.”

“The usual’s good,” Lex agreed. There wasn’t anything wrong with knowing what you liked. A comfortable routine never hurt anybody, and it was comfort she needed. “Have you seen

The Rebel Player

?”

“Yes, but I don’t mind watching it again,” Colin said, then held up a hand as his call connected. “Hello? Yes, I’d like to place an order for delivery…”

Lexie let her mind drift as Colin placed the order. Her eyes wandered around the familiar room and settled on a figurine of an owl that had been on Colin’s bookshelf for as long as she’d known him. It was now sporting a tinfoil hat, tiny but perfectly fitted. Lex held back a chuckle. Even if he did believe in a lot of crackpot theories, Colin also had a sense of humor. He must have put it on after their last argument, in which she accused him of being on the verge of wearing a tinfoil hat (an argument that fizzled out into laughter when Colin informed her, in a serious tone, that tinfoil would actually probably amplify any signals that you might want to keep out).

Still, it was just one more argument in a long list of them. He was so stubborn. Lex wondered to herself if she would be able to handle another.

“It’ll be here in twenty minutes, babe,” Colin said, coming back in to take his place beside her on the sofa. He slipped a tanned arm around her shoulder and pulled her against him. “It’ll be all right.”

He put his feet up on the coffee table and started sipping at the beer he had brought in, placing hers in her hand. He hit play on the movie and settled back, his attention fully on the screen.

Lex huddled against him, but she wasn’t looking at the movie; she was looking at their reflection, visible whenever the screen was dark enough. Colin, happily drinking his beer, grinning at the action. She herself, her dark hair almost invisible in the reflection, merging at the neck into the black collared shirt she had worn to work. Her lips were pulled tight with strain, her brown eyes ringed with tiredness. She looked worn out, wrecked.

Colin, meanwhile, really was watching the film without a care in the world. She knew that was what she had asked for, but somehow she felt a little put out that he didn’t even slightly seem to mind about the fact she had lost her job. He could have shouted, she thought. Or helped her get set up on a job board so she could find something new. Or, really, anything at all except for brushing it off as if she had told him nothing more serious than the state of the weather.

It wasn’t like she really had anything to complain about. He was nice, and supportive, and didn’t make her feel bad for losing her job. That was something. A lot of men would have been meaner about it. She let herself relax, her head against his chest, and tried to focus on the movie.

The pizza came, of course, right in the middle of a pivotal scene. Lex and Colin groaned out loud at the same time, then laughed at each other as Lex reached for the remote to pause it. He ran down to the lobby to take it out of the delivery boy’s hands and returned just as Lex was opening a couple of new beers.

“It smells so good,” he said, dropping the box on the coffee table.

Lex set the beers down next to the pizza and flipped the lid of the box open, reaching out to get that first deliciously stringy slice, still hot enough to steam. “You’re not kidding,” she said, breathing in deep and taking a bite. The flavor exploded in her mouth: hot, greasy cheese on tomato, perfectly cooked dough, and a juicy slice of mushroom all combining together in one bite.

Colin hit play on the movie and leaned in to join her, both of them eating with their heads over the box, one hand hovering in the air underneath each slice to catch any errant crumbs.

The movie was far from original, and not exactly as engrossing as Lex would have liked, but at least it was the distraction she wanted. She watched the teenage heroine with a roll of her eyes—couldn’t the girl tell already that she was caught up in something magical? Characters in stories like those always seemed to be so dumb, never figuring everything out until it was spelled out for them. They got themselves into the most dangerous situations, too.

Lex reflected that maybe a book adaptation hadn’t been the best choice of movie. After all, all she was doing was thinking about plot and structure—work, in other words. Not that it was her work anymore. What was she going to do now? What she’d said to Bryce was true: publishers didn’t tend to have openings for highly genre-specific editors very often.

“You know,” Colin said, finishing the last bite of one of his slices, “it doesn’t even look like that, really.”

Lex pulled her attention back to the screen, seeing a view of the Earth from space. She frowned, wondering what she had missed. “What do you mean?”

“The planet. It’s not like that. It’s actually flat.”

Lex stared at him, her third slice of pizza forgotten in her hand. “No, it isn’t.”

“It is.” Colin shifted his body toward her, a sure sign that he was about to get into an in-depth discussion on something he thought she needed to know. He’d probably been waiting for an excuse to talk about it. “I’ve been reading up on it. It’s a huge conspiracy. Everyone’s been told the Earth is round, and we have all of these phony images that supposedly come from space. It’s not even real. The science backs it up. The Earth has to be flat.”

“Colin,” Lex said evenly, barely able to believe she was even having this conversation. “Listen to me. Flat Earthers are idiots. None of that is true.”

“Look off into the horizon,” Colin said, gesturing animatedly with his hands. “It should show a curve if the Earth is round, right? Even a slight one? But it doesn’t. It’s always straight ahead. They’ve done experiments, and it turns out if you measure a straight line across the Earth—it doesn’t bend. It’s completely flat.”

“No, it…” Lex took a breath, trying not to yell at him. Today, of all days, was not the day to test her patience. “

Colin

. You can’t see the curvature of the Earth with the naked eye because the Earth is huge. Also, people have measured the curvature, and it is there. You can’t just get all of your information from Flat Earth forums. Look it up properly—lots of people have disproven it in so many ways. In fact, I’ll show you—look, here, I’ll search it up on my phone—here we go, photos taken by NASA from the ISS. See?”

“Oh, Lexie, you’ve fallen for it, too,” Colin said, reaching for her hand with a sympathetic expression. “That’s what they want us to believe, you know? Because there are really valuable material deposits around the rim of the Earth. Right before it falls off into space there are mines where the governments of the world make all their money. They just don’t want us to know about it so they can control all the wealth and tell us what to do. All the photos are faked—no one’s ever been into space. I’ll show you some sites. You have to get the wool off of your eyes and see the truth.”

Lex yanked her hand out of Colin’s and dropped the slice she had been eating back into the box. “You know what, Colin,” she said. It had been a long day in a string of long days as far as he was concerned, and now he was attempting to mansplain to her something that she would be in a far better position to understand than he was. “My whole job is—was—about science and history. And you think, of all people, I wouldn’t know whether the Earth is flat?”

Colin frowned. “I just think you deserve to know the truth, instead of walking around like the rest of the sheeple. You didn’t believe me about the faked moon landings, or the race of lizard people ruling the planet and controlling us, or the Illuminati and their secret messages! You’re so close-minded! I don’t know if I can stay in a relationship with someone that just isn’t open to the truth.”

Lex shook her head in disbelief. Colin’s words were probably intended as an idle threat, a threat that would normally have made her back down and try to calm him. But for what? So that he could just do this again next week, and the week after? “I can’t be around irrational people anymore,” she said, more to herself than to Colin, because he clearly wasn’t listening anyway. “I can’t do it. That’s it. I’ve had enough.”

She got up from the sofa, grabbing her bag from by the door as she went. As she moved a cold rage filled her bones—anger that grew from being fired and Karen’s smugness and Colin’s insensitivity and all of the rest of it, and that now pushed her forward with a shock of bold energy.

“Lexie, babe, where are you going?” Colin called out. He didn’t sound concerned or upset—just condescending. Like he didn’t believe she would really go. Behind him, the movie was still playing, completely forgotten. She knew he hadn’t been listening, not really.

“I’m going home,” Lex shouted over her shoulder. “And I’m not coming back. We’re done, Colin. Don’t try to call me again.”

She stepped outside of the apartment and slammed the door behind her for good measure, striding down the corridor and then the stairs with nothing more than a sense of relief. Even though she knew she’d made the right decision in her bones, there was also a question at the back of her mind still: now that she’d managed to lose both her career and her relationship in one day, what else could possibly go wrong?

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