A Sheer Veil

VP and BP Rankings
Claire - 141 VP - 3100 BP - 2 Achievs
Sam - 139 VP - 5900 BP - 3 Achievs
Erin - 134 VP - 8100 BP - 3 Achievs
Emi - 125 VP - 9250 BP - 3 Achievs
Myra - 121 VP - 4000 BP - 3 Achievs
Chloe - 106 VP - 7550 BP - 2 Achievs
Emily - 106 VP - 7500 BP - 3 Achievs (2 used)
Liesa - 104 VP - 4400 BP - 3 Achievs
Norah - 103 VP - 0 BP - 3 Achievs
Marissa - 90 VP - 7000 BP - 3 Achievs
Dawn - 78 VP - 9000 BP - 3 Achievs
Riley - 77 VP - 8800 BP - 3 Achievs
Laura - 3950 BP - 2 Achievs

Andy woke to warmth on both sides: one weight familiar as muscle memory, the other a newer fact of life he was still learning how to account for. The bed was the same bed as always—a king, sheets in the HH’s preferred five-star cotton—but the world on top of it had changed. Sometime in the dark between last night and now, Laura had doubled again.

She’d done it without waking him. There was her body on his right, arm slung over his chest, soft and a little sweaty from sleep, cheek pressed into the slope of his shoulder. There was her body on his left, curled up facing him, the blue-black hair a soft drift against his bicep, knees tucked against his hip so their legs made a complicated knot under the blankets.

Andy didn’t move. He let the heaviness of the two of her anchor him to the bed, breathing quietly and doing a systems check on his own insides. He’d woken to so many versions of her—one, two, sometimes none at all—that the baseline for “normal” had lost all meaning. But this felt close to the original: him as the axis, Laura as the world moving around him.

He lay there, eyes closed, and let the memories of yesterday reel through him.

The day had started in the house, the one Laura built in Saddle Ridge out of all the fragments and wishes she’d carried since childhood. The way she’d looked at him when she said, “I always thought this is where we’d end up, if we survived everything.” The look was not a joke or a dare—it was a simple statement of fact, like the color of the wallpaper or the creak in the floor. For years, Andy had assumed Laura’s only vision of a future was just surviving the next day. But here, in the house she dreamed into being, it was all there: the windows full of morning light, the too-many bedrooms, the way it smelled of bread and sunlight and “home.” The kitchen with the stacked mugs and the battered cutting board, the hall with the spot where you could never quite scrub away the juice stain, the upstairs where the doors all opened and closed in the same order as in his own memory of childhood.

He’d watched her walk through it, room by room, picking up each object as if it were both a relic and a miracle. Andy had seen her face when she opened the nursery—the one she said she never dreamed of, not really, never imagined herself as a mother, never let herself want that—and yet it was there, new and perfect, and it nearly broke her. She hadn’t cried, but the shock of it still sat in Andy’s chest, sour and bright.

He thought about the fort room, the Cooper-Ashford Fortress. He could picture the two of them, kids again, jammed into the plywood-and-blanket stronghold, both pretending the world outside didn’t exist. It hit him harder than the nursery, if he was being honest. That room wasn’t built for a baby or a hypothetical life. It was built for them, a world with only two people in it, built as a promise to keep her safe. Andy had always believed that if he just tried hard enough, he could keep his world from breaking. Every time he failed, he built another layer.

He thought of the wall of photographs on the stairs. The way he and Laura had stopped on the landing and stood in front of it, neither willing to say what they both saw there. The whole history of a life that never happened. Andy had not dared to look directly at the faces in those pictures, not at first, but now—lying here with both of Laura wrapped around him—he let the images scroll through his head. The beach trip, the graduation, the one with the newborn in the hospital, all of them lined up like the future had been a series of train stops instead of a free fall.

He kept his eyes closed, pushing the images to the back of his brain. But they stayed there, as insistent as a pulse.

After the house, they’d driven out to his parents’ house, parked on the curb like it was a holiday visit, and walked up to the front door together. Laura—both of her—had been nervous, though she hid it better than he did. Andy remembered the way his mother’s arms had closed around Laura, the way his father had squeezed her hand and said nothing, just looked at her with the full weight of everything he’d ever wanted to say.

Andy remembered how it felt, sitting in the kitchen that was always at the center of his universe, to watch Laura fit herself back into the space she’d left behind. He remembered his mother pouring cocoa, remembered the way Laura’s hands shook as she took the mug, how she didn’t spill a drop. He remembered his mother’s face when Laura told them about her own mother, about the Garden and the strange, sad miracle of finding her alive and unhealed on the other side. The silence in the kitchen after that, the way nobody wanted to fill it.

He remembered the walk to the footbridge, the way the old handrails felt under his gloves, the initials still there from all those years ago. The two of them had stood there, and Andy could feel the shape of every single year between her death and this time, like a thousand versions of them layered over the same span of frozen river. He remembered the way Laura’s voice sounded when she said, “I’m glad we had this second chance.” Like she meant it for him as much as for herself.

The dinner at the restaurant, the booth crowded with the two of her, the plates stacked up between them. He remembered Laura’s faces when he told her about the corned beef hash, the way her eyes had matched in their skepticism. He remembered the way the server did not blink at their doubled-up party of three, just took the order and moved on. But Andy had felt the strangeness of it anyway—the sense that this was the world as it could have been, if only they had both survived the first time.

The memory came back whole, every detail intact, and underneath the joy of it was the thing he had felt in Laura all day and had chosen not to name.

He lay there, replaying it all, and turned his head to look at the face of the Laura on his left. She slept with her mouth slightly open, the barest trace of a frown between her brows. He shifted his gaze to the right, to the other Laura, whose face was angled toward him, half-buried in the pillow. The symmetry of them was perfect, uncanny, and Andy did not look away for a long time.

He’d lost her once, lost her so completely he thought it would take the rest of his life to dig out from under the weight. Now he had her back, doubled. He didn’t know how to keep her, not with the wedding in a week and the debt hanging over their heads like a sword, but Andy decided—just there, still flat on his back and pinned by her arms and legs and gravity—that this time, he was not going to let her go.

He didn’t know how that would be true. But he meant it down to the bone.

He was still lying there when Laura stirred, both bodies shifting at the same moment. The one on his left blinked up at the ceiling, then at him. The one on the right stretched, rolled onto her stomach, and looked at him from the other side of the bed, hair a black scribble across her face.

Both faces wore the same confused, dreamy expression.

“Andy,” she said, in stereo, both voices soft. “I just had the strangest dream.”

He went very still. “What did you dream?” he asked, his voice low.

Laura pressed the heels of her hands to her foreheads. “I was in a house, a real house, in Illinois,” she said. “It was… everything. We lived there, you and me. There was a bedroom, and a kitchen, and a staircase with so many pictures on it. I dreamed we ran errands, and then we went to see your parents. And then it was like the dream just kept going, all day, all the way until…” She trailed off, both faces registering the effort of trying to pull the details together. “I don’t think I’ve ever had one so real,” she said.

Andy stared at her. “That wasn’t a dream, Laura.”

Both of Laura went still. They didn’t say anything, only looked at him.

He sat up, careful not to jostle either. “That was yesterday. The Dream Date package, remember? You built that house in Saddle Ridge. We lived in it for a whole day.” He waited to see if it would land. “We had lunch at my parents’ place, we visited the bridge, we went to that restaurant you liked. It was all real, Laura.”

Laura closed her eyes, thinking. Then she looked down at her hands, twisting her fingers together. “I remember it,” she said, both voices now slightly out of sync. “I remember every second. But—” She blinked again, as if clearing out the sleep. “I thought it was just my mind, patching together the pieces. I didn’t think I could have all of it.”

He reached over, set a hand on the shoulder nearest him. “You have all of it. So do I.”

They lay there for a while, letting the truth of it settle between them. Andy felt the pulse in Laura’s neck under his fingers, steady and real.

After a while, Laura spoke again. “Do you remember the wall of photographs?” she asked, voice low. “The Europe trip, the camping, college…”

Andy nodded. “Yeah. Of course.” He smiled, remembering. “Remember when I took that one in the train? The picture of you asleep on my shoulder.” He smiled, a little sad. “I remember thinking that you looked so peaceful, like nobody in the world could ever bother you.”

Laura smiled, and said, “Yeah. Those seats were so comfortable, and then it started to rain, and the sound of the rain put me to sleep. I was so tired, after walking so many days.” She wrinkled her nose. “I remember when the conductor made that announcement in German, and the feedback woke me up. That wasn’t fun.”

Andy felt his own breath get thin. He hadn’t even realized he remembered those details, but as soon as Laura spoke them, they sprang into focus. “I… I remember the window,” he said. “I remember that you woke up and complained that my neck made a terrible pillow, but then you went right back to sleep.” He laughed. “I remember that you insisted on saying ‘merci’ to the ticket guy even though we were in Germany, not Belgium.”

Both of Laura blinked, tears forming in one set of eyes, then the other. “That was such a good day,” she said, and the words sounded brand new, as if she’d never had a good day before.

They let the silence grow again.

Andy tried another one. “Do you remember the graduation photo?” he said.

Laura nodded. “I do. I also remember how you almost missed the ceremony because you couldn't find your suit, and you had to borrow a tie from your dad. I remember how I wore a dress that didn’t fit, either, but I wanted to look like someone who belonged there.” She looked at him, both faces steady. “I remember that you brought me flowers, and they were the cheap ones from the grocery store, and they dyed your hands purple when you carried them.”

Andy went still. “I remember that, too,” he said.

Laura smiled, both sides. “I remember you being so proud of me. I’d never felt that before.”

He ran his hand through his hair. “How is this possible?” he said, voice barely above a whisper.

“I don’t know,” she said, but her faces looked more at peace than he’d seen in a long time. “But it’s there. Every second. Like we really lived it.”

He let that settle. He looked up at the ceiling and felt the whole phantom life unspool behind his eyelids. He tried something that had not been in the photographs. “Do you remember the New Year’s party? The one in New York?”

Laura blinked, surprised. “I do. It was in 2021. We went to the big party at the top of the building, and you spilled your drink on that guy who kept talking about his car.”

He snorted, because even as she said it, the memory was there: the slick floor, the panic of having a Manhattan running down his sleeve, the way Laura had laughed until she cried. “I can see it,” he said. “I can almost taste the cheap champagne.”

“Me too,” Laura said, and this time she did cry, just a little, the tears slipping sideways onto the pillow and making a dark star in the cotton.

They traded more memories. The camping trip, the miserable one in Wisconsin where it rained the entire weekend and they wound up holed up in a tent playing cards. Laura remembered the sound of the rain on the nylon, the way Andy made up rules for the card game to keep her from getting bored. He remembered the way her hair got plastered to her face, the way she shivered at night but refused to admit she was cold.

It was all there. Not just the photographs, not just the versions of themselves smiling for the camera, but the whole, messy, lived-in world of days they never got.

At one point, Laura said, “I remember a Tuesday. Just a Tuesday. We were both sick, you’d caught a bug at work, and I tried to make you soup but burned it. I don’t even know if that ever happened, but I remember the way the apartment smelled, and how you laughed and said I should patent the recipe as an industrial solvent.”

Andy finished the memory without thinking. “You tried to fix it by dumping in a whole jar of paprika. I ate three bowls anyway, and the next day my mouth was orange.”

Laura laughed, real and unguarded, and her right-hand body rolled onto her back, hand over her eyes.

For a few minutes, neither spoke.

Andy was the first to break. “They’re not just photographs, are they?”

Laura shook her heads. “No. It’s everything. A whole life, just dropped in.”

He felt it. The shape of it. In his own head, the memories weren’t quite as bright as the ones he’d lived for real, but they were sharp enough to hurt if he pressed on them.

He reached for her, and she took his hand, both bodies doing it at once.

They lay there, in the quiet, for a long time. Andy watched the light crawl along the wall, thought about all the lives they could have had, and let the one they did have sit in his chest, a new thing and an old one, all at once.

The silence after that was different. The world outside the suite stayed quiet, only the faintest hum of the elevator or the distant whoosh of a closing door somewhere else in the Hotel. But in here, every sound between them was amplified—the creak of the mattress, the hiss of breath, the soft shuffle of Laura’s hair as she moved.

Something shifted in Laura, both faces at once: a subtle inward turn, as if her blue eyes were tracking something only she could see.

She said, “There’s one I have to check.” The voices came in stereo, but softer than before, almost unguarded.

Andy, immediately, knew which one she meant. His own mind was already circling the memory, wary and tender.

He didn’t say it out loud, just nodded, and together they reached for it.

The scene was a November afternoon, the kind where it rained just enough to ruin everything but not enough to call it off. They were thirteen, Andy and Laura, both too thin and too angry at the world for their bones. They were on the footbridge over Willow Run, boots making a noise like old drums on the slick planks.

They’d just had the worst fight of their lives. Even sixteen years later, Andy knew the shape of it before it even began, the way sorrow could etch itself into memory and stay crisp forever while every daily happiness faded. Laura’s voice, brittle with rage and disbelief, riled up by someone who had lied to her, still rang in his skull: that she knew Andy had kissed Chloe behind the gym and then, as if that weren’t enough, had called Laura a “charity case.” A freak, someone he kept around so he wouldn’t look like a loser. Laura had believed it. Of course she had—because somewhere deep inside, Laura had always believed she was unlovable, and that the best she could hope for was to be temporarily tolerated until someone better came along.

The rain, too, felt like destiny that November. Not the lashing, cinematic kind, but the endlessly persistent drizzle that soaked through everything and made the bridge boards slippery as soap. They were meeting, not to make up, but for Laura to inflict the kill-shot. She wanted it to cut, but not in a way that made her look weak. Andy—God, so much smaller then, all knees and too-long arms—had come to the bridge because it was their place, and maybe because the footbridge was neutral ground and no one would see them lose.

He remembered, with perfect clarity, how the fight started. He’d thought he could talk her down. She’d turned around with her hood up, face already red, and before he could get a word out, she’d lit into him: “Did you enjoy it?” And then, without waiting for him, “Did you enjoy kissing her? Did you tell her you loved her? Or did you save that part for me?”

Andy had not expected this. When Laura had called, crying, he had come to the bridge because he wanted to tell her the truth, what he had realized when Chloe had kissed him. But Laura’s fury was a living thing; it wanted only to burn, and she didn’t let him speak.

The memory was so sharp, so real, that as he watched it play out he could feel the itch of the wool sweater against his skin, the way his sneakers sloshed on the wet planks, the taste of iron in the back of his mouth from running all the way there. He could see Laura, not the impossibly beautiful woman she’d become, but the real her from then: thin, small, pale as the inside of an eggshell, hair dark with rain and stuck to her forehead, eyes so blue you wanted to believe they could freeze a river.

This was the moment he’d relived a thousand times: the moment she said it. The worst thing she knew. She’d squared up, made her voice flat so she wouldn’t cry, and said, “I loved you, Andy. I fucking loved you. And you… you let them say I was nothing because you didn’t want to be the weird kid.”

Andy had felt the hot sting of tears, sudden and overwhelming. "It wasn't like that," he said. "I would never—"

But Laura had already started walking away, boots thumping hard against the planks, each step a thunderclap of finality. “Too late.”

The sound was the boots: wet, rubbery, and furious. Andy followed her, not because he had any clue what to do, but because the alternative was letting her go and never seeing her again. The fight, the rain, the bridge were all just set dressing for the moment he would reach for her wrist—the last moment, in the old version, that anyone would see Laura Ashford alive. In that world, he followed, and she braced, and he slipped. Into the water, then blackness, then the rest of his life without her.

He saw himself call after her, voice louder than he meant. “Laura, wait!” He said, but in this memory, his throat closed up around the “wait” so that it ended in a break.

He remembered how much it hurt that she didn’t even turn around. But in this memory, this manufactured, impossible memory, she did. Just a little, because of that crack. She paused at the far end of the bridge before her mind could process what her body was doing, shoulders hunched up to her ears, and for a second Andy thought he saw her wipe her face with her sleeve.

Instead of running, he took it slow, hands out like he might slip at any moment. He closed the distance, step by careful step, and then stopped with a meter between them, as if a force field had been strung across the bridge.

She glanced at him, but only for a second. “Go away, Andy,” she said, voice wrecked. “I already said everything I needed to.”

Young Andy just stood there, trapped in the rain, and let the misery take him over. He realized, with a sudden clarity, that it was the last moment he’d ever get to tell her how he felt. And so he did the thing he’d never done before, the thing that had always scared him more than anything else in the world. He told the truth.

He said, “I love you, Laura.” Not a whispered, embarrassed admission, the way a thirteen-year-old might try to play it cool, but a full-throated, breaking, helpless cry. The rain peppered the bridge between them, and the words just hung there, naked and raw and impossible to take back.

She froze. Her foot was still in the air, caught in mid-step; her hair clung to the sides of her face, and the line of her jaw was set like she was about to spit at him. But she didn’t move, not for a long moment. Andy could see her thinking, could see the calculus of pain and hope and disbelief play across her face with every heartbeat.

He didn’t try to reach for her. He just left the space there, said it again, softer: “I love you.” This time, his voice didn’t break; it was gentle, almost calm. “That’s all I really wanted to say.”

Laura stared at him, eyes red and streaming, not sure whether she wanted to slap him or kiss him. She made a noise—part laugh, part sob—and covered her mouth with her hand. For a second, Andy thought she was going to run. But then she did something he’d never seen, never even imagined: she stepped back toward him. First just one foot, then the other, guilt and longing and raw need fighting for space in her eyes.

He could feel her through the bond, even in the memory-version: all the doubts and self-loathing, all the ways she’d convinced herself she would always end up alone. And he could feel, too, the way something in her unclenched. The hatred evaporated, and what was left was fear. Not of him, but of what it would mean to be loved, to really be loved, and maybe lose it anyway.

Andy was crying now, too—he could feel the tears mixing with the rain, heat against the freezing cold. In the memory, they were thirteen, but inside the memory they were also here, older now, the versions that had lived and died and lived again. She came closer, stopped in front of him, and tilted her face up, eyes searching his. He didn’t move. He just let her look, let her see that he wasn’t lying.

And then, without ceremony, Laura kissed him. It was the most awkward, beautiful, shivering mess of a kiss that two people could possibly manage. Teeth clicked, noses bumped, and the wetness made everything slippery and absurd. But it was real. Andy held her face, careful and gentle, and she let him, and when they finally came up for air she was smiling, amazed and fragile and shining.

In the old memory, they had both gone into the water, pulled under by the current, and Laura had never come back. In this one, they stood on the bridge for a long time, rain soaking them through, hands clamped together like they were afraid to let go. The rest of the world could burn; they had this.

They didn’t talk much after that. They didn’t need to. The bridge, the rain, the warmth of each other’s hands—that was enough to make it through. Eventually they walked off together, the long way toward nothing in particular, and neither of them looked back at the river. It would always be there, but it didn’t get to have the last word.

And that was the memory. Not an erasure, but a rewrite. A world where the worst thing that ever happened to either of them didn’t have to be the end.

They were back in the Master’s Suite, the morning gone bright and sharp through the glass doors, and Andy could feel it—the residue of that memory, burning in the center of his chest. He knew Laura felt it, too, because both bodies had tensed, both faces pressed against his shoulder. Her hands had locked onto his forearm, her fingers tight.

For a long time, neither said a word.

He understood, even before he tried to name it, what was sitting between them: that so little would have needed to change. One cracked voice. One slowed step. The whole life that neither of them lived was right there, complete in both their heads, the only difference being that in the real one, the bridge hadn’t held.

Eventually, Laura pulled back enough to look at him, both faces wet, one with tears, one just with the shine of it. “How can you have that?” she asked, both voices together, almost a whisper. “How can either of us?”

He didn’t know. “I don’t understand it either,” Andy said, and he meant it. “I stopped trying to figure it out about thirty seconds ago.”

She let out a shaky sound, not quite a laugh. “Do you think it’s real?” she said.

He didn’t hesitate. “I do. I think it’s ours now, and I think it’s real enough.”

Laura went silent for a long time.

Then she said, “I had sixteen years of nothing in my head.” She stared at his chest, not his face. “Now I have that whole time filled in. Not perfect, not always clear, but it’s mine. I used to think I would never catch up, that there would always be this wall between me and the world. But now…” She shrugged, both bodies, and it was the first time the motion didn’t look forced. “Now I can see it all. Even the parts that hurt. And it’s a gift, Andy. I don’t care how I got it.”

He pulled her close, both bodies, and let her press into him, both faces tucked under his chin. He didn’t say anything, because there was nothing to add.

They stayed like that, sharing the memory of a life that had never happened, until the world outside the suite came back into focus, until the day called them to get up, to eat, to see what else could fit into the space between the lives they’d lived and the ones they never got.