Whit's lawyers proposed a buyback program. Shaw Maritime would set up a private foundation, locate every buyer, offer triple the original price for any remaining vial fragment plus a signed voluntary-return agreement.
I'd assumed the money would be the hard part.
The first buyer turned us down at his front door.
Henry Boudreaux — no relation to Tessa; Louisiana has too many Boudreaux to count — was a retired oyster fisherman in lower Plaquemines Parish. He lived in a small house at the end of a shell road with a screen porch that opened onto the bayou.
He cracked the door six inches.
"Miss Léveille. I know it isn't mine."
His eyes were red rimmed.
"But since I've had your happiness in me, I can sleep three hours a night."
I couldn't make the next sentence happen.
He said, "Since my wife jumped, I couldn't even look at our daughter's photograph. Only when your happiness was in me did I remember a person can be alive for something besides hurting."
Whit was a step behind me. He did not push.
The man's voice dropped. "Could you give me a little more time."
The Aperture banner came down on my phone.
Buyer sync: 34%.
He was already dreaming about my mother. Liking the icing-pooled corner of king-cake.
If I gave him more time, he would become more of me.
I closed my eyes a moment.
"Seven days."
He bent his head.
In the car, Whit asked: "Why."
I watched the shell road go by.
"Because he's not a bad man."
Whit said, quietly: "He's still hurting you."
I turned my head.
"So are you."
He didn't answer.
We ran eight buyers that day.
Three signed.
Two had ghosted us.
One called me a con artist.
Two said the joy was theirs now — they had paid for it.
That night in the car Asa passed me a manila folder over the seat.
"Miss Léveille. We've identified your highest-sync buyer."
I opened it.
The photograph showed a woman with dark hair, parted center, wearing a slip dress in dusty rose silk.
The name field read:
Marigold Cabot.
Sync: 79%.
Marigold Cabot was not a stranger.
She was Madison Cabot's older cousin. Pierce's almost-cousin-in-law.
Also the woman who had bought a resold piece of my first pink bottle off a back-channel reseller — the streetcar man, the one with the strawberries, had needed money fast and listed the leftover tag and a film of residue on a dark-net board.
Marigold had bid the highest.
She hadn't gotten the whole bottle. She had gotten the core of the memory.
Pierce at the door of the Boot. White roses. Me running across the floor toward him.
Whit read the file. His voice cooled in a way I hadn't heard before.
"She didn't end up next to Pierce by accident."
Tessa, who'd come to my apartment for this meeting, slammed the kitchen island.
"She bought your heart-flutter and then went and used it to seduce your ex?"
I didn't feel hurt.
I felt the specific nausea of a person whose drawers have all been gone through by a stranger.
A new text came in. Marigold.
Joy. Pierce's engagement party is tonight at the Columns. Seven o'clock. You're welcome.
A picture attached.
She was in a white silk dress, standing next to Pierce on the Columns Hotel's veranda. He was looking at her the way he'd once looked at me.
Tessa snatched my phone.
"You are not going."
Whit, quietly: "She is."
Tessa rounded.
"What — she's not miserable enough for you?"
Whit was looking at me.
"She's at 79%. She can predict Joy's moves. If Joy doesn't show up, she'll come find her."
I took the phone back.
"I'm going."
"Joy —"
I looked at the photograph of Marigold's smile.
That smile was too much like a smile I'd worn at nineteen.
Clean. Hot. Convinced that loving one person could buy you the whole world.
I suddenly wanted to peel it off her face.
Not for Pierce.
For me.
The Columns Hotel sat on St. Charles like a white wedding cake some Confederate widow had abandoned in the rain. The party was on the long veranda. String quartet. Sazerac on a silver tray.
Pierce was mid-toast when I came up the steps.
"Madison is the most sunshine-feeling person I've ever met."
Applause.
Madison stood beside him in a pale-blue silk shift and the kind of pretty blush that doesn't have to be practiced.
Marigold was at the head table.
She was wearing my dress.
Not a similar dress. The same dusty-rose silk slip dress I had on at Coquette the night Pierce introduced me to Madison. The same brand. The same dark-pearl drop earrings. Hair loose, tucked behind the left ear. Even her posture, leaning her right elbow on the back of her chair, was a posture I knew because I owned it.
She raised her glass to me.
Pierce saw me a half-second later. His smile caught on a nail in the air.
Madison followed his eyes. Her face changed.
I walked up to the table.
Marigold spoke first.
"Joy. You came."
She used the nickname like she had earned it. Every head at the nearest tables turned.
Pierce frowned.
"Mari. You two know each other?"
Marigold laughed gently.
"Of course we know each other. We're so alike, aren't we?"
She raised her wrist. A thin gold chain bracelet glinted there — identical to one I'd been wearing for two years.
Madison's color went out of her face.
"Marigold. Why are you dressed like that."
Marigold didn't acknowledge her.
She looked at Pierce. Her eyes filled, slow and beautiful.
"Pierce. Do you remember the white roses sophomore year."
The Sazerac in Pierce's hand swung once.
A small intake of breath rippled across the closest tables.
That was a memory Pierce had shared with two people in his life. Me. And, presumably, Madison.
He swung around at me.
"You told her."
I hadn't opened my mouth when Marigold's tears started.
"She didn't tell me. I remember it."
Madison's voice cracked.
"Marigold. What are you saying."
Marigold stepped around the table to stand in front of Pierce.
"I remember your ears were red. There was a card tucked into the roses. Joy, I've been working up to this for months. — Pierce."
Pierce completely lost his shape.
He grabbed her shoulders.
"How do you know that."
Marigold looked at me, smiling.
"Because that happiness is mine now."
The party broke open.
Madison slapped Marigold across the face. Open-handed. Loud.
"You're insane."
Marigold's head turned with the blow. She turned it back, slowly.
She did not look at Madison.
She looked at Pierce.
"You loved the Joy you knew at nineteen. Not the empty thing standing over there."
Pierce went the color of his shirt.
I stood very still and watched the show like I was watching it on someone else's phone.
Marigold pointed at me.
"She sold the part of her that loved you. She hasn't loved you in months."
Pierce looked at me.
There was shock in his face and rage and a kind of late, self-pitying hurt.
"Joy. Is that true."
I said, level: "Yes."
He looked as if I had stuck a knife into him.
"You sold what we had?"
"I sold my happiness. Not yours."
His eyes went red.
"I was inside that."
That, finally, was the sentence that landed.
I looked at him.
"When you brought your fiancée to meet me, did you think about how you were inside that too?"
He stalled.
Madison began to laugh.
She laughed and her laughing went over into crying.
"So all of you," she said. "All of you, you're using me as a prop."
Pierce reached for her arm.
She pulled away.
"Don't touch me."
Marigold used the gap. She slid up to me in the crowd, lowering her voice so only I could hear.
"Joy. Do you want to know the funniest part."
I looked at her.
She smiled.
"I didn't only buy your heart-flutter. I also bought the one your mother left you. The one with you on her shoulders at Mardi Gras and the king-cake icing on the knife."
My head emptied like a glass tipped over.
That bottle was supposed to be inside Whit.
Whit's face moved very fast and went very flat.
Marigold leaned closer.
"Mr. Shaw's people," she said, "have my people."
I watched Whit get angry for the first time, in real time.
He looked at Asa.
Asa was bone white.
"Sir. I'll find out tonight."
Marigold wasn't afraid.
She pulled a bottle out of the silver clutch at her hip.
The glass was old. The cardstock tag at its neck had darkened to a soft gold at the edges.
I knew it.
My mother on St. Charles Avenue. My six-year-old weight on her shoulders. The fingertip of king-cake icing.
The bottle I had told myself I could let go of, because my mother was already gone, and I was already a person who sold things.
Marigold was holding it the way an executioner holds a contract.
"Swallow this," she said, "and my sync passes Mr. Shaw's."
Tessa lunged.
The bodyguard behind Marigold's left elbow caught Tessa across the chest.
Pierce, slow on the uptake but finally catching up, said, "Mari. Put that down."
Marigold looked at him with a tenderness that was wrong.
"Pierce. When I become her, you'll love me again."
Madison started screaming.
"Marigold —"
Marigold pulled the cork.
She was lifting the open bottle to her mouth when Whit grabbed a cut-crystal tumbler off the nearest table and hurled it at the lighting console on the back wall of the veranda.
The whole veranda went black.
In the chaos somebody slammed into me. I could hear Tessa shouting my name and Asa swearing and Pierce calling for a guard.
A cold hand closed around my wrist.
Whit's voice was at my ear.
"Come with me."
He pulled me into a service stairwell.
Footsteps came after us down the corridor. Marigold's voice came up the stairwell behind us, knife-thin.
"Joy. You can't outrun me."
"Every bottle you sold is a thread back to you."
Whit had me by the hand. He was running.
His body, between the third and the fourth floor, could not.
He made it to the eighth landing and dropped to his knees.
I caught him.
His palm was wet with cold sweat.
"Leave me."
I set my teeth.
"Shut up."
He looked up. The corner of his mouth pulled into a small thin thing that was almost a smile.
"You're worried about me."
I froze where I crouched.
The Aperture banner came down.
New joy detected.
It was the smallest bottle the app had ever generated for me.
It sat in my palm like a single white pearl.
The liquid inside wasn't pink, wasn't gold. It was a pale milky white.
The cardstock tag was written in a different hand than the others. Cramped. Pencil. As if someone other than the system had written it.
Relief at finding him still breathing. 12%. NOT FOR SALE.
I stared at the tag.
Not for sale.
Whit had seen it. His eyes started to light up, slowly.
The footsteps behind us were getting closer.
He looked at me.
"Joy. You can still make joy."
I curled my fingers around the bottle.
"Now is not the time to study it."
He braced his hand against the wall.
"Go."
We made it onto the twelfth floor and into an empty guest room. Asa's team had caught up; they had Marigold's bodyguards bottled in the corridor.
The room had us in it alone.
Whit went down onto a sofa. His breath was heavy and slow.
I closed my palm around the small white bottle.
A new line arrived from the app.
New-growth joy is not part of historical inventory. Not subject to existing transaction rules.
It went through me like a clean wire.
I'd sold the joy I'd already lived through.
But if I could still grow new joy, I wasn't a husk.
Whit said, quiet: "Can that bottle save you."
I didn't answer.
A laugh came up the corridor.
Marigold's voice through the door.
"Joy. Mr. Shaw's dying, isn't he."
"You think he won't beg you for your new joy when it comes to it."
Whit's face went hard.
I went to the door.
Marigold kept going.
"Men like him — staying alive comes first. You really think he'd choose to die."
Whit said, "Don't listen."
I looked over my shoulder.
His eyes were full of a kind of contained pain.
"I won't eat any more of your joy."
The corridor was quiet a beat.
Then Marigold laughed louder.
"Mr. Shaw. Lying gets punished."