Asa had the leak inside Shaw's household by the next morning.
A private nutritionist Whit's old internist had referred to him three months back. Marigold had paid her in cash and a passport.
The leak had walked out with the remaining residue tag from the king-cake bottle and the half-empty bottle itself.
Good news: Marigold had not yet swallowed it.
Bad news: she had run.
By noon Madison had broken the engagement with Pierce. She left him a four-line text and went home to Boston.
Pierce called me twenty-seven times.
I declined all twenty-seven.
The twenty-eighth call came in while I was sitting on the edge of Whit's hospital bed. Whit picked the phone up off the bedside table and answered it.
Pierce: "Joy. Meet me."
Whit said, level: "She doesn't want to see you."
A silence on the other end.
When Pierce spoke again his voice had gone hard.
"Sterling. Who are you to decide for her."
Whit looked at me.
I didn't stop him.
He said into the phone: "Whoever she doesn't answer her phone for."
Pierce's breath got heavy.
"You know how many years she and I —"
"I do," Whit said, soft and even. "I've seen them."
The sentence cut precisely.
Pierce went furious.
"You stole her memory and you use that voice at me."
Whit lowered his eyes.
"That's why I'm returning it."
Pierce: "Are you going to be able to."
The room was quiet.
I reached over and took the phone from Whit.
"Pierce."
His voice went soft instantly.
"Joy. I want to help you."
I said: "Stay away from Marigold."
"I know. She's not well."
"Stay away from me too."
There was no answer on the other end.
I hung up.
Whit watched me for a long moment.
"You loved him."
I said, once: "That part of me was sold."
His eyes darkened.
"And if you hadn't sold it."
I put the phone face down on the table.
"Sterling. Don't test what's left of someone half-broken."
Miss Odette gave me a plan.
"New-growth joy can anchor you," she said. "More anchors you have, harder for old buyers to overwrite."
Tessa wrote it down on the back of a Whole Foods receipt and set about engineering joy by force.
She came back with a Hubig's pie. She put me through three episodes of Top Chef New Orleans. She made me walk Magazine with her. She set up a group chat with our old Tulane crew and forced a dinner at Cooter Brown's.
By the end of the day my palm had not produced anything.
Tessa's eyes were ringed red.
"You used to be happy for half a day on a banana-pudding snowball from Plum Street."
I looked at the leftover pie.
"It tastes different."
It didn't, actually.
I tasted different.
That evening Asa let himself into my apartment with a box that he set on my coffee table like an offering.
Inside it:
A St. Charles streetcar souvenir token from the Carnival my mother had taken me on the route to see the Rex parade.
A first edition of an Anne Rice novel I'd loved as a teenager and never replaced after Katrina took my mother's storage unit.
A handwritten list, on cream Crane stationery, in a precise sloping hand.
Joy Léveille — joy triggers.
White roses: high probability.
Work being recognized: medium.
Tessa safe: high.
Awkward gestures from someone she dislikes: unknown.
I looked up.
Whit was in the wheelchair, eyes pointed at the rug.
"Asa wrote it."
Asa, behind him, almost dropped the box he had brought in.
"Sir. I did not."
Whit coughed once.
The whole tableau was so absurd I felt my chest get warm.
A small white bottle rolled out of my hand.
The tag was in that pencil hand again.
The small pleasure of watching him fail to lie. 6%. NOT FOR SALE.
Tessa stared at it for two seconds, then slammed her hand on the table and started laughing.
"Mr. Shaw. You're not completely useless."
Whit looked at the bottle, and there was something in his eyes I had not seen.
Like a man on death row reading the words appeal granted.
Marigold didn't show her face again.
She sent me things.
Day one. A bouquet of white roses.
The card: Pierce's roses, sophomore year. I remember them better than you do.
Day two. A photograph of my mother. From an album in my apartment.
I had no idea how she had gotten it.
Day three. A strawberry cake. The kind from the bakery on Carrollton my mother used to drive across town for on my birthday when I was a child.
Tessa called NOPD.
Two officers were in my kitchen taking the report when another delivery arrived.
A black thumb drive.
I plugged it into Whit's laptop.
A video opened. Marigold sat in front of a vanity mirror in my apartment's old lighting. She had on my exact lipstick — the Tom Ford in Bare Peach.
She smiled at the camera.
"Joy. I'm at 91%."
The wall behind her was papered in photographs of me. Tulane orientation. The Sazerac launch dinner. Tessa's wedding. Surveillance frames I didn't recognize.
She said: "I catch myself buying your perfume now without thinking. I have to fall asleep to a song your mother used to hum."
She leaned toward the camera.
"You know what? I've started to hate Pierce."
Cold went down my back.
She smiled wider.
"Turns out the person you can't let go of isn't him."
The frame cut.
The next frame was hospital security footage. Time stamp 3:17 a.m. Whit alone at the side of a hospital bed, smoothing a cardstock tag flat against the page of an open book, sliding it carefully under the spine.
Marigold's voice continued under the footage.
"Joy. Your new anchor is him."
"I just have to break him, and you can't come back."
Whit's chair pushed back.
Asa came through the door, color bad.
"Sir. Someone has been in the medical records. The prescription chart's been altered."
Whit started to speak. His body swayed.
I caught his elbow.
His palm was cold.
The Aperture app went red.
Anchor target: vital signs irregular.
Whit had been poisoned.
Not a hard poison. Something that punched the appetite center first and hardest. In a normal body it would have caused two days of unpleasantness.
In his body it was a death sentence.
The clinic doctor said in front of me: he needed to eat now, or organ failure was going to come faster than they could outrun it with fluids.
Asa's eyes filled.
"Sir. Please."
Whit looked at the tray in front of him. His throat moved. His head turned away from the food before his thought could intervene.
It wasn't dramatics. It was the body refusing.
I stood at the foot of the bed.
The three small white bottles in my palm felt like pebbles.
Miss Odette had said: new-growth joy can't be sold.
She had not said it couldn't be given.
Whit read me.
"No."
I didn't say anything.
His voice went cold.
"Joy. I said no."
I picked up the water glass on his side table and slid the smallest white bottle into it.
It dissolved in seconds.
Whit reached out to stop me. I pressed his wrist back down.
It was so thin under my hand that my fingers overlapped.
"This is my new joy," I said. "I get to decide."
His eyes filmed red.
"You'll have one less anchor."
"Anchors can grow back. Dead can't."
He looked at me, hard.
"I thought you said you were half-broken."
I lifted the glass to his lips.
"Half-broken doesn't mean I don't get to choose."
He wouldn't open his mouth.
I drank a mouthful. Held it. Reached out, took his jaw in my hand, and kissed him.
The water went through.
In the second of swallowing, his whole body went still.
In the doorway behind me Asa made a tight choking sound.
Tessa, who had come up the corridor just in time to see, smacked her hand over Asa's eyes.
"Mature audiences. Look away."
Whit swallowed.
A second later a tear came out of the corner of his eye.
It wasn't grief.
It was the new joy taking.
He grabbed my hand. His voice was wrecked.
"Joy. Don't give me any more."
I looked at him.
A new small bottle rolled out of my palm onto the sheet.
Heart-flutter, kissing him. 18%. NOT FOR SALE.
Whit lived.
I lost two anchors.
In the Aperture dashboard, Marigold went to 96%.
Her final message came in.
Tomorrow night, midnight. The carousel at Jazzland.
Bring Mr. Shaw.
Otherwise I swallow the last bottle. The one with your mother in it.
Tessa was already locked-in against me going.
Asa was already locked-in against Whit going.
Whit looked up from his cuff link and said, level: "We go."
Asa snapped, "Sir. This is a trap."
Whit slid the back of his cuff link into place. His face had no color but his voice was steady.
"I'm the bait."
I looked at him.
"You know that."
"Yes."
"And we're still going."
His hand on the cuff link paused.
"Because she has your mother."
My throat closed.
He raised his eyes.
"Joy. I can't return all of it. At least I can give that one back."
Jazzland — Six Flags New Orleans — had been sitting empty since Katrina took it in 2005. The fence had been cut and re-bolted by trespassers so many times the chain was a memorial. Vines had grown through the painted horses of the carousel. The Ferris wheel kept its half-rotted gondolas in the still air like dead bells.
The September night was warm and the wind off Lake Pontchartrain came across the lot in long flat sheets.
Marigold was standing on the carousel platform in a white silk dress. Her hair was loose down her back. She had one hand on a peeling-paint horse.
She saw us and smiled and opened her arms.
"You came."
Her face had become very like mine.
Not the bones. The expressions.
The way she lifted her chin. The way she set her mouth before speaking. Even the way she stood, weight on her right hip.
Tessa, in my earpiece, swore softly.
Whit stepped in front of me.
Marigold looked at him. Her smile cooled.
"Mr. Shaw. I want you to know I hate you a lot these days."
Whit said: "Honored."
Her eyes went flat.
"Why would Joy's happiness like a man like you."
I stepped forward.
"My happiness isn't a thing. It doesn't like anybody."
Marigold looked at me.
"And yet I'm almost you."
She lifted the small bottle out of her clutch.
"Once I swallow this, I am Joy."
Whit laughed.
It was the first time I had heard him do it without it costing him to.
Marigold's smile snapped off.
"What's funny."
He said: "You're not Joy."
"I'm at 96% sync."
"That's why you'll never be her."
He took a step toward her.
"You have her memories. You've copied her habits. You've replicated her expressions."
"What you'll never be like is the one part of her that's the most her — the part that doesn't survive by stealing from somebody else."
Marigold's voice tore.
"You stole too."
Whit stopped.
"I did."
He took a small folding knife out of his coat pocket and ran it across the soft pad of his hand.
Blood hit the cracked concrete.
Miss Odette stepped out from behind the carousel housing where Asa's people had been keeping her safe. She had the apothecary jar in her hands.
Marigold's color went.
"You set me up."
I looked at her.
"You can predict my moves, can't you?"
She stepped back.
"You won't let him die for it."
She was right about that.
But Whit had already made the choice ahead of me.
He didn't look at me. He spoke to Miss Odette.
"Now."
Asa made a small low sound and gripped his fists so hard his knuckles went white.
Miss Odette closed her eyes and began.
A pale-gold light pulled out of Whit, slow and clean, like a long ribbon out of a sleeve.
Pictures cracked open inside my head.
A boardroom. A champagne tower. The first swallow that wasn't punishment.
The stairwell again. My aunt's voice through my mother's voice. Ma joie.
The October wind across the old track at Mount Carmel the year I ran the 800 and came in first.
Piece by piece they came back into me.
Whit went down on one knee. Blood came out of the corner of his mouth.
I lunged. Caught him.
"Stop."
He turned his hand and gripped mine. The strength left in him wasn't a lot. It wasn't going to let go.
"Don't stop."
Marigold lunged at the apothecary jar.
Tessa came around the carousel housing at a flat run, swinging the aluminum bat she kept in her trunk for after-dark car-park walks.
The bat caught Marigold across the wrist.
"Stealing and still acting righteous about it. Bitch been holding back."
Marigold screamed.
The small bottle of king-cake icing fell to the concrete.
I went for it.
She started to laugh.
"Too late."
She opened her mouth.
Under her tongue: a folded fragment of the old cardstock tag, blistered with dried residue from the rim of the bottle.
She swallowed it.