The Aperture banner went red.
Sync: 99%.
Marigold shuddered. Her eyes lost focus, then re-found it, and the look that came up in them was a look I knew.
She looked at Tessa.
She started to cry.
"Tess."
Tessa went sheet-white.
"Don't you call me that."
Marigold looked at Whit.
Her face filled with pain.
"Sterling —"
My stomach turned.
She was reaching for what I'd grown for him, too.
Miss Odette spoke fast.
"Joy. Cut the line. Now."
"How."
"Use your strongest new-growth joy to overwrite the old contract."
I opened my palm.
Three small white bottles.
The highest purity one was the heart-flutter of the kiss. 18%.
Not enough.
Marigold was smiling now and walking toward me.
"You can't beat me, Joy."
Her voice grew more and more mine.
"You sold yourself too clean."
Whit caught my wrist.
His body had hit its limit. His fingertips were burning.
"Joy. Look at me."
I turned.
The blood had drained out of him. His eyes were clear.
"Don't think about saving me."
He said: "Think about yourself."
"Think about why you liked the corner of the king-cake slice. Think about why getting that first bonus made you proud. Think about why Tessa is the friend you'd actually die for."
"Those aren't yours because somebody else gave them to you."
Marigold screamed: "Shut up."
Whit didn't.
He looked at me. His voice was very low.
"Joy. You're yourself first. Then you love anyone."
The sentence dropped, and my whole palm went hot.
A bottle rolled out of it. Bigger than the others.
Iridescent. Platinum. Every color of light it caught, it gave back.
The cardstock tag, in that pencil hand:
I want to be Joy Léveille again. 100%. NOT FOR SALE.
Miss Odette took the platinum bottle and tipped it into the apothecary jar.
The light that came up was the color of every dawn I'd ever stood out on a porch for.
Marigold screamed and went down on her knees.
The expressions started to peel off her face.
Her eyes first.
Then the way she held her mouth.
Then, in the last second, she put her hands over her face.
"Don't. Please. I don't want to go back."
I stood over her.
"You were always Marigold Cabot."
She lifted her head. Her eyes were full of a cold open hatred.
"What's good about being Marigold Cabot. Nobody loves her. Nobody remembers her. She's the fringe of the Cabot family. Madison's older cousin. The failure who never married. The one always being compared to."
She pointed at me.
"You're different. Somebody loved you. Somebody protected you. Even when you sold your own joy, you found Sterling Shaw."
I watched her break, and there was no satisfaction in it.
Only exhaustion.
"So you stole."
She laughed, the way you laugh when there are tears.
"You sold yours first."
I couldn't answer.
I was the one who'd put a price tag on first.
I was the one who'd thought you could slice an emotion off a life and retail it.
Miss Odette finished the line of words.
Marigold's sync rate went to zero.
Before she lost consciousness she fixed her eyes on Whit.
"You're going to die."
The sentence hit like ice water.
Whit went down into my arms.
He was very light.
So light that I held on to him and felt a fast panic rise in me.
The Aperture banner came down.
Primary buyer Sterling Whitford Shaw IV has returned all historical joy.
Life dependency severed.
Estimated time remaining: six hours.
Asa was shouting into his phone for an ambulance.
Tessa, crying, pulled at my arm.
I looked down.
Whit's eyes were closed but not completely. He found enough strength to open them halfway.
"Joy. Don't give me anything."
I held his hand.
"You shut up."
His mouth moved a little.
Almost a smile.
"This time. Listen."
The light over the operating-room door at Touro stayed on for four hours.
Asa stood against the corridor wall and hit himself in the face with a closed fist.
"This is on me. I should have caught the nutritionist."
Tessa caught his elbow.
"This isn't the moment for that."
Asa's eyes were violently red.
"Mr. Shaw hasn't kept a meal down properly since he was nine. He was finally —"
He couldn't finish.
I sat on the long vinyl bench against the corridor wall.
My palm was empty.
The platinum bottle was used.
Most of the old joys had come back into me.
Coming back wasn't easy.
The old joys came in the way children who have been lost for years come home — not quiet, not grateful, but crying and laughing and shouting over each other and all rushing through the door at once.
I started leaking water out of my eyes.
It started as a slow leak.
Then it didn't stop.
Tessa got her arm around my shoulders.
"Joy. Let it out."
I said, voice strange in my throat: "I don't want him to die."
Tessa's hand stopped on my back.
I said it again.
"I don't want Sterling Shaw to die."
The Aperture app was silent for a long beat.
Then a banner came down.
New emotion detected: love.
Package for resale?
I stared at the line.
Love.
Not joy. Not flutter. Not relief.
Love.
A second line dropped under it.
This emotion may force life-extension. Cost: permanent inability to love.
Tessa saw the screen.
Her face changed.
"Joy, no."
Asa came across the corridor.
"Miss Léveille. Mr. Shaw wouldn't —"
The operating-room door opened.
The doctor came out and pulled his mask down.
"Family. You should prepare yourselves."
I stood up.
A small new bottle was already in my palm.
It didn't have a cardstock tag.
It didn't have cotton string.
It was a small clear bottle, completely unmarked.
Like a single frozen tear.
Tessa grabbed my wrist with both hands.
"Joy. You just got back."
I looked through the small window of the operating-room door at the pale shape on the bed.
I knew.
So I didn't trade right away.
I went into the room.
Whit was awake. Or he was holding himself awake.
He saw the small clear bottle in my hand and his eyes changed.
"Take it away."
I sat on the edge of the bed.
"You don't have any strength left and you're still bossing me."
He breathed slowly.
"Joy. Don't become the second me."
I looked at him.
"You bought my joy to live."
"That was different."
"It wasn't."
I leaned down close to him.
"Sterling. You wanting to live wasn't wrong. Me selling my happiness wasn't a crime. What we were both wrong about was thinking we could do any of it without paying a price."
His eyes filled red.
"The price shouldn't be you."
I set the small clear bottle in his palm.
He moved at once to throw it away.
I held his hand still.
"I didn't say I was giving it to you."
He paused.
I looked up at the corner of the room where the Aperture banner was hovering.
"Cancel transaction."
The banner blinked.
Emotion has formed. Cannot be unmade.
I said: "Then I won't sell, won't give, won't trade."
The clear bottle in our joined palms shimmered, very small.
The banner stayed.
Use not selected.
I read the line, and then, without warning, I laughed.
This laugh was not a smile I had practiced.
It was an actual laugh.
"Then we keep it."
Whit stared at me, dumb.
The next second the bottle melted in our joined palms.
It didn't go into his body.
It didn't go back into mine.
It became something else. A warm light. It settled in the space between our two hands.
A new banner came down. The last one I would ever see.
Co-anchor created.
Each party retains independent personality.
Life dependency reconfigured: mutual recovery.
Whit's monitors evened out.
The doctor was the first one through the door. He went very still.
Asa, in the corridor, dropped to his knees.
Tessa burst in behind the doctor and burst into tears and through the tears she yelled, "You two scared the hell out of me, you absolute lunatics."
Whit looked at me. His voice was a thin thread.
"Can you still love."
I held his hand tighter.
"Yes."
He closed his eyes.
A small tear came down his cheek.
"Good."
Three months later, the emotion-bottle marketplace was gone.
Shaw Maritime's lawyers had filed civil suits against the back-channel resale ring; the federal attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana had picked up criminal indictments off the same files. A small story ran in the Times-Picayune and the local crowd that follows port-business news read it twice; nobody outside that crowd really understood what had happened.
Marigold Cabot was sent to a private psychiatric facility in Connecticut.
Pierce came to find me once.
He stood on the sidewalk under the awning of my building. He was thinner. He looked older.
"Joy. Madison and I called it off."
I nodded.
"I heard."
He looked at me a long moment. There were too many old things in his face.
"For a long time I thought you stopped loving me because you got mercenary."
I didn't reach for that one.
He smiled, small and rueful.
"Then I found out you'd just packed that part of yourself into a bottle and sold it."
A breeze came up Esplanade Ridge. Cool, this time of year.
He said, low: "If I hadn't gone to Oxford. If I'd come back sooner —"
I cut him off.
"Pierce. Don't rewind your life into hypotheticals."
His eyes went red.
"Are you saying we couldn't ever —"
I looked at him.
For the first time since the night he'd brought Madison to Coquette, I felt a specific clear thing.
Regret.
Regret is not love.
"No."
He stood there a long time. Then he said, "I hope you're happy."
I smiled at him a little.
"Thanks."
He turned and went down the block toward St. Charles.
He didn't look back.
I went upstairs.
Whit was in my kitchen, ruining congee.
That is the most exact way to say it. He had brought a pot. He had brought the rice. He had brought a strip of ginger and three scallions and a half-pound of chicken thighs from Whole Foods. He had been at the stove an hour. The pot looked like a small battlefield.
Asa was standing at his shoulder with the expression of a man at a wake.
"Sir. The salt's been in there three times."
Whit, calmly: "I know."
Tessa was at my counter cracking sunflower seeds with her teeth.
"He doesn't know."
I came up to the stove and took the spoon.
I tasted a mouthful.
It was salty enough to make my tongue tingle.
Whit was watching me. His face, which I now knew could go pale at any sign of weather, was carefully unreadable.
"How is it."
I swallowed.
"Tastes like being alive."
Tessa laughed so hard she put her head down on the counter.
Asa pressed both hands against his mouth and went purple trying not to laugh.
Whit laughed too.
Soft. Real.
A small heat moved across the inside of my palm.
A small bottle rolled out into my hand.
The cardstock tag, in the pencil hand I had finally learned was just my own:
The joy of getting to keep living with them. 31%. NOT FOR SALE.
I went into the dining room.
On the sideboard there is a tall glass apothecary jar with a glass stopper. Miss Odette gave it to me the week after the carousel. She'd said, Child, you put the ones you don't sell in here.
The jar already had a lot of small white bottles in it.
I added the new one.
They aren't goods anymore.
They're the life I'm growing back.