It was 11:42 in the evening and Jenna was waving a champagne flute like she was conducting something, and Brooke had the tiara on sideways because Hannah kept adjusting it and making it worse, and Lila was filming everything with the focused dedication of someone who has promised a highlight reel and intends to deliver. Someone had turned the music up to a volume that was going to become the next room’s problem. I was standing near the window with my own glass and thinking that this was exactly what a bachelorette party was supposed to feel like, which is to say loud and warm and slightly overcrowded and full of the specific joy of women who have known each other long enough to be genuinely happy for one of their own.
Then my phone buzzed in my pocket and I figured it was Jack, probably texting because Liam was fighting bedtime again, which was Liam’s preferred hobby on nights when I was not home to manage it. I looked at the screen. It was not Jack.
It was a notification from the smart scale app, the one I had connected to my bathroom scale several months earlier during a brief and not particularly successful wellness phase. The app tracked weigh-ins and stored profiles, and it had sent me a notification because a weigh-in had just been detected. Profile: Guest.
Weight: 115 lbs. I read it twice, then a third time, standing by the window with the music going and everyone laughing behind me and the city lights spread out through the glass. Jack weighed just over two hundred pounds.
Liam was seventy-two pounds on a good day, soaking wet, with his shoes on. Ava was forty-eight. Even if Liam and Ava had somehow both stood on the scale at the same moment, which would have required coordination they did not possess, the math did not produce a hundred and fifteen.
I checked the timestamp. 11:42. Not a delayed sync, not something from earlier in the day that the app had only now gotten around to sending.
This had happened in real time, at twenty minutes to midnight, in my bathroom, where the three people who were supposed to be home did not collectively or individually weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds. “Michelle!” Brooke called from across the suite. “You’re missing the toast!”
“Just a minute,” I said.
Hannah came over with a slight frown that said she had registered the change in my expression. “What’s wrong? Why do you look like that?”
I turned the phone around and held it up.
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