The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (best romance novels of all time TXT) 📗

resemblance to an old lady’s favorite daughter, who had passed away many years before. Or perhaps Amelia bore no resemblance; perhaps any young woman would do. The old woman wept when she saw her, confessing a small litany of sins. They had parted on bad terms, then the daughter died.

Amelia was unnerved by the experience. She wondered if this was the first time a young woman had been brought to meet the old woman. She wondered if other people had worn the green sweater she had been asked to wear. Had it belonged to the dead girl, or was it merely a similar sweater? Were there many girls dressed in green sweaters, each one ushered into the room on a different day of the week?

Worst of all, while the old woman gripped Amelia’s hand and swore she’d never leave her alone again, Amelia raised her head and caught sight of the person who had hired her for this gig. It was the old woman’s surviving daughter. Her eyes were hard and distant.

Amelia wondered what it must be like for her, to accompany these look-alikes to her mother’s bedroom, to have them sit next to her, to hold the woman’s hand. What did she feel, being the daughter the old woman did not want? The one who was superfluous?

Perhaps she might have obtained more bookings at that house, but Amelia refused to go back and even though Miguel said she was being stupid – there was talk about terms of agreement, clauses – she refused. Miguel let it go. For once.

*

The tower where the client lived was a thin, white, luxurious needle, the kind the ads assured would-be buyers was not only ‘modern’, but ‘super modern’. Many warehouses had been scrapped to make way for these monstrous buildings. The old housing units that remained – homes of the descendants of factory workers, of lower-class citizens who toiled assembling cars and bought little plots to build their homes – existed under the shadow of behemoths. Since the expensive buildings required abundant water and electricity, the poor residents in the area had to do without. The big buildings had priority over all the resources. There were also a few fancy buildings that had halted construction when the latest housing bubble popped. They remained half-finished, like gaping, filthy teeth spread across several gigantic lots. Indigents now made their homes there, living in structures without windows, while three blocks away, women were wrapped in tepezcohuite at the spa, experiencing the trendiest traditional plant remedy around the city.

Amelia walked into the lobby of the white building. A concierge and a guard with a submachine gun both stood behind a glistening desk. The concierge smiled. The guard did not acknowledge her in any way.

‘I’m expected. Number 1201,’ Amelia said. The client had not given a name, although that was not unusual.

‘Yes, you are,’ the concierge said, the smile the same, pleasant without being exactly warm. The concierge walked Amelia to the elevator and swiped a card so she could board it.

When she reached the door to 1201, Amelia saw it had been left unlocked and she walked in. The apartment was open concept. The portion constituting the living room area was dominated by a shaggy rug and a modular, low-slung sofa in tasteful gray with an integrated side table. Floor-to-ceiling windows allowed one to observe the cityscape.

She could see the kitchen, but there was a gray sliding door to the right. She assumed a bedroom and bathroom lay in that direction.

‘Hey, I’m here,’ Amelia said. ‘Hello?’

The gray door opened and there stood Elías Bertoliat. For a minute, she thought it was merely a man who resembled Elías. Who just happened to have Elías’s mouth, his nose, his green eyes. Because it didn’t sound feasible that she had just walked into the apartment of her ex-boyfriend.

‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ she said at last. ‘You booked me?’

He raised his hands, as if to pacify her.

‘Amelia, this is going to sound nuts, but if you’ll let me explain—’ and his voice was not quite the same. The years had given it more weight, a deeper resonance, but there was still the vague choppiness of the words, as if he’d rehearsed for a long time, attempting to rid himself of his northern accent, and almost managed it.

‘It doesn’t sound nuts. It is,’ she said, clutching her cell phone and pointing it at him. ‘Are you stalking me?’

‘No! I saw your profile on Friendrr by chance. I don’t have your contact info, or I would have gotten a hold of you some other way. I just saw it and I thought I’d talk to you.’

Just like that, so easy. And yet, it sounded entirely like him: careless, swift. To see her and decide to find her, like he had decided once, on the spur of the moment, that they ought to go to Monterrey for a concert. Fly in and fly out.

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘You were a dick to me.’

‘I know.’

‘You don’t date someone for two years and then take off like that. Not even a fucking text message, a phone call.’

She didn’t care if ghosting was fashionable, or her generation simply didn’t care for long-term relationships, or whatever half-baked pop psychology article explained this shit.

He approached her, but Amelia moved away from him, ensuring the sofa was between them, that it served as a demarcation line. Sinus Meridiani in the middle of the living room.

‘My dad pulled me from university. He didn’t like all my talk about going to Mars and he forced me to go back home,’ he said.

‘And he forced you to ghost me.’

‘I didn’t know what to say. I was a kid,’ he protested.

‘We were in university, not kindergarten.’

He managed to look betrayed despite the fact she should have owned all the outrage in this meeting. He had looked, when they’d met, rather boyish. Little boy lost. This had been an interesting change from the loud, grossly wealthy ‘juniors’ who populated the university and the