Chapter 1
Sloane thinks her bed is the only place she loves more than her lab. Seventy-six inches wide, eighty inches long, and made up of a forty-seven percent hybrid of foam and wool. However, the reason she loves her bed can’t be put into numbers. It’s the girl directly across from her. Celine sleeps on her right side, chest delicately rising and falling with every breath. Sloane counts each one. She calculates the average seconds between them, maximum lung capacity, and the thousands of other numbers that make up the equation of her love.
Her hand reaches out, lightly grabbing her girlfriend’s wrist. She feels her pulse and counts each slight jump of her vein. Sloane memorizes her heartbeat and listens to it like a love song. Celine shifts. Her eyes open and land on Sloane. Whenever the other FBI agent looks at her, there’s a sixty-seven percent chance she’ll smile. Sloane loves that number. She traces it into the skin of Celine’s wrist. Her girlfriend turns to study her, eyes flickering as they catalogue every muscle and bone in her face.
“You had the nightmare again?”
“You and Michael’s gifts have a coefficient of relatedness of point-three-five.”
Celine pulls her closer to her, wrapping her arms around. The other woman's warmth surrounds her, and the remaining tension from her nightmare fades away. She rests her head on her shoulder, allowing herself to be buried away from the remnants of a very bad place.
“I had a dream about Aaron,” she confesses,
The downside of having a brain like hers is that she can’t forget. She remembers every second of finding Aaron’s corpse. His body was still, lifeless, and covered in blood. She’d known as soon as the paramedics arrived that he was dead. His chest didn’t move. His eyes weren’t blinking. There was no slight jump in his skin, indicating a pulse. In the seconds after the camera turned on, she’d counted all the ways he wasn’t alive.
“Want to talk about it?” whispers Celine into her ear.
Sloane doesn’t respond. Can’t find a way to make her throat work past the tears and heartache.
“Do you want espresso?” she asks instead.
She smiles brightly at her girlfriend. "Caffeine has a ninety-eight percent success rate of fixing a bad night's sleep in relation to nightmares."
“Cows are twenty times deadlier than sharks, killing an average of twenty people in the US every year.”
The statistics are coming out of her mouth faster with every sip of the warm caffeinated goodness in her hand. Sloane loves coffee. It turns off all the ‘incomputable’ data, like whether people are mad or are annoyed with her. Fortunately for her, she tends to surround herself with people who think she says the right thing eighty-seven percent of the time.
“Maybe we should start arresting cows instead of serial killers,” says Michael.
“I thought you hated profiling,” Lia quips back.
There’s a lightness to her tone that doesn’t quite meet her eyes. An uncomfortable silence coats the van, like film on a cold cup of coffee. Sloane takes another sip of hers.
“A kiwi bird’s average egg size is fifteen percent of the female’s body weight compared to the average two percent of other female birds.” She blurts out.
“Sterling has a case for us,” says Cassie, pointedly ignoring the tension in the room. “I think it’s a good warm-up for The Naturals as they graduate to active cases.”
The Naturals program has undergone a lot of changes since it first started. Ever since Judd retired, Cassie stepped up to take over the program, watching over the kids both on and off the field. One of the many changes to the program was the addition of stages to case involvement for the kids. Similar to a high school, students had to graduate from cold cases before they could work on active ones. The current group of Naturals had finally graduated from he cold case program and were eager to get involved in active cases.
However, just like Judd, Cassie had final say on all the kids’ involvement in any case. The current Naturals program has the lowest active-duty case load by twenty-four percent. Sometimes Sloane wishes she understood people. She wishes she could understand why Cassie doesn’t want to use the Naturals. Sloane thinks it might have something to do with the psychiatrist Cassie is seeing, but that’s a prohibited area of conversation, which no amount of hacking would allow her permission to enter.
“A full-grown Amazon pink river dolphin can grow up to 9 feet (2.7 meters) long, weigh up to 400 pounds (181 kilograms), and live to 30 years old.”
“Pink is my favorite color,” says Celine, cutting through the tension like a red light at midnight. “Tell me more about pink colored animals?”
Sloane feels the tension that’s been boiling in her stomach dissolve as she rapidly fires facts on flamingos, shrimp, axolotl, and every other pink animal that comes to mind. By the time they pulled up to the Colorado office, most of the team had relented, asking different questions about the multiple animals she had brought up. It’s nice. If the world were a puzzle, Sloane finally feels she has a place to belong, not just with Celine. Here with the Naturals or the FBI, Sloane feels like she fits. Her girlfriend holds her hand as they walk into the office. They give their badges to the security guard who scans them in. His name is Freddy, and he tends to appreciate statistics on Giraffes.
"Giraffes are one of twenty-four species with prehensile tongues. Sun bears are included in this number as well as chameleons and anteaters.”
Freddy whistles. There’s a thirty-eight percent chance it’s out of appreciation. The more significant probability is that it’s out of admiration.
“Four for one special,” he says as he scans them all in. “By the way, someone is waiting for you in the office.”
“Who?” asks Celine
“Not you," he clarifies, "Mrs. Tavish."
Sloane provides a vital service as an FBI agent. Still, the chances of a civilian requesting her assistance on any matter are highly unlikely, a probability of less than eleven percent to be exact.
“Who?” repeats Celine, asking for both of them and growing more annoyed.
“Her name is Blythe Shaw.”
The world stops, numbers and equations grinding to a halt.
"Grayson Shaw's wife," her voice sounds foreign to her ears.
She knows he's only been faithful to her for fifteen percent of their thirty-two years of marriage—her birth a testament to his infidelity. Her stomach twists. Blythe has always been a statistic she didn't want to look at. The physical reminder of the woman her mother had hurt. The woman her father forced her to be a secret from. The woman Grayson Shaw wanted and loved. She's been standing silent and frozen at the entrance of the building too long.
"Sorry," says Freddy. "Was I not supposed to let her-"
"Yes," says Celine, voice cold. "Please have her escorted out."
"No!" shouts Sloane. She swallows thickly, coming out of the state her mind had been. "I want to talk to her."
Celine shifts so that they're face to face. "Sloane, you don't owe the Shaws anything. How they treated you-"
"Blythe has only ever met me once."
It had been an accident. Her father had taken his wife to his mistress's show. Margot had thrown her out of her dressing room to prepare, smearing her face with makeup and adjusting her bra to make her chest twenty percent bigger. Sloane had wandered outside into the Casino. She'd been watching the slot machines, playing a game with herself as she tried to guess the next combination based on probabilities. One of the security guards had picked her up. She'd been so invested in the numbers she hadn't seen an army of security, making way for the King and Queen of The Majesty. Her father didn't say anything as the security, over three-point-six times larger than her, picked her up like a suitcase to move her out of their way. Blythe did.
Be careful with her. She's someone's daughter.
"Blythe was nice back then." Sloane sucks in a deep breath. "I want to talk to her."
Celine doesn't say anything for a while, staring at her and then past her. These are one of the moments Sloane wishes she could understand people the way she can equations. She wishes she could understand Celine the way Celine seems to understand her.
"Fine," her girlfriend breathes out. "But I'm coming with you."
"We all are," says Cassie.
Sloane looks at her family. It's been seventeen years since she saw Blythe Shaw in The Majesty. She's no longer that sad and lost little girl. She's found her place and her people. With a surge of confidence, she grabs her partner's hand, ready to confront her past.