Page 7 of Help Wanted: Wife

The apartment door melted open at his approach. He shoved the cases inside, and they returned for the others. In two more trips, they had all the luggage.

She surveyed the unit with obvious curiosity. He kept it clean, but nothing about it was fancy or spacious. But it was a huge improvement over his andSala’s previous unit, a dingy surface-level single room. This three-room apartment accommodated his home office and the bakery kitchen. The parlor boasted a nice wide window, except it had no view. All you saw was another graffiti-marred cloudtopper, which blocked most of the natural light. Under the circumstances, he would have preferred a smaller window and more wall space for shelving.

Besides a sofa and the floor-to-ceiling storage unit, a desk, two chairs, and his DataDrive were crammed into a corner.

“Office?” she asked.

“For the time being.” The new bakery would have a cubicle to take care of business matters.

“The kitchen is in here.” He led the way into the best part of the house. The kitchen was another reason they’d selected this unit. The largest room, it had space for commercial ovens, a giant chillerator, cooling racks, and a long smooth counter for working with dough, which also doubled as the dining table.

She scrutinized the ovens and the mixers, studying the dials and peering inside the former. “Hm…a little different from what I used on Terra Nova. You’ll need to give me a quick tutorial.”

“I will. Let me show you the rest of the apartment, and then we’ll go to the bakery at the cozi.” That was the most important thing.

He pointed out the bathroom before moving to the bedroom. He froze.Fizzak.

How could he have overlooked such an important detail?

He had one bedroom, one bed.

Chapter Five

We’re going to have to share a bed.Prudence eyed the huge elephant in the tiny room.

Never having been scrambled and unscrambled in a vaporator before, she felt nauseous. She hoped all her molecules had been put back into the right place. However, she suspected some of the queasiness originated from regret.

Why had she come here? What had possessed her? Hope had warned her not to do anything rash. By nature, she was rational, methodical,prudent. But had she lived up to her name? No. William’s defection had knocked her so far off-kilter, she’d temporarily lost her mind.

She couldn’t point to any single incident as the cause of her growing regret, but rather the accumulation of a bunch of small things. The alien tech. Accelerators, cloudtoppers, vaporators. She had no idea how to operate any of the kitchen appliances. Had no idea what some of them were. At the spaceport, she’d stood out like a canary amongbluejays, conspicuous in her humanness. Although she understood and spoke their language by virtue of her translator, Caradonian still sounded alien to her ears, like nothing she’d ever heard before. Besides the shock of hearing an alien language come out of her own mouth, speaking felt weird, like her tongue was twisting in different ways.

Maybe if Larth had welcomed her with open arms, she’d feel more comfortable, but that hadn’t occurred. He’d seemed ambivalent—not impolite but not overjoyed to see her, either. Was he suffering remorse?We’re off to a great start!The marriage was just a business arrangement, but she’d still expected a more congenial welcome. Co-workers and business partners were friendly to one another.

He’s not over his late wife.The attachment was obvious. He referred to her as if she were still in the picture.

She remained by the door as he squeezed through the narrow space between the footboard and the wall. “You can put your clothes in the wardrobe.” Without looking, he touched a panel, and a door slid open to reveal a closet—jam-packed with women’s clothes.

Where exactly am I supposed to put my stuff?

The wardrobe full of his late wife’s clothing offered more evidence he hadn’t gotten over her death. But she could see it in his blue-black eyes, ringed by dark shadows of sadness. She could empathize with his grief, but it worried her. She hadn’t come for a love match—would have run from it if it had been offered—but how would a marriage of convenience even work if he was actively grieving? They had to achieve some equanimity and equilibrium. They would be working together, living together—she glanced at the elephant in the room—sleeping in the same bed together.

He closed the closet. “Would you like to see the bakery now?”

“Yes, I would,” she said, relieved to leave the bedroom. She backed into the hall to give him space.

“We’ll take the vaporator again,” he said.

This time, Larth explained how it worked—via brainwaves. A programming chip embedded in her wrist—she’d received one on the ship—allowed her to transmit a “mental destination” to the machine, which would then deposit her in the closest location.No wonder he told me not to think when he left me on one at the spaceport to get the trunks.She could have ended up anywhere with no idea how to return.

They boarded the vaporator, and it transferred them to a location on the surface. She immediately understood his pride in the second-floor apartment. As soon as the transport opened, she was bombarded by a cloud of noxious odors and clashing, clanging noises. She stepped out into a dense forest of skyscrapers, and, like overgrown trees, the cloudtoppers blocked the sun, casting the crowded street in dusk-like shadow.

Graffiti blackening and bluing buildings contributed to the air of dereliction. She tipped her head, peering up the tall buildings. Everything got cleaner, brighter, more expansive on the upper floors.The higher you go, the better it gets.

Oblivious to the trash littering the walkways, people strode briskly to their destinations. Although she spotted couples and single women, the devastating effects of the pandemic were readily apparent. Men outnumbered women at least two to one. Grief etched the faces of many unattached males. The planet-nation still mourned.

Anger had helped her through her loss, hot fury cauterizing the wound and muting the pain. These men didn’t have the crutch of anger to lean on.

She wondered when Sala had died. How fresh was his wound? She tilted her head and glanced at him.

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