Page 23 of The Echo Wife
“I can explain,” he said, three words he’d never said to me before. Not in all our years working together.
Behind me, Martine let out a softhmph.
I understood right away, all at once.
She’d been trying to warn me. She’d been doing it in the best way she knew how—in a way that wouldn’t cause a fight, that wouldn’t force her to directly contradict me, that put the burden of annoyance squarely on her shoulders.
She’d tried to warn me, and I hadn’t listened.
She was right.
We were not, in fact, alone.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
I can admit to having made mistakes in the course of my life, my career, my relationships. Do not mistake this for largesse on my part. I’m a scientist; examination of my own errors is part of my job. Without honest self-assessment, growth is impossible. If I can’t rule human error out of my work, then my results simply cease to matter.
I try not to make mistakes. I try not to introduce new elements of human error into any environment in which I have a material investment in outcomes. Some might consider this isolating, but I’m not in the business of seeking out chaos simply to appease some arbitrary notion of social nourishment. I was fine as a child with few playground friends and a cold, authoritative father; I was fine when I was alone in a sprawling stone house with my mother and her clean hands; I was fine when I was the only teenager at my boarding school who didn’t get invited home for holidays. And, as an adult with a longer list of successes than failures, I don’t see a reason to force myself to rely on other people.
Every time I have tried to do it—every time I’ve tried toneedsomeone—it’s been a mistake. I tried to need Nathan, but I couldn’t need him enough to satisfy his hunger to be necessary. Some inextractable part of him wanted to bear my weight, resented me for standing on my own. It’s why he decided to create Martine, I think. She needed him, truly needed him, the way a dog needs someone to put food in his dish. She couldn’t help needing him, because it was the whole function of their relationship: She made him feel essential in a way I never did.
But I learned early on that no one is necessary. After my father was gone, my mother didn’t have to bear his weight anymore, and she could have taken mine. But she didn’t. She left me to grow on my own, sent me away when she could, never tried to become the kind of mother she could have been in his absence. It was the best thing for me: I learned to breathe in a vacuum, to walk underwater, to be all alone in the world. Because of the solitude she gave me, I learned never to lean on anyone too hard, never to lean on anyone at all. Not even my husband.
But, as I said, I can admit to making mistakes. I learned my mother’s lesson well, but I am not perfect. There was one exception to my rule.
Over the years of our working relationship, I began to lean on Seyed.
He wouldn’t look me in the eyes.
He was wringing his ski mask in his hands, twisting it hard enough that I could hear the creak of the fabric against his palms. I wanted to tear it from his grip, wanted to throw it to the floor and force him to look at me. It didn’t feel like he had a right to regret. I didn’t want to give him the gift of guilt.
“Student loans,” he said at last, his voice saturated with shame. “It’s just so much, I didn’t know how I’d ever pay it all off. And then someone approached me, they asked if I could sell them some supplies, and it… it seemed like a victimless crime.”
“How long has this been going on?” I asked. “How long have you been using my funding to subsidize your side business?” He mumbled something in reply. I couldn’t hear him. Rather than asking him to repeat himself, I waited. It was a trick I learned from my father, letting the silence thicken until it was suffocating. It worked as well on Seyed as it had worked on me as a child. After a few seconds, he swallowed hard and spoke again.
“About a year.”
I swore, and he flinched. I thought of every time I’d had tofight for funding over the previous twelve months, every time I’d justified how expensive it was to operate my lab, every time I’d explained that marketability would have to wait another fiscal quarter. Every time I’d had to say that we weren’t ready to go mainstream with a product, but that when we did, it would be worth the cost.
All that time, Seyed had been stealing from me. I fought down a flash of rage at the way he cringed, the way he was acting small and soft now that he’d been caught. Where was the confidence he’d needed to grift me for an entireyear? I wanted to make him show it to me, wanted to force him to stand tall in his betrayal. Martine rested a hand on my arm. I looked at her, half to see what she wanted and half to get respite from the sight of Seyed cowering.
Her face radiated calm. She whispered for me to take a breath. Her mouth was curled up at the edges, the barest hint of a smile. She gave my arm a gentle squeeze.
It shook me, the expression on her face. The way she instinctively knew how to calm me down. She looked so much like my mother.
I wonder if, in that moment, I looked like my father.
I nodded at her, mirrored her smile, and turned back to Seyed. “Okay,” I said. “This is unacceptable. But I can understand why you would decide to steal from me.”
“I’m so sorry,” he stammered. Martine gently squeezed my arm again.
“This is unacceptable,” I repeated. I kept my voice level, but still, he flinched. “Who were you selling to?”
He hesitated. “They came to me,” he said again. “Someone who was trying to reproduce your methods in a collectivized laboratory. They just needed to source some of the supplies we had extras of anyway, and—”
“Did wehaveextra?” I interrupted, sharp. “Or did youorderextra?”
