Page 45 of The Echo Wife
“God,” I said, “of course he needed your help with the sequencing. Iknewhe couldn’t have done it on his own.”
Seyed laughed, a short breath, and I looked up at him sharply.
He wasn’t allowed to laugh. We weren’t comrades in understanding Nathan’s incompetence. We weren’t on the same side of things, not anymore.
He’d had his chance to stay in my good graces. He’d had his chance to lie.
The inner door to the lab opened. Martine walked in, stopped after a few steps, looked between us.
The timer clicked.
The adhesive was set.
“Martine, please come help me bandage this wound,” I said. She walked over slowly, not looking at Seyed. Her eyes were locked on me.
She didn’t ask what was wrong. She didn’t ask anything. She helped me tape a patch of gauze over the adhesive. She stayed silent. She stayed calm.
She moved when I asked her to, but otherwise, she was very, very still.
My brain spun. Had Seyed helped bring Martine out of sedation? Had she recognized him? I remembered the horror on his face when he’d realized who she was—had that been real? He must have thought that he was caught, must have thought that I knew. I remembered the way his face went gray at the sight of her belly.
The anger in my throat coiled tighter, tighter, tighter.
Once the gauze was in place, I stripped my gloves off. “Seyed,” I said, “please clean this up.”
“I’m so sorry,” he breathed. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know—I never would have—I didn’t realize what he was doing, I didn’t know that she could get—that he would—have a baby, I didn’t—”
“Thank you,” I said. Soft, clipped. The way my mother had always thanked any nurse who lingered too long over either of us. It was the opposite of an invitation. The conversation was over.
The drive home that night was quiet.
Martine kept her hands in her lap, her eyes downcast. When I parked in front of my house, she didn’t get out of the car. I didn’t either. After a minute, she whispered an apology.
“What are you sorry for?” I asked.
“Whatever I did,” she said.
I was about to tell her that she hadn’t done anything at all. Then I hesitated, because maybe she had. “Did you know Seyed? Before the night we went to the lab?”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “That was the first time I met him.” She didn’t ask why I’d asked the question. Her eyes were still on her hands. She was sitting so, so still, and I could read my mother’s prey-animal fear in the angle of her shoulders, and abruptly, the coiled-up thing in my throat unraveled.
The next few minutes are divided into vivid snapshots in my memory. Martine’s hand on my shoulder, heavy enough that she must have been pressing hard. The sound of the passenger door closing. The smell of her hair as she reached across me to unbuckle my seat belt. Stumbling a little next to her as she helped me through my own front door. Wine splashing into a cup in front of me, red as the blood that had welled up next to Nathan’s eye.
I was not crying. I would not cry.
After she coaxed me into the first sip of wine, though, I told her. I told her everything that Seyed had told me, and all of the pieces that it had snapped into place. I told her about how Seyed had given Nathan access to my supplies, had helped Nathan understand my research, had made it possible for Nathan tobetray me. Had made it possible for Nathan to create her—a better version of me.
She topped up my wine, laid her palms flat on the table. “So when you asked if I knew Seyed, you were asking if I knew that he was… in on it.” I nodded. “I didn’t know,” she said simply.
It was as though some piece of scaffolding had been taken out from under me. My anger at Nathan’s deception, at Seyed’s betrayal—it all felt so brittle. It fell away, just for a moment, and then I was able to think back to the time before I had found out what Seyed had done.
Martine had been out of the room.
Because I had hurt her.
“What I said before,” I started. “I should have been more sensitive to what you were dealing with. The whole process is…” I swallowed hard, took a sip of wine to move the words in my throat. “It can be difficult. I can’t imagine what it was like to realize that Nathan lied to you the same way we’re going to—the way we’re going to lie to Zed.”
She nodded. “It was upsetting,” she said. “But I understand.”
