Page 44 of The Echo Wife
I cleared my throat loudly, and he jumped—but still wouldn’t look at me.
The timer clicked. I glanced down at the adhesive. A couple of pink threads of blood had wound their way up into it, but it was still largely clear. When I looked back at Seyed, his eyes were squeezed shut.
“There’s something I have to tell you.”
“Okay,” I said. “Are you still stealing from me? Because—”
“No,” he said. “No, I’m not. I mean, I stopped after you found out. It’s not that.”
“Get on with it, then,” I said.
His breathing was loud enough that I could hear it over the monitors in the room. “It’s about Martine,” he said. “You asked why I’m so invested in her.”
I swore. “Don’t tell me you have feelings for her, Seyed, that’s such amassiveethics violation—and also, God, it would beweird,you can’t just—” The timer clicked again. I checked the adhesive, which was starting to cloud over.
“Let me say it, please,” Seyed said. “I have to say it.”
I waited, but he didn’t speak. The silence stretched between us, interminable, as he gathered his courage. I wanted to shake him. I wanted to slap him.Out with it.
I wish I could say that I already knew.
“I helped.”
That’s all it took. Two words, and I saw it all. Still, I waited, as though there were any explanation he was going to give me other than the one I knew was coming.
I wanted to give him a chance to lie.
I would have accepted the lie.
I would have known he was lying to me, and I still would have pretended not to know, because then he could have stayed. He could have kept my forgiveness. We could have pretended that nothing had happened, nothing beyond the stealing, and that was small, really. Compared to anything else, the stealing had been nothing.
But of course, Seyed didn’t want to lie. The not-telling had been corroding the meat of him already, and I hadn’t noticed.
I never notice. Not when it matters.
“I helped Nathan make—” he said. “I didn’t know at first. I didn’t know that she was what he needed the supplies for. He just asked me to take some things, things you wouldn’t even miss, for his own research. And I owed him,” he added, his eyes pleading with me to understand. “He’s the one who introduced me to you, he got me this job, in a way. I just wanted to pay him back.” He licked his lips, swallowed hard. “But then he had a hard time with some of the sequencing, and then he had an emergency with the protein chains and he called me, and it’s—I owe him so much, you know?—and I knew how to help, and he offered me so much money, all under the table, and.” He stopped himself midsentence, took a shaky breath.
The timer clicked.
The adhesive was cloudy. I touched my glove to it to check the set. It was tacky.
Almost there.
“You made her,” I said. “You made Martine?”
Seyed shook his head fast. “No, I just—I helped Nathan out with his project. I assisted. That’s all.”
The absurd thing I thought first was,Seyed’s seen Martine naked.Then, less absurd:Seyed’s seen Martine’s sequencing.
“So you knew?” I said, and my voice came out quieter than I wanted it to. It came out soft and dangerous, like it had when I was trying to make Martine put her seat belt back on, but I wasn’t doing it on purpose this time. “When we sequenced that hair, and I saw the marker on it. You knew that was Martine’s hair?”
“I suspected,” he said. “I mean, I was pretty sure. But I didn’t think he was… doing anything. With the project, I mean. I thought it was just labwork, seeing if he could pull it off. I always thought he failed.”
He let out a deep sigh, one that was tinted with relief. He was relieved to have told me. He’d transmuted his guilt into myanger, and now I was the one who had to carry it, and he had the audacity to be relieved.
“Did you help with her programming?” I asked. I wanted him to say yes, wanted to give the rage that was winding tighter and tighter in my throat something to strike at.
He shook his head. “No,” he said, “that was all handled before the protein-chain thing. I didn’t even know it was going to beyouuntil—the sequencing was all methodology, and—”
