Finding out what Nathan was doing should have been so much easier than it was. Once I started looking right at things, it was obvious. He had gone to no great lengths to hide her from me. His nightstand was littered with receipts—for clothes and jewelry that never made it to our house, and meals at restaurants I’d never had time to eat at. He didn’t bother to make excuses for late nights out, for strange bruises on his shoulders and scratches on his back. Was there ever lipstick on his collar? Did I ever pay close enough attention to find out?
I don’t know if he thought I was too stupid to see what he was doing, or if it just didn’t matter to him that I might catch him.
Now, I padded across the unfamiliar dining-room tile to the open galley-style kitchen and filled a coffee mug with water. Drank the whole thing, yes, must be responsible about hydration, then refilled it and took the mug back with me to the table. My belly sloshed uncomfortably with water.
Now was as good a time as any, I figured. I’d sign the papers while I was still a little buzzed and riding high on the ego-flush of the evening. I’d get it over with, and in the morning, I probably wouldn’t even remember doing it.
I fished a pen out of my leather shoulder bag, the one I took to work with me every day. It was big enough to fit a few shirts, a few pairs of underwear, a pair of slacks, a toothbrush. It was small enough that no one noticed I was living out of it, the week after I’d found out about Nathan. It wasn’t unusual for me to stay in the lab for a couple of hours after everyone else was gone, and no one commented on the way I was there before anyone else in the morning. No one had needed to know that I was sleeping in my office during that terrible week.
I pressed the tip of my pen to the bottom of the first page, above the first yellow sticky flag, a line with my name on it. My married name. My name for good, since all my publications were under it. My doctorate had been issued to that name, even. I was so young when I married Nathan, so sure that he was good enough, that he was what I wanted. So sure that we’d go on to conquer the world together. So ready to give up the name I shared with my mother and my father. So ready to become someone new.
My award glinted in my peripheral vision, the silver double helix shining in the fluorescent light from the kitchen. I put it on top of the thick stack of divorce papers and let the weight of it compress the pile.
“Worth it,” I whispered to myself. I let the pen in my hand fall to the ground. I could sign the papers in the morning, with coffee and aspirin and whatever headache was waiting for me. I decided that I would lean right into the misery of it, make it a whole pathetic tableau.
I walked upstairs and wilted onto my bed, on top of the covers. I yanked at my gown until I felt the buttons between my shoulder blades pop off. I tugged the silk over my head and gasped at the feeling of freedom, my ribs expanding further than they’d been able to for hours.
I could breathe. I could finally breathe.
CHAPTER
THREE
The weekend gave way to Monday like fog dissolving in sunlight. I drove to the lab with too much gratitude, embarrassingly relieved to be out of the little house I’d never wanted. The lab, by contrast, was something I’d wanted with the kind of mania some women reserve for childbearing.
It had been an incredibly hard win. The Artemis Corporation hadn’t initially wanted to give me my own space for my research—they’d claimed that, without military contracts, my work was too controversial to be profitable. It took years of fighting to convince them that my work could have other applications, the kinds of applications that would bring in immeasurable profit from private sources. Years of measuring out the size of the waves I could afford to make. Waves just big enough to keep the conversation going, but not so big as to make me into a problem. Years of sharing my space with people who could never begin to understand the kind of work I was doing. Except for Seyed, of course. He always understood the work. He always understood me.
But then, one day, the fighting was over, and the lab was built. Tempered glass tubes filled with artificial amniotic fluid, tables made of tungsten instead of steel or aluminum, a fume hood big enough to fit an adult specimen if necessary. I still had to fight over funding every year, of course, but maybe the Neufmann would change that. Maybe results would change that.
Either way. My lab felt more like home than any iteration of home ever had.
“Did you bring it?” Seyed never greeted me with a “hello.” He considered that kind of formality a waste of time. It was part of why I’d hired him in the first place.
Seyed was already waist-deep in the fume hood. I couldn’t see him until after I went through the airlock, positive-pressure ventilation pulling a few strands of my hair loose—but I could, as usual, still hear him. He always started talking as soon as he heard the affirmative beeps of my entry code.
Now, his muffled voice reverberated through the vents of the hood as I walked into my lab. “Of course I brought it,” I said, setting the Neufmann on a bare patch of lab table. “You’d quit if I didn’t.”
Seyed emerged from the fume hood, scrub brush raised high, and yanked off the respirator that covered the lower half of his face. He was small, rail-thin but with a round face that made him look like an undergrad. A soul patch sat in the center of his chin, groomed with the great pride a man shows the only facial hair he can reliably produce. He stared at the silver double helix with a critical eye. “It’s smaller than I expected,” he said.
I dropped my things on my desk and told him to get used to it. “You’ll have ten of them someday, if you keep practicing your fume hood maintenance.” He saluted me with a finger, pulled his respirator back on, and vanished into the fume hood again. “What are you doing in there, anyway?” I asked. “Did something explode?”
“No,” he said, “not technically. Don’t worry about it, I ordered the replacement parts already.”
I didn’t worry about it. I never worried about anything that Seyed told me not to worry about. Some of my colleagues would flinch at the idea of trusting an assistant the way I trusted Seyed, but he’d earned it. He was smart, sure, but anyone could be smart. I would never take on an assistant who wasn’t smart. I demanded more than smart—brilliance was the bare minimum required to keep up in my lab, and not keeping up wasn’t an option. Not keeping up was dangerous.
Seyed was more than just brilliant. He was competent, independent, and fearless on a level that matched me pace for pace. I spotted it in him for the first time when Nathan brought him home for dinner, when he was a graduate student threatening to become Nathan’s protégé. The questions he asked me about my research that night went well beyond polite interest. His teeth were sharp and he was hungry, too hungry to be satisfied by the kind of growth Nathan could offer him.
I told him so, that night, and then I offered him a job where he could flourish, and that was that. I don’t remember if Nathan was upset or not. I suppose that, by then, I’d stopped paying attention to that kind of thing.
Most of the time, it was just the two of us working together, and it was easily the best working partnership I’d ever been half of. I trusted Seyed’s judgment like I trusted my own. I trusted him without question.
So I didn’t bother looking into the fume hood to see what he was doing. Instead, I grabbed a clipboard from the side of a specimen tank and started reviewing nutrient updates, as recorded by the weekend intern I’d never wanted to hire. I hated trusting data collection to someone other than Seyed or myself, but there were labor laws to consider.