You sit back, relieved. Of course, you’re biased, but the case against Tim was clearly paper-thin. The prosecution had no body, no CCTV, and no forensic evidence. An attractive, high-profile young mother had vanished, and in the subsequent media frenzy someone had to be found to blame for it, that’s all.
You’d known all along there was no way Tim could have been involved, but you’d been half dreading that the trial might have turned something else up; that your husband—never the humblest or most patient of men—could have been goaded by some wily prosecutor into saying something that showed him in a bad light. But as it turned out, he’d never even had to take the stand. He’d been completely exonerated. And if a few crazies on social media had a hard time accepting that—well, that was their problem, not his.
All the same, it strikes you that you, Abbie, were a strangely absent figure from the proceedings. The allegations of affairs weren’t even touched on, nor the evidence of your depression. You’d hoped reading about the trial might give you an insight into what was really going through your mind in those last few weeks, but—just as with the contents of your phone—there’s nothing.
“Do you believe me?”
Startled, you look up. Tim’s eyes are boring into yours. “Do you believe I had nothing to do with what happened to you?” he repeats.
The question must be burning him up for him to even ask. His certainty is usually as fixed a part of his personality as his gray T-shirts.
“Of course.”
He grimaces. “Don’t say Of course. Of course means ‘I have no choice but to believe my husband.’ Your mind’s better than that, Abbie.”
Is this why you built me? you wonder. So I could pronounce you innocent from beyond the grave? To hear me say out loud the words the jury foreman never got to say?
“But it is Of course. And I didn’t need to read those articles to think that, either. I know you, Tim. I know you’d never deliberately harm anyone. But especially not me.”
Tension leaves his shoulders. “Of course I wouldn’t.” You both smile at his choice of words.
You hear the sound of a car pulling up. It’s Sian, arriving with Danny. “Hi, Danny,” you say eagerly as he runs into the house. He ignores you, instead making a beeline for the long wall of windows overlooking the ocean, which he greets by rubbing his face happily over the glass. You know you should really follow through, make him go back and say hi in response, but he looks so delighted to be here that you don’t have the heart.
“He loves this place,” Tim says, watching. “He used to spend hours down on the beach, jumping in the waves with you.”
“Maybe that’s something I can do with him tomorrow, then. I’d like that.”
Tim hesitates. “I’m afraid not. You going in the ocean would be like me taking my smartphone into the pool. Water—particularly salt water—would wreck you in a second.”
“Oh.” You think of your earlier self, the thousands of hours you spent on a board. That was why Tim built this house, after all—so you could be near your beloved ocean. And now even that’s off-limits.
“We might be able to address that, though, in time,” he adds. “And the hiking here is terrific. We should think about getting a dog—”
You shake your head. You don’t want a dog.
You make pasta. The four of you sit around the massive party-sized table on the sundeck to eat it, but conversation is fitful. You try to draw Sian out, but she seems to regard your questions as just some random computer-generated chitchat. Sometimes she ignores you altogether. Only when you ask her about Danny’s school does she become more animated. Meadowbank is, she says, exceptional, the only place in the whole state where kids like Danny get the consistency and intensity of support they need. The results there have been incredible.
You can’t help looking at Danny, who’s taking no part in the conversation, dreamily twirling a forkful of pasta tubes in front of his eyes before finally putting it in his mouth. Automatically, you smile at him—his fine, ethereal face is beautiful, whatever his condition—but incredible isn’t the word you’d have used.
“You should have seen him a few years ago,” Sian says defensively. “He was self-harming—headbanging, biting the backs of his hands, pulling out his hair…He’s made giant strides.”
“Of course,” you say quickly. “You’ve done a great job.”
Later, Tim and Sian clear the dishes while you stay with Danny. You’ve devised a simple game: You read one of his Thomas books out loud, but every now and then substitute a silly word for one of the originals—gorilla for train, say—or deliberately get Toby and Terence mixed up. Since Danny knows the text forward and backward, this is indescribably amusing to him. Sometimes he laughs so hard he can hardly make the thumbs-down sign, his way of saying Wrong.
“Thomas, you are a really useful elephant…”
You pause for effect. From the kitchen, you hear Sian say conversationally, “It’s incredible how quickly you forget she isn’t real. For a while back there it was just like talking with an ordinary person.”
Outraged, you wait for Tim to slap her down. But his reply is brief and noncommittal, a low rumble you can’t quite catch.
“Well, maybe you could train her to add a bit less salt to the pasta,” Sian adds primly. “Still a couple of things a robot can’t do as well as a human, I guess.”
Danny taps your arm insistently to make you go on mangling the story, and you don’t hear the rest.
After dinner, thankfully, Sian retires to her room with her laptop. You watch TV with Tim while Danny goes on playing with his trains, lining them up against the baseboard in endless, exact permutations.
“I’m sorry about the salt,” you say eventually.
“What? Oh, that. Don’t worry about it.”
“Sian doesn’t seem too keen on me.”
Tim shrugs. “She’s worried you’ll replace her, that’s all. She’ll come around.”
You hadn’t thought of it like that. “Replace her? Why?”
“If you think about it, therapy work’s another sector that’s ripe for automation. The whole point is to be consistent and repetitive. There’s plenty of evidence a bot could do that side of it far more effectively than a human.”
“Well, of course I’m not going to replace her. She’s good for Danny. And he likes her.” Even so, you feel better.
The news comes on. You’re the second item. “Tech titan Tim Scott, who four years ago was controversially cleared of murdering his wife Abigail, has created an eerie robotic replica of the missing woman—” It’s illustrated with a long-lens shot of you closing the blinds.
Abruptly, Tim raises the remote and the picture dies. “I’m going to bed,” he says with a sigh.
“We talked about uploading some wedding footage,” you remind him.
“Oh—so we did. We can set that up now.”
As you follow him upstairs you pass a painting on the landing. You stop to look at it more closely. It’s a portrait of Danny at a few months old, half asleep, one eye squinting lazily up at the viewer. It’s smaller than the other paintings around it, barely larger than a paperback. Even the brushstrokes are finer and more detailed, as if the painter’s whole world has shrunk to this tiny face, those dark eyes, the crinkle of soft, pouchy skin beneath each eyelid.
There is no way, you think, no way on God’s earth, that the woman who painted that portrait could have abandoned her son. No matter how trapped she felt, no matter what his diagnosis, she wouldn’t have left him.
You look up. Tim’s watching you intently.
“You feel it, don’t you?” he asks softly. “You feel what you felt when you were painting that.”
“I think anyone would. Any mother, anyway. It doesn’t mean I’m a mind reader.” Something makes you add, “Tim…those articles I read earlier. Were you checking my emails?”
“Of course not,” he says, clearly offended. “Why would I want to? We never had secrets from each other.”
You lie down in a bedroom and he hooks you up to a laptop. “It might take a while,” he warns. “The cable speeds out here are terrible.”
“That’s all right…And Tim?”
“Yes?”
“Would you kiss me before you go?”
“Of course.” He bends down and, tenderly, plants a kiss on your forehead. “Good night, my love. Enjoy the upload.”
“?’Night.”
You close your eyes and let the elixir of memory flood your system, like an addict’s fix of heroin.
23
You dream it, and you don’t dream it. These uploaded memories are more vivid, and more painful, than any dream. For a few precious minutes you’re yourself again—seeing the world through your own eyes, thinking with your own mind. Complete, once more.