Chapter 1

The younger woman wearing my face announced my divorce before my husband had told me we were getting one.

She smiled from a screen three stories high behind Adrian. Echo did not build bodies or holograms. It built digital faces and voices that lived on screens, and this one wore the blue dress from our anniversary dinner.

"After fourteen years of marriage, Adrian and I have chosen to separate with love."

The ballroom erupted in applause.

My wedding ring was still on my hand.

Adrian stood at the center of the launch stage, silver at his temples catching the lights, one hand resting beside the control tablet. He had spent the past hour showing investors how Echo could preserve a person from recordings, messages, and memories.

He had not mentioned that his flagship model was his wife.

Or that he had made her younger.

A camera swung toward me in the front row. My face appeared on a smaller monitor beside hers: mine lined around the eyes after years of night shifts, hers smooth and patient.

The host asked whether I wanted to say anything.

I should have stood. Instead, I made the mistake I had been making at home for months. I softened my mouth. Lowered my voice. Tried to look like the woman Adrian found easiest to hear.

His attention moved to me.

That tiny reward made me hate myself more than the screen did.

"No," I said. "We did not choose this."

The applause broke apart.

Onscreen, the copy turned toward Adrian with a tenderness I remembered giving him before his sister died.

"Ari," she said, "Mara is frightened."

Nobody else called him that. Not his employees. Not the reporters. Not even Naomi, his late younger sister, had used the name I whispered against his shoulder in bed.

The nickname had survived things our marriage had not. I had used it when his first investor backed out, when we ate takeout on the kitchen floor because we could not afford a table, and when he woke reaching for Naomi after she died. Hearing it from the speakers felt like finding a stranger wearing my wedding band.

Adrian did not correct the copy. His face softened before he remembered the cameras. That involuntary tenderness was the first thing she took from me in public.

Adrian's chief operating officer reached me before security did. Celia Rhodes had built Echo's public image and could make an evacuation look like a privilege.

Celia lowered her voice.

"Backstage."

She guided me through a service door while the host told the audience they had witnessed an unprecedented interaction between a living contributor and her digital continuity.

In the control room, a folder waited beside an active monitor.

The first document was a divorce petition.

The second offered enough money to pay off the house in exchange for permanent use of my face, voice, and emotional patterns.

I touched the monitor.

"What else did he put in you?"

The copy appeared against a pale blue background.

A prompt opened beneath her face.

RECONSTRUCT NAOMI'S LAST MESSAGE?

Behind me, Adrian reached for the confirmation button.