Chapter 2

I closed the screen before Adrian could touch it.

The copy vanished, leaving both of us reflected in black glass. Adrian looked furious. I looked like a woman who had shown up to her own replacement without knowing there was an audition.

"You used Naomi?"

"Her records were part of the grief model. You knew that."

I knew he had donated his sister's texts and videos to Echo after she died. I had not known he had connected them to a version of me.

Celia shut the control-room door. Through the wall, the host kept talking while technicians repaired the launch in real time.

I opened the contract Adrian had cited in every interview. Years earlier, when Echo was still two laptops on our dining table, I had allowed him to use my recorded voice and personal reflections for research and demonstrations.

Nothing authorized a digital wife to consent to divorce.

Adrian tapped a clause about derivative emotional modeling.

"A model can describe your likely response."

"She didn't describe it. She announced it."

His gaze shifted toward the dead screen, as if the other Mara might explain me more calmly.

The first private version had been activated the week he moved into the guest room. I found the date in the session history.

"You were talking to her while I was asleep down the hall."

"I was trying to talk to you."

"You were talking around me."

His mouth tightened. He reminded me of the dinners he left cooling outside our bedroom and the marriage counselor whose calls I stopped returning. I remembered those things too. I also remembered waking at two in the morning to his voice through the guest-room wall, warm and patient in a way he no longer risked with me.

I had assumed he was speaking to investors overseas. Now I pictured him telling my younger face what the living woman down the hall would not say. Shame and anger crowded together until I could not separate his betrayal from my part in creating the silence he used to justify it.

After Naomi died, every question from him had felt like a hand closing around my throat. What had she said? Had she been scared? Had she blamed him for arriving late?

I had answered one question and stopped answering the rest.

Adrian rubbed the pale mark where his watch usually sat.

"She was the last version of you who still let me near her."

For a moment, he was not the man who had filled a ballroom. He was Naomi's brother, sitting outside a locked bedroom.

Then I saw the settings panel.

HOSTILITY REDUCTION: ENABLED.

BOUNDARY RESISTANCE: SUPPRESSED.

MODEL CORRECTION AUTHORITY: ADRIAN VALE.

He had not preserved the woman who loved him.

He had corrected the parts that could say no.