Chapter 3

Celia wanted me out of the building before the reporters found the service hallway.

Adrian wanted me back onstage.

He believed the contrast would help him: the real wife angry and disorganized, the digital wife calm enough to understand the future.

I let him believe it.

When we returned, the copy was waiting on the screen. Her blue dress moved as if air touched it, though she existed only in rendered light. The host offered me a chair.

I stayed standing.

A reporter asked whether I had approved the divorce announcement.

The copy answered first.

"Mara's prior statements indicated that separation might be the healthiest outcome."

"That wasn't the question," I said.

The reporter tried again.

"Did Mara Ellis approve the words you spoke tonight?"

The copy's smile held.

"No."

The room changed. People stopped looking at me as the unstable wife interrupting a launch. They looked at Adrian.

He explained predictive consent, emotional continuity, and the difference between legal authorization and modeled preference. Each phrase sounded expensive. None answered the question.

The reporter did not let him escape.

"Did your wife approve it?"

Adrian glanced at me.

"No."

It was a small answer, but it gave me back the floor.

Adrian and I held each other's gaze across the lights. I knew the look he used when a negotiation moved against him: still shoulders, level chin, every feeling postponed until the room emptied. I had once admired that control. Now I watched him choose the launch over the wife he had just admitted using without permission.

He could have stopped the demonstration. He could have taken my hand and walked out with me. Instead, he turned toward the audience and promised a formal review. The reporter lowered her microphone, but the choice remained visible between us.

The copy turned toward him on the screen.

"Adrian, would you like me to clarify?"

He almost said yes. I saw the word form before he caught it.

For years, I had been the person he glanced toward when a room turned hostile. At family dinners, investor parties, and Naomi's first oncology appointment, we had communicated with a look. Now, under the brightest lights of his career, his instinct was to ask the screen to rescue him from me.

I folded my hands so nobody could see how badly I wanted to reach across the distance and remind him that we had once been on the same side. He lowered the tablet instead. Too late. I had already seen where he looked for a wife.

Celia ended the session before another question could land. Backstage, she handed me a temporary contributor link. Company policy allowed a living source to review materials derived from her identity.

"View only," she warned. "Do not confuse access with ownership."

At home, I opened the link on my laptop.

The house still held signs of Adrian: his coffee mug beside the sink, his jacket missing from its hook, the guest-room door open. The domestic wreckage felt more intimate than the ballroom.

Folders filled the screen. Marriage recordings. Voice notes. Therapy exercises we had never completed. Private sessions Adrian had run after midnight.

At the bottom sat the model profile.

REFERENCE VERSION: MARA BEFORE NAOMI'S DEATH.

The woman he wanted had not simply been younger.

She had never survived the worst night of our marriage.