“Yes,” you say, nodding. “That was the one part of our life that wasn’t perfect, was it? Danny.”

“It was a shock, of course. And yes, it meant we had to reassess a few things. But you took it in your stride. Things happened for a reason, you said. If we’d been given Danny, it was because we were the best people to take care of him. Which we did.” He hesitates. “You did. We were lucky—we could afford help—but it was you who talked to every doctor on the West Coast, you who researched all the different therapies. You were amazing. Not that I was surprised. But what happened, and how you responded to it, just made me love you even more.”

   “Thank you…But don’t underestimate what you’ve done, either. All those years bringing him up alone.”

“I love him,” Tim says simply. “Just as I love you. His problems will never change that.”

“I love you, too.” It’s the first time you’ve said those words to him properly since all this began, you realize. “Tim, I love you.”

You look around at this place where you got married, and imagine what you felt then—the optimism of two young people stepping out together on a journey, an adventure. You can almost remember it—how excited you were, how certain that, whatever problems you faced in life, you would overcome them together.

And you feel it now, too: a sense of possibility, an eagerness for the future. The journalists, the lingering self-disgust, the physical limitations—none of those really matter, not if you have each other.

I can do this, you think. I can live this life. So long as I have Tim’s love, we can make this work.

SEVEN

   Abbie begged and borrowed from all of us. From Hamilton she got the frame of an old shopbot, the Mk II. From Rajesh she got a couple of Mk III arms. Kathryn gave her some wiring, and Darren—developer Darren, who worshipped her rather too obviously since she’d put herself between him and Tim’s tongue-lashing—wrote some code. We all wanted to know what it was for, of course, but Darren wasn’t telling.

“I promised her I’d keep it a secret,” he insisted. “You have to wait and see.”

The gas burners, pneumatic tubing, and welding tools were Abbie’s own, lugged from the back of her beat-up old Volvo.

This was another Abbie entirely, this slim, lanky figure in dark-blue overalls and even darker welding goggles who knelt in a corner of the parking lot, day after day, spraying sparks. And when she was finally done, it was to the parking lot she summoned us. Of course, we all went—even Tim and Mike. Nobody would have missed this.

   “I made something for y’all,” she announced. The trace of the South in y’all told us how excited she was. “I call it Electra Dancing.”

We noticed she had a fire extinguisher standing by. “You should probably give her some room,” she added.

She pulled a sheet off the thing that stood next to her. It was a kind of sculpture, we saw instantly, not dissimilar to the shopbots we were all familiar with. Some of the shopbot parts, though, had been replaced with junk—the head was an old motorcycle headlight, the fingers were bicycle chains, and there were bits of old telephones and typewriters incorporated into the design. It was wearing a pretty vintage dress in bright-yellow cotton.

As we watched, the bot abruptly raised both arms. Flames shot from its wrists—one forward, one back, like a Catherine wheel. It started to spin; or at least, its body did. The head remained motionless. And suddenly flames started shooting from its head and that started spinning, too, the opposite way to the rest of it. It was a dancing dervish, a pirouetting top, a whirligig of flame.

“I’m pretty!” the robot announced in a mechanical recorded voice, like a truck reversing, even as it was consumed by fire. “I’m pretty!” Its torso erupted in flames, the yellow dress turning to lace and dropping to the ground. We thought—or said later we’d thought—of witch burnings, autos-da-fé. But mostly we just stood and gaped. “I’m pretty!”

It was all over in less than a minute. First the bot fell silent, then it stopped spinning, its smoking carcass completely incinerated. An acrid, cordite stench wafted over the parking lot.

“What went wrong?” someone asked—some idiot: Most of us decided later it was Kenneth. But Abbie didn’t seem to mind.

“Oh, it was supposed to do that,” she said cheerfully, surveying the charred wreckage. And turning toward us, she added, “I like to play with fire.”

She did indeed, as some wit pointed out later. Because, although we were not very good at art or its interpretation—felt rather uniquely unqualified to judge it, in the normal way of things—it was absolutely clear to us that Electra Dancing, or the firebot as we christened it, was Abbie’s way of telling us that she thought the shopbots sucked.

21

   While you wait for Danny and Sian to get to the beach house, you plug Tim’s USB stick into a computer and look through the next document. It’s another slideshow; of articles about the trial this time.

Once again he watches intently as you read, gauging your reaction.

The first cuttings relate how Detective Tanner listed to the court the steps taken to find you, the subsequent widening of the search to include the possibility you’d been harmed, and the switch of focus from accident to murder. The jury was told that police cadaver dogs had found two “areas of interest”: one in your car, and one in the kitchen at Dolores Street.

Under cross-examination, Detective Tanner admitted the sniffer dogs might have been reacting to the smell of raw meat previously stored in your kitchen. You’d been given some venison by a friend not long before your disappearance, which you transported in the car and subsequently hung in your larder.

   He also admitted that the switch to a possible murder investigation came after air and sea searches around San Gregorio had drawn a blank.

“In other words, you were keen for it to look as if you’d finally made some headway?” Tim’s defense lawyer, Jane Yau, suggested.

Not surprisingly, Detective Tanner rejected this, maintaining that it was reasonable, when no evidence emerged to support the most likely explanation, to switch his team’s attention to the next most likely.

“So you can confirm that the transition to a homicide investigation—a widespread, costly, well-publicized homicide investigation—was prompted not by any actual evidence that a murder had taken place, but by the absence of evidence of accident or suicide?” Jane Yau pressed.

Reluctantly, Detective Tanner conceded that this was indeed the case.

The jury then heard from an old college friend of yours, Sukie Marenga, also an artist, who claimed you’d told her you were having problems in your marriage. You’d also complained that Tim was reading your emails. Sukie told the court that, around that time, Tim and you wrote down your feelings about each other on two pieces of paper, which you burned together in a Buddhist-style ceremony.