I lay on the floor and looked away from her, while she pummeled my face and shoulders. I felt nothing at all, I was just waiting for it to be over – but when she stood up and started to leave, making sniveling noises as she staggered around the kitchen, I suddenly wanted to hurt her, badly.

I said evenly, “What did you expect? I can’t cry on cue like you do. My prolactin level’s not up to it.”

I heard her dragging the suitcases along the hall. I had a vision of following her out the door, offering to carry something, making a scene. But my desire for revenge had already faded. I loved her, I wanted her back … and everything I could imagine doing to try to prove that seemed guaranteed to hurt her, guaranteed to make everything worse.

The front door slammed shut.

I curled up on the floor. I was bleeding messily – and gritting my teeth as much against the metallic stench, and a sense of helpless incontinence, as against the pain – but I knew I wasn’t cut deeply. I hadn’t gone insane with jealousy and rage and severed an artery; I’d always known exactly what I was doing.

Was I meant to feel ashamed of that? Ashamed that I hadn’t broken the furniture, disemboweled myself – or tried to kill her? I could still feel the sting of Gina’s contempt – and if I’d never really known her thoughts before, I’d understood one thing as she knocked me to the floor: because I hadn’t been overwhelmed by emotion, because I hadn’t lost control … in her eyes, I was somehow less than human.

I wrapped a towel around my superficial wounds, then told the pharm what had happened. It buzzed for several minutes, then exuded a paste of antibiotics, coagulants, and a collagen-like adhesive. It dried on my skin like a tight-fitting bandage.

The pharm had no eye of its own, but I stood by the phone and showed it our handiwork.

It said, “Avoid strenuous bowel movements. And try not to laugh too hard.”

Chapter 8

Angelo said glumly, “I’ve been sent.”

“Then you’d better come in.”

He followed me down the hall into the living room. I asked, “How are the girls?”

“Good. Exhausting.”

Maria was three, Louise was two. Angelo and Lisa both worked from home – in soundproof offices – taking the childcare in shifts. Angelo was a mathematician with a net-based, nominally Canadian university; Lisa was a polymer chemist with a company which manufactured in the Netherlands.

We’d been friends since university, but I hadn’t met his sister until Louise was born. Gina had been visiting mother and daughter in hospital; I’d fallen for her in the elevator, before I had any idea who she was.

Seated, Angelo said cautiously, “I think she just wants to know how you are.”