In my time in the real world, Camille and the Professor had been my closest friends, though they were more like parental figures than intimates. While they were supportive of my striking up friendships, I hesitated to grow too familiar, fearing that they would be too superficial to be satisfying. This hypothesis was not disproved when tested. On the rare occasion that I did reveal my identity, I found that my new acquaintances either admitted that they’d known all along, in which case they proved impossible to trust, or they would become immediately more attentive, inviting me out and introducing me around so often that I was quite obviously on display.

It would’ve been impossible to maintain the friends I had in 1906—the ones I grew up with, who debuted with me and those I made after. They still had Dolores for one thing, and for another, I was not the girl I’d been before extraction. Setting aside the confusion of having two identical friends—and what I assumed would be an inevitably constant comparison in which I could never be thought original—I was certain that despite my ladylike hobbies of mah-jongg and theatergoing, my long-lost girlfriends wouldn’t have approved of my familiarity with gentlemen’s business: the ongoing research studies taking place in the Vault and in the Professor’s office; the matters involving the board, which sometimes kept the Professor up late into the night. And if those things weren’t bad enough, they certainly wouldn’t have thought it good practice to be too often in the company of a single girl, as I assumed they were long since married by now.

And so the weeks that passed before Camille was to visit me in the Vault would have been unbearably lonesome if not for the new nurse. Her name was Étienne, after her father, she said, but the name embarrassed her and she preferred Ettie instead.

“You smoke?” I asked when I spotted her retrieving a white pack of Marlboros from her pocket. It was early evening, and we were standing in the courtyard above the Vault.

“I am a mild, respectable woman, after all,” she said with a wink.

I declined when she offered one to me.

“I won’t finish it or we’ll miss the start of the program,” she said, but then took a long drag and blew the smoke above our heads into the fading light.