“I apologize,” I said, still watching his hands until he looked at me. “Beneath this floor it was easy to forget how much you cared, but I shouldn’t have. You’ve been fighting in a way I’m not allowed and it means the world to me.”

Now his jaw clenched as well, so that the only softness I could see was in the tears shivering on his lower eyelids before slipping down his face.

“I’m not giving up,” he managed, as though his voice fought to escape. “They refused mediation at first, and now he’s agreed to meet you. That’s a start. It’s a good sign, Dolores. So you must promise me that you won’t give up either.”

“If I’m a Mem, it isn’t giving up.”

I didn’t say that real people may do as they like with their memories or that perhaps my Professor was most afraid because of what he himself had done. But his shoulders buckled forward as though I had or as though I hadn’t needed to. When he caught himself on the chairback before him, I leaped to his side for the second time in our life together. My embrace forced him to correct his posture enough to wrap an arm around me, his forehead resting against mine.

“I cannot lose another child.”

It was the loveliest thing ever said to or about me and it broke my heart in an entirely new way. I’d become as vain as any of the other Mems; despite what I knew about him, I’d forgotten that not every real person had chosen the path of relief. Like me, the Professor had kept his mind intact. His memories remained—even the ones that tormented him, the ones that kept him from ever speaking freely with his wife. These same ones now terrified him. It was as if I could somehow read his mind; I could feel his anxiety at the thought that Lyman Shepherd might do to me what the Professor had done to Camille No. 1, but reason—or optimism—assured me that my Source’s husband had no such provocation.

“You can’t lose me,” I whispered. “I’ll always be your girl. Even if you’re the only one to see me that way.”

As much as I hoped breaking with the fantasy of humanness would simplify my life, I couldn’t help the way they stayed on my mind, these parents who had chosen me, the Professor and Camille, and Ettie, my last and closest friend.

And Harvey.

“Let me go with Lyman. You saw the way he looked at me. If he likes me, perhaps they’ll accept another Mem to be reprinted in my place.”

“The board wants all fighting to end,” he said.

“I know.”