Before I could answer, her eyes went back to the stairs. “You really should tell him to come down here so that we can thank him. I value gratitude above everything, and this just feels really impolite.”

“I’ll let him know you appreciated it,” I answered before turning my back on her to ask Harlow about how her stop-motion cannibal bunny rabbits piece was coming along.

The first few Group B presentations went well. Everyone asked all the hard questions, which was a generous thing to do at a soft presentation.

We’d all seen thesis showcases where someone got hammered with a hard question and completely fell apart. It was better to have something like that happen here with your fellow grad students than when you were presenting in front of the entire animation school, undergrads included.

You think that would’ve been the end of the Victor subject. But at break time, Elizabeth Ann Margaret started quizzing me again.

“I know you’ve mentioned spending time in Japan when you were in high school. Is your husband Japanese? He doesn’t look Japanese. I thought they had a thing about tattoos.”

“No, he’s Chinese.” My cheeks burned. And I could feel Asher’s eyes on me again.

“ABC?” Wei-Chuan, a visual effects animator, who was also Chinese, asked. She came over to stand with us.

ABC stood for American-born Chinese. Victor had often used those three-letter signs to describe Phantom. Also, to make excuses for him.

“No, he’s from China. From Hong Kong,” I answered Wei-Chuan.

“It’s unusual for a couple from your two backgrounds to get together, much less marry, right?” Elizabeth Ann Margaret demanded, her tone a lot less respectful than Wei-Chuan’s.

She had no idea. But I had to ask, “Is there a reason you’re so interested in my husband?”

“Just curious,” Elizabeth Ann Margaret answered, her eyes once again drifting toward the stairs. “I mean, he showed up at RhIDS that one day, and that one day only—almost like you told him to. It just seems a little strange that he would go through all this effort for your soft thesis presentation but wouldn’t even show up for it. I mean, is your insanely hot husband even planning on coming to your thesis showcase? Or is he going to be out of town again?”

She didn’t make mocking quotation marks around the words “out of town,” but she might well have. Everyone listening, including me, could see that Elizabeth Ann Margaret was working a theory that Victor was some kind of actor or male model. Someone I’d hired to play the part of my husband to prove Elizabeth Ann Margaret wrong.

“I’m not sure,” I answered between clenched teeth. “But I don’t need a husband there to validate my work.”