“It’s a life choice, Mom,” Steven said. “If you can choose one sexuality, you can just as easily choose another. That’s all they’re trying to do.”

I sat speechless as I watched the faces of gray-clad people, once mothers and fathers and accountants and lawyers, make their way from wall to fields. Jackie might have been among them, tired and blistered from day after day in the sun.

Steven upped the volume and pointed at a screen of statistics. “See? It’s working. Ten percent after the first month, up to thirty-two percent as of the end of September. See?” He was referring to the conversion success rate.

I didn’t see at all. But I saw, and still see, Jackie Juarez in work boots and a khaki uniform, weeding and harvesting until her hands are raw and bloody.

Or.

Jackie is married. Maybe to a fat fuck like Jack the security man, maybe to one of the gay guys she knew before. She wears a word counter and spends her days baking and hoping to get pregnant, so the authorities will know the marriage is bona fide, more than a convenient arrangement to dodge life at one of the camps.

No. Jackie would never fold, never work the system, never whore herself out to the president’s men in exchange for money or a voice or a month of liberty. Patrick would, of course. Lorenzo wouldn’t. That was the difference between my husband and my lover.

But Lorenzo did, the second he signed the contract and agreed to work on the aphasia project.

As I pull into my driveway, the reason dawns on me:

Lorenzo has another agenda, and I think it bears my name.

Chapter Thirty-two

THIRTY-TWO

I put on my Mother and Wife face when I walk through our back door. Sonia and the twins are playing a game of cards on the den carpet; Patrick is chopping vegetables in the kitchen, an open bottle of beer next to his cutting board. I wonder if this is his first of the afternoon.

“Hey,” I say, dropping my purse—thoroughly searched at the security checkpoint before I left the office—onto a side counter.

“Hey, babe.” Patrick sets the knife down and gives me a squeeze. “Everything go okay?”

“Well enough.”

“What was it like?”

“We’re under the pain of torture not to talk about it outside the office,” I say. It’s probably truer than I think. “Where’s Steven? He’s about to miss his six o’clock predinner feeding.”

Patrick knocks his chin toward the left side of our house. “Next door.”

“He and Julia must be talking again,” I say. “You really need to speak to him about this marriage thing. He’s too young.”

“I will. Oh, and your parents FaceTimed. I said you’d call tomorrow, but your mom wants to talk to you tonight.”

“Can I use your laptop?”

“Where’s yours?”