Chapter 12
886 Words
(Rebecca's POV)
Eric is explaining something about a prosthetic hand in a glass case when a familiar laugh cuts through the noise of the exhibition hall, and Eric's voice dims to background noise.
Not because he's boring — Eric is never boring when he talks about robotics. His voice gets low and steady, the way it does when he's spotted a flaw no one else has caught. He leans toward the glass case like the hand inside it owes him an answer. Normally I could listen to him for hours.
My stomach drops.
Sean. Three displays down. Hannah beside him.
My fingers go cold. My chest locks. The exhibition noise thins to a hum and all I can hear is my own breathing, loud and wrong in my ears.
I curl my hands into my palms and force myself to look.
His back is to me. One hand in his pocket. Head tilted toward her — that tilt, the one where his whole body angles in like she's the only signal in the room. She's pointing at something on a screen and he's leaning close. Attentive. Present.
I ironed his shirts for six years. I slept on my side of a bed that never got warm. I raised his son and cleaned his house and brewed his coffee at exactly the ratio he likes, and not once — not once — did he lean toward me like that.
Hannah gets it standing next to a drone display at a university exhibition.
Eric's voice stops.
"That's—"
"Yeah."
"Do you want to leave?"
I think about it. For about two seconds.
"No."
Eric looks at me. "You sure?"
"He should've seen the divorce papers by now." I say it flat. Matter-of-fact. Like I'm reading a line off one of those display plaques. "If he read it and still came here with her instead of calling me, then that tells me everything I need to know."
Which is exactly what I already knew. Sean doesn't love me. He never did. A piece of paper confirming it was never going to change the outcome — just the timeline.
"We're here to see an exhibition," I say. "So let's see the exhibition."
Eric nods. He doesn't push, doesn't hover, doesn't ask questions. He just turns back to the prosthetic hand and picks up where he left off, pointing at the finger joints, explaining the tension system that lets them flex individually.
I try to listen. I do. But my chest feels tight, and my jaw is clenched, and I keep catching Sean's silhouette in my peripheral vision like a splinter I can't reach.
I force myself to look at the display. The prosthetic hand is beautiful — lightweight titanium frame, synthetic muscle fibers, a neural-interface chip embedded in the wrist plate. Three years ago, this kind of integration was theoretical. Now it's sitting under glass at a university showcase.
"The sensor array is impressive," Eric says. "But the response latency is still too high. You'd need to rework the signal processing to get real-time feedback."
"Parallel threading," I say, almost without thinking. "Split the sensory input into discrete channels and process them simultaneously instead of sequentially. You'd cut the lag by at least sixty percent."
Eric stares at me. Then he grins — wide — the kind of grin that brightens his features.
"There she is. The genius who built NanoStep six years ago."
Something warm flickers in my chest. Small, fragile, easy to miss. But it's there.
We move to the next display. Then the next. I start talking more — pointing things out, asking questions, arguing with Eric about compression algorithms and actuator design. My voice gets louder. My hands start moving the way they used to, sketching ideas in the air. For ten minutes, maybe fifteen, I forget that Sean is in the same building. I forget that my marriage is ending. I forget everything except the work, the way I used to forget everything when I was nineteen and the whole world was a problem I knew how to solve.
Then a kid comes out of nowhere.
A boy, maybe seven or eight, running full speed between the displays with his arms out like airplane wings. His parents are nowhere. He's on a collision course with me and I don't see him until he's three feet away.
I step sideways to dodge him. My heel catches on the edge of a display platform. My ankle folds. The floor tilts.
Eric's hand is on my waist before I register that I'm falling.
He pulls me upright. Steady. Close. His other hand catches my elbow, and for a second we're standing face to face, his chest almost touching mine, his eyes tense on my face.
"You okay?"
"Yeah." My voice comes out quieter than I meant. "Yeah, I'm fine."
He doesn't let go right away. His hand stays on my waist for one beat. Two. Then he steps back, and his hand drops to his side, and the moment closes like a book.
"Careful," he says. "Can't have the best engineer at RobotX out with a sprained ankle before her first day."
I almost smile. "I haven't said yes yet."
"You haven't said no either."
The warm thing in my chest flickers again. I don't fight it.
- Writer
