The Perfect Wife(96)

You’re about to turn the TV off when the picture cuts to Tim. Standing next to him, smirking, is Nathan from the phone shop.

“Thanks to this man, we do have some potential leads,” Tim’s saying. Nathan, you little shit. You wonder what Tim promised him in return for selling you out.

“We also know the cobot may be unstable and potentially dangerous,” Tim adds. “It would be safest not to approach. Meanwhile, we’re doing all we can to track them from this end.”

So now Tim has access to everything Nathan knows. It’s a good thing you wiped the iPad along with the hard drives, you reflect. Without that, and the link to Dr. Laurence, you doubt they’ll be able to identify Northhaven as your destination.

Unless Tim can somehow decode those screenshots Nathan took. You recall something Tim said, right at the beginning, when he was explaining how you learned. I could plug in a screen and see the math happening, but I couldn’t necessarily follow it…

You put the SIM card in the burner phone and message Friend.

We’re on our way. But they may be onto us. Still want us to come?

And the answer comes back, moments later.

Come.





78


The rest of the day is interminable, but the following morning you’re up and waiting at the bus stop in plenty of time.

Once you cross the state line into Oregon, you relax a little. It helps that the scenery is stunning—an endless parade of cliffs, pounding surf, and giant sea stacks, dotted with flying pelicans and cormorants, the whole vista endlessly changing but endlessly repeating, like one of those old spinning zoetropes depicting a galloping horse or a flying bird. Danny, too, is happy to be on the move again. He finds the motion of the bus comforting, and he likes that nobody’s making any demands of him.

He looks out of the window and murmurs something.

“What’s that, Danny?”

“Dangerous to the public, indeed,” he repeats softly.

It’s a line from Toby the Tram Engine. When Thomas is told off by a policeman for not having a cowcatcher, the policeman writes down Dangerous to the public in his notebook.

“The law is the law,” Danny adds, “and we can’t change it.”

Then he catches your eye and grins.

Suddenly you realize what’s happening here. Danny’s commiserating. He’s using snippets from the story to show that he understands how you feel about being called dangerous and unstable on the news last night.

From someone who apparently has no empathy—who finds even eye contact overwhelming—this tiny moment of interaction is as momentous to you as a child’s first steps.

Trying not to let your excitement show, you reply with another quotation. “Toby is always careful on the road.”

Danny thinks, then announces, “We’re sorry your line is closing down.”

Has he somehow picked up that time’s running out for you? Is he saying he’ll miss you? Surreal though it is, it feels as if you’re having an actual conversation now.

“Thank you, Toby, for a very nice ride,” you say. You take his hand and pat it.

Danny nods. Then he says thoughtfully, “?‘Is it electric?’ asked Bridget.”

Of course you are electric, and in some strange way you think that’s probably what he’s asking you.

You have to be honest with him, you decide. After all, it may be your last chance. So you reply in the same oblique way.

“Electric indeed!” you tell him.

“Well bust my buffers,” Danny says. He turns and leans against you, staring out of the window. After a moment, you feel his hand reaching for yours. It’s the first time since his regression that you can remember him seeking out your touch.



* * *



—

From then on, you entertain each other by reciting Thomas stories, speaking the best bits in unison like singers dueting a chorus. It’s amazing how many phrases seem eerily appropriate to your situation. And Danny is clearly enjoying the parallels. When a woman gets on the bus and says to him, “And what’s your name, young man?” he replies, “Toby, sir,” without missing a beat.

“Pleased to meet you, Toby,” she replies, only slightly nonplussed.

He laughs and bounces up and down on his seat. For the next hour he happily recites every single word of Four Little Engines from memory.

Meanwhile, you’re thinking about what will happen when you get to Northhaven and find Abbie. Whether you’re really going to kill her.





79


Yes, you were lying when you told Jenny and Mike you planned to just hand Danny over to his mother. It seemed the best way to convince them to help—the kind of emotional gloop people like them would buy into.

Your plan to kill Abbie began forming long before then, when you finally realized Tim was never going to prefer you to his flesh-and-blood wife.

Looking for another way out, you’d started thinking about something he said once, when you were discussing machine learning. He was talking about the AI that finally beat a human player at Go. But what was most remarkable, he said, was the way it beat him. During the match it had played one move that was so reckless, so apparently random, that no human player would ever have thought to try it.

That’s what you had to do, you realized. You needed to find the unplayable play, the unexpected move that made sense only in hindsight. And you set your deep-learning brain to working out what that could be.