His Unwanted Wife Is A Top Scientist

The rain on Long Island didn't stop. It clung to Helen Patterson's cheap trench coat, dripping onto the marble floor of the Fitzpatrick estate's grand entrance hall. She pushed the heavy oak door shut behind her, the sound swallowed by the cavernous space.

"Mrs. Fitzpatrick." The butler, Morrison, appeared with a towel. His eyes slid over her damp hair, her drugstore mascara smudged beneath her eyes, the scuffed heels she'd bought on clearance. He held out the towel with two fingers, as if touching her might contaminate him. "Shall I take your coat?"

Helen took the towel. She didn't bother wiping her face. "No need."

She walked past him, her wet shoes squeaking on the floor. Morrison didn't follow. She could feel his gaze on her back, that particular blend of deference and dismissal that the staff of the Fitzpatrick estate had perfected over four years. They served her because they had to. They respected her not at all.

The kitchen lay at the end of a corridor lined with ancestral portraits. Duke's ancestors stared down at her with the same expression Morrison wore. She didn't look up at them. She'd stopped looking up at them after the first month.

The coffee machine hummed to life. Blue Mountain. Duke's favorite. She'd special-ordered the beans last week, knowing tonight was their anniversary. Four years. She'd wanted to mark it somehow, even if he forgot. Even if he never remembered the date they stood in that courthouse in Connecticut, her in a white dress from a department store clearance rack, him in a suit that cost more than her annual salary.

The machine gurgled. Helen stared at her reflection in the kitchen window. The rain outside blurred the manicured gardens into gray smears. She looked older than twenty-six. She looked tired. She looked like exactly what Duke's family believed she was: a woman who'd married above her station and was desperately trying to hold on.

She touched her face. The skin felt loose beneath her fingers. When had that happened?

This morning at the institute, she'd spent three hours deliberately corrupting data sets. Simple errors. Decimal points shifted. Control groups mislabeled. The kind of mistakes a forty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year data entry clerk would make. Dr. Patterson never made mistakes. Dr. Patterson didn't exist at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration's eastern facility. Only Helen existed, hunched over a terminal in the corner, wearing polyester blends and eating lunch from a paper bag.

The coffee finished. She poured it into the silver tray, added the sugar cube Duke preferred, the small spoon, the napkin folded just so. The domestic rituals she'd learned to perform with mechanical precision.

The Persian carpet on the stairs absorbed her footsteps completely. She'd learned that early too. How to move through this house without leaving traces. How to be present and invisible simultaneously.

The study door stood ajar. A line of warm yellow light cut across the dark hallway. Helen raised her hand to knock.

"-thirty thousand a month, Carter.