The Echo Wife Quotes
"Stress stimulates growth. Sometimes, in order to make something develop in the right direction, you have to hurt it."
"Twice in my life, now, I have buried myself in finery. Twice I have arranged myself within a great complication of fabric to prove that I understand the importance of a moment."
"I allowed myself a breath of satisfaction: it was enough."
"The help would have been convenient, but I didn’t need it."
"The gown was black silk. The skirt fell perfectly, the darts at my waist making the fabric bell over my hips before draping into crisp pleats."
"Everything was good. Everything was already decided. Everything was for me."
"I caught myself balling up my napkin in my fist, reflexively clutching at the fabric. I smoothed it out, creased it carefully, and set it next to my plate."
"I filled my pockets with that smile. I tucked it away for later, to get me through the lean times when we couldn’t look at each other."
"I’ve never had cause to expect a positive outcome when all the signs point to a negative one."
"The worst fight we ever had, and it ended with our engagement."
"It’s not her fault. It’s not her fault. It’s not her fault, all your fault. If you had just been the wife he wanted—"
"There was something absolute in the sensation of driving the blade into the box, something primal and honest."
"I leaned my head back against the wall, and forced myself to look the thing right in the face."
"I could deal with a lot of things, but I didn’t have the patience for her tears."
"I had to look down, if only for an instant. That was all it took for me to verify what I knew I’d see: the skirt of Martine’s dress, which clung wet and red to her legs."
"I tried to figure out how to tell Martine to hurry up her farewell without sounding like a pitiless monster."
"Martine jumped into the grave. The motion was graceless, foreign."
"I asked what she thought she was doing, whispering as loudly as I could."
"Muddied and panting, she strode across the yard to the garden shed."
"This will help," she said, returning with a white box in each hand."
"The roses like an acidic environment," Martine said, gesturing to the rosebushes.
"Does it really work?" I called after Martine’s back."
"We buried him together, in a silence that was enhanced by the cocoon of steady rainfall."
"I did not like knowing that she and I could fall into the same patterns."
"His opinion stopped mattering the moment he stopped breathing."
"I tucked my hands under my arms, waiting for them to stop shaking."
"I filled the wineglass well past the point of a single measure."
"On those late nights that bled into early mornings, she’d hear my sock feet padding on the hardwood."
"It wasn’t fair of me. Martine wasn’t her own fault."
"In the dying light, I could only just make out Martine’s answering shrug."
"I wanted her to feel that bewilderment, the sudden fear that comes with something falling apart."
"I was young, and I was accustomed to a very different kind of man."
"Specimens were always disposable. Trying to hang on to them felt foolish, indulgent."
"In the end, Martine turned out to be a valuable thought-partner."
"I’ve never loved science. Loving science would be like loving my own fingernails, or my lungs, or my lymph."
"I learned to breathe in a vacuum, to walk underwater, to be all alone in the world."
"I began to lean on Seyed. It should have been simple enough to clone Nathan."
"I was trying to see if he understood the second chance I was giving him."
"Martine was the one who prepared the tissue sample for sequencing."
"It was a perfect plan, and it should have been easy to execute."
"Seyed was already tearing open the plastic wrapping on a folded lab coat."
"I don’t regret that—why would it have been guilt?"
"I didn’t want to lose the only person left in my life who I trusted."
"She was almost certainly programmed to handle situations like this one."
"I trusted her with a job that I should really have given to Seyed."
"He had the beginning of a crease between his brows though. I wondered what made him frown often enough to put that crease in place."
"I didn’t want to give him the gift of guilt."
"Martine had known I was there. And so she knew she was being watched."
"I felt as though I’d just been scolded, as though I’d lost some small battle."
"I suppose I would have done whatever was necessary."
"But there was something different between us now."
"I was the only teenager at my boarding school who didn’t get invited home for holidays."
"I swallowed hard, because I had been staying quiet on her account."
"I’d gotten it so wrong. That whole time, that sense of judgment and interference, that feeling I had like I could have closed my hands over her temples and pressed with all my strength until her skull gave in to the pressure of my rage—it was nothing. It was based on nothing."
"Her voice broke halfway through the sentence, and I understood, and the bottom fell out of my belly and that dark roiling rage drained out, leaving me water-stained and empty, a monster with no middle to it."
"I never wanted children, and I never wanted this. But, I reminded myself, I hadn’t been prepared for any of it."
"She’d been waiting. That’s all it was. She’d been waiting for me to tell her to stop working."
"She’d been waiting for me to tell her that she was allowed to use my shower, that she could change out of the clothes she’d been wearing for days."
"I wasn’t prepared for this at all. I didn’t know how to take care of her, how to understand her needs."
"I was trying to solve what felt like a thousand problems at once, back then. I remember leaning across the table and kissing my husband, and thanking him for being one of the only things in my life that didn’t need fixing."
"I can find a lot of the moments, but they don’t seem to be enough. They come together like the skin of a person, but without bones or muscles or a central nervous system to hold the thing upright. I’ll never know what I missed."
"You only felt happy that day because you were programmed to feel happy. You only want this because Nathan designed you to want it."
"We’re putting him back the way he’s supposed to be. We’re making him into the man we loved."
"His mind was flexible, malleable, ready to accept fresh stimulus."
"His consciousness was still a little plastic, just soft enough that I could leave a fingerprint in it as it cooled."
"We had programmed this new Nathan to be as much like the old Nathan as possible."
"But there in that airlock, all at once, I knew how I felt about her."
"I couldn’t send her back to the life she’d been living."
"They were specimens, subjects, bodies, corpses, failures, data points. They were biowaste."
"You knew that he was awful to me. So why is this different? Why does this suddenly make it so you can’t be here anymore?"
"I gutted myself making this version of Nathan for you."
"I won’t let you destroy him the way you destroyed everything else I’ve spent my life building."
"This isn’t up for any further debate. I’m not asking you, Martine. I’m telling you."
"I wanted more than anything in that moment to hide in my bedroom with the door locked."
"I had done precisely the damage I set out to do."
"I could fix her later. When there was more time."
"It was a standard part of the autopsy process."
"Martine helped me to lather Laila’s limbs with the same sweet-smelling vanilla soap."
"It felt wrong, too intimate. Too close."
"I wondered how long she had lived before Nathan decided that she would not suffice."
"The dowel creaked ominously, but it held, at least for now."
"Laila was dead, and Laila had our face, and Martine was right: It wasn’t fair."
"I will not try to describe the way her face crumpled before the first of her tears fell."
"I had to check it three times as I punched the numbers into my phone."
"I didn’t know, then, the precise duration of the drive from my parents’ house to the city."
"I try to bring her whatever she asks for, within reason."
"I sit in my study, and I close the door."
"We’re better this way. We have everything we need."