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Quincy’s car is already parked on the side of the road when Eva gets to the fields. She hurries to turn off her own car, unwilling to disrupt the bright expanse of stars wheeling overhead.
The real thing is so much brighter than memory, the sky so swollen with stars that Eva feels it might swallow her. She takes a deep breath, drawing in the sweet fragrance of the lavender, then goes to find Quincy.
He’s settled in a patch of grass close to the road, a blanket under him. Eva takes a seat next to him silently.
Quincy passes her a beer bottle—non-alcoholic, Eva notes. Her gut twists, but she forces herself not to react. She opens it and they clink bottles. Eva takes a swig, bemoaning the lack of a burn as it goes down.
Quincy clears his throat. “Happy birthday, Neil,” he says hoarsely.
“Happy birthday,” Eva whispers under her breath. She takes another sip around the pain in her throat.
They sit in silence for a long while, shoulder to shoulder.
“Have any trouble finding this place?” Quincy asks finally.
Eva doesn’t tell him that she’s been here before, though not in real life. She shakes her head instead.
“How’ve you been, Eva? It’s been…what, six months since I last saw you?”
“Probably,” Eva says. “Uh, thanks for that, by the way. It meant a lot, having you at my birthday party.”
“Anything for family,” Quincy says easily. Eva’s stomach churns with guilt. Quincy already has so little left in the way of family, and she rarely calls or visits him despite their affection for each other. She would, if she weren’t so busy—
“Although,” Quincy says, “I don’t think you were too thrilled about the party in general, if I’m not mistaken. I’m guessing it wasn’t your idea?”
It had been Traci’s, actually, and once Roxie had heard about it, there was no way Eva was getting out of it. She’d stayed up later than usual that night in the machine, revisiting an old memory of her birthday with Neil. It had been leagues better than the party she’d had mere hours earlier.
Eva doesn’t say any of this, either. “No,” she says, a beat too late. “No, it was my sister’s. I appreciated the effort, but I wasn’t really in the party mood. I haven’t really been for a while.”
Eva feels Quincy’s eyes on her. She slides him a glance and shrugs, taking another pull of her drink.
God, she wishes this was real alcohol.
“I can understand that,” Quincy says finally. He sets his bottle down and turns his gaze to the fronds of lavender stretched out for miles before them.
In the quiet, Eva studies him.
Quincy’s face is drawn and tired, the shadows deep under his eyes. His hair is streaked with more grey than the last time Eva saw him, his beard on the edge of unkempt. His shoulders are tense and bowed just slightly, as though he holds himself upright only through sheer intention. His hands twist around themselves.
His eyes are the same, though—warm, kind, ready to brighten at the mere hint of humour. They’re so much like Neil’s.
“You’re staring,” Quincy says, the grief lines around his eyes crinkling as he shoots her a teasing smile. “Penny for your thoughts?”
Eva looks away. “They’re not happy thoughts.”
Quincy nods, thoughtful. “They rarely are these days, for the both of us.” He nudges her. “I’d like to hear them anyway.”
Eva reaches for a stalk of lavender and twines it between her fingers. Her mind travels back to the numerous simulations she’d run, despite Machine-Neil and Faye’s attempts to block her, to weave together a future. A future where she and Neil had gotten to live together, laugh together, grow old together. She remembers that the further they grew away from the age of Neil’s death, the more she had been unable to forget, even with repeated attempts to dull her own memory. Even constructing a happy reality for his parents—and by extension, her and Neil—hadn’t worked; the fabric of memory holding that layer together had shattered grotesquely.
She remembers night after night of turning the machine off in agony and staggering into bed, mind racing with thoughts of I know what to change. Next time. Next time, it’ll be different. It’ll be real.
On one of those attempts, Faye had found her weeping. She taken her hand and squeezed it so hard that Eva’s fingers ached even after she’d woken up. “You don’t want what’s real,” Faye had told her, mouth hard. “If you did, you wouldn’t be here.” She blew out an angry breath. “I can’t stop you from doing what you want, Eva. But at least be honest with yourself about what’s possible here before you’re driven to complete madness. You’re a scientist, aren’t you?”
I am a scientist, Eva had thought to herself later that night, staring dazedly at the ceiling. But I’m only human. Why am I not allowed to be human? Isn’t that what Neil wanted when he left this to me?
But she had never attempted the future again.
Eva takes a breath that shudders its way into her bones.
“I was just thinking,” she says unsteadily, “that seeing you age is the only way to know what Neil might have looked like if he’d had the chance to grow old.”
Quincy stares at her. His jaw works, and he’s the one to look away this time, a hand going to swipe at his cheeks. Another lump forms in Eva’s throat. She opens her mouth to apologize, but he waves it away.
“You know,” Quincy says roughly. “I think the same thing every morning when I look at myself in the mirror.”
Grief festers like rot in the folds around Quincy’s eyes, the planes of his face. He hides the worst of his pain from her, Eva realizes. And with the time she spends at work or in her machine, she has no idea what Quincy has done to process it.
She stops.
What if…?
She’s a scientist, a doctor. This is what she does, isn’t it? Give people choices, opportunities they could never had otherwise?
And what would happen if she introduced another person into the machine? She could experiment—she could make it better. New variables, new possibilities.
“Quincy,” Eva says, gripping his hands. “What if you could see him again?”
Quincy jerks back, his face going white. “Eva, what—?”
“There was—Neil, before he—” Eva’s mouth fumbles on the word died. “Before, he left me this machine. He’d been working on it through our work at Sigcorp, and I—”
“Eva.” The word rockets out of Quincy like a bullet. “Eva. Stop.”
Eva flinches. His hands are shaking under her palms.
“Stop,” Quincy whispers. “Please.”
“I was just—I could—”
“Oh, honey.” Quincy sighs. He looks so, so tired. “You think I don’t know what you’ve been doing?”
Eva’s mouth snaps shut.
“I don’t know the details, but…I read the news, you know. I keep up with your work and the company’s projects. Whenever I saw you after Neil…” Quincy’s voice breaks. “I saw this…light in you. Neil had that light when he was obsessive about something, do you remember? So did Lynri. So did you, whenever you got too wrapped up in a project, especially when Neil talked you into it.” He gives her a humourless smile. “I watched you grow up, too, sweetheart. I know you as well as I knew Neil.” His smile fades. “Well, as much as he let me know him, I guess.”
“But…”
Quincy shakes his head. He looks ancient, frail in a way Eva rarely sees. She breathes around a vicious surge of anger, not at Quincy but at the world. She lost Neil, which has already destroyed her—she can’t imagine losing both a partner and a child.
“I’ve worked so hard,” Quincy says haltingly, “to get to a place where I wouldn’t say yes in a heartbeat. I promised Lynri and Neil that I would move forward. So please, don’t offer that to me ever again.”
Shame burns hot in Eva’s cheeks. “I just wanted to help,” she says, forcing the words out through the knives in her chest.
Quincy’s eyes ache with knowing. “Does it help?”
Eva stares at him, stricken. Against her will, her face crumples.
Quincy reaches for her. She collapses into his arms, into tears that wrack her whole body, wave after wave of grief threatening to overwhelm her with only Quincy’s arms as a beacon, a lighthouse to guide her through the waters.
The lavender fields sway softly around them under the milk light of the moon, the susurration of the wind in the leaves echoing through the air. All Eva can think is, Neil should be the one holding me. He should be here.
“I’m sorry,” Eva sobs, over and over. “I can’t stop. I can’t let him go.”
“I know, honey,” Quincy says, hugging her tight. His tears are hot against her hair. “I know. But you have to try. It’s what he would have wanted.”
“I don’t know how!”
“I know,” Quincy says again, and Eva can feel the weight of how much he does know. “I can’t tell you how. The only way out is through. The only way through is to feel it and be here, Eva.”
“You don’t know the things I’ve done." Eva lets out a shaking breath, gripping onto his shirt like she’s a little girl again. “I don’t think I’m strong enough.”
Quincy surprises her by laughing wetly. “Well, now, that’s not true,” he chides gently, rocking her back and forth. “I don’t know what Neil was thinking when he left you whatever he did, but he wouldn’t have done it if he thought you couldn’t handle it.”
I could ask him why, Eva thinks. One day, I could ask him and…end all of this.
For the first time, the thought doesn’t bring just overwhelming despair.
Instead, she feels a resigned malaise, the kind one might feel as a party winds down, joy and merriness turning into the beginning of a goodbye.
“He wanted us to have a garden, one day,” Eva murmurs.
“He always was a romantic.” Quincy’s grin is tremulous when she pulls back to look at him. “Just like his old man.”
Eva smiles, small. “I was thinking…maybe in the next year or two, I’ll go somewhere I can make that true. Build it for both of us.”
Quincy’s eyes soften. He puts an arm around her shoulder.
“He would love that,” he says.
Eva leans into him and closes her eyes. “Yeah,” she says, letting the wind carry her voice into the future. “So would I.”