she’d discovered about Tim, it hadn’t even come as much of a shock. On some level, perhaps she’d always known. There was her art, for one thing. Every single piece she’d made at Scott Robotics had been, in some way, about what that place did to women. Could an artist do that, at a subconscious level, and not admit it to herself?
Later, she must have smelled unfamiliar perfume on his clothes countless times. Or did she choose to believe that was just from some seedy bar he’d been forced to visit in the company of potential investors? “There’s only so much silicone a man can look at, honey. I’d far rather have been home with you.”
And then, abruptly, the memory comes to you. Jenny. Dropping in for coffee that time. You won’t like this, but hear me out. She knew the women’s names, the dates. She’d even worked alongside some of them, passed them tissues, knew how much they’d been paid to keep quiet.
That visit was Jenny’s quiet rebalancing of the books, you realized. Payback for all those years of having to sit at her desk and suck it up.
Even so, you’d sensed there was something more, something she still wasn’t telling you. Something that made all this personal—
And then you’d guessed.
“Did Tim ever try it on with you?”
Jenny held your gaze for a moment. “Just once.” She paused. “After Mike first told him we were dating. And that it was serious.”
You stared at her.
“When I told him to get lost, he just laughed. Claimed he’d only been joking. That he wasn’t into little boys, anyway.”
Jesus.
* * *
—
Danny has been remarkably good all day, but next morning he has more energy and wants to know when you’re going home. When you say you aren’t, you’re going to find Mommy, he starts to stress. You can’t blame him. To him, it’s as if you said you’re going to find yourself. When the restaurant of the no-name budget motel you ended up at can only offer him own-label Cheerios instead of the real thing, he has a meltdown. All you can do for him is to let him howl himself out without getting cross or impatient with him. It takes twenty minutes, but he eventually brightens up when you tell him you’re catching a bus at exactly ten twenty-eight. And once you’re on the bus—a tiny minibus, little more than a van, with REDWOOD COAST TRANSPORT emblazoned across the side—he’s almost cheerful. Motion and timetables: two of his favorite things.
The 101 runs along the coast for a while, then veers inland through towering, shadowing redwoods. Tourist season is over, and the road is nearly empty. You notice how, when people here board the bus, they say hi to those already on it. No one seems to notice you’re not like them. You wonder if that’s because you’ve gotten better at fitting in, or whether people are simply more polite here, away from the big cities. Hardly anyone stares at Danny, either.
It makes you think about the nature of being human. It seems to you that you’ve met many people over the last few weeks who weren’t, not fully. It would be easy to single out Judy Hersch, with her plastic smile and botoxed face, parroting her autocue, or Sian and the therapists at Meadowbank, shocking their students whenever they flapped their arms, but actually it goes much wider than that. To the judge, mechanically applying the rule of law to every situation that comes before him. To Tim’s employees, diligently turning his wishes into lines of code while ignoring the toxic, misogynistic environment he created. And to Tim himself, believing that every problem of the heart must have an engineering solution.
The bus driver interrupts your reverie. “Your boy ever drive right through a redwood?” he calls over his shoulder.
“Not yet.”
So the man makes a left, turning into the forest, where the road passes through the middle of a growing tree. The redwood is evidently a local celebrity: the other passengers applaud as you go through it. “That’s something, huh?” he calls cheerfully.
“Sure is,” you call back. Danny hadn’t looked up from his toy train. You don’t have the heart to tell the driver that.
And Danny? Is he more or less human than others? Some might see his rigidity of thought, his love of schedules, and his lack of imagination as robotic. When people talk about their “humanity,” after all, they generally mean their empathy, their compassion, their moral code. But