Becky’s breasts.
A rush of memory—but Heather’s own, not Kyle’s.
Becky had come to see her mother when she was fifteen or sixteen, just about the time she’d first started dating. She’d taken off her shirt and her small bra and shown her mother the space between her breasts. She had a large brown mole there, raised like a pencil eraser.
“I hate it,” Becky had said.
Heather had understood the timing: Becky had lived with the mole for years; indeed, three years ago she’d overcome her modesty to ask Dr. Redmond about it, and he’d assured her it was benign. No doubt countless girls had seen it in the locker room at school. But now that she was dating, she was thinking about how a boy might react to it. It was all too fast for Heather—her daughter was growing up much too quickly.
Or was she? Heather herself had only been sixteen the first time she’d let Billy Karapedes get his hand up under her shirt. They’d done that in the dark, in his car. He hadn’t seen anything—but if Heather had had a mole like Becky’s, he would have felt it. What would his reaction have been?
“I want to have it removed,” said Becky.
Heather had thought before responding. Two of Becky’s high-school friends had already received nose jobs. One had had freckles lasered off. A fourth had even had breast-enlargement surgery. Compared to that, this was nothing: a local anesthetic, a flick of a scalpel, and voilà!—a real source of anxiety gone.
“Please,” said Becky when her mother made no reply. She sounded so earnest that for a second, Heather thought Becky was going to say she needed it done by Friday night, but apparently things weren’t moving that fast.
“You’d need a stitch or two, I bet.”
Becky considered this. “Maybe I could get it done over spring break,” she said, evidently not wanting to face the locker room with suture protruding from her sternum.
“Sure, if you like,” said Heather, smiling warmly at her daughter. “We’ll get Dr. Redmond to recommend somebody.”
“Thanks, Mom. You’re the best.” She paused. “Don’t tell Daddy, though. I’d die of embarrassment.”
Heather smiled. “Not a word.”
Heather could still picture that mole. She’d seen it twice more before it was removed, and once, even, after the surgery, when it was floating in a small specimen container before it was taken to a lab to be tested—just to be on the safe side—for malignancy. As she’d promised Becky, she’d never said a word about the little bit of plastic surgery to Kyle. The Ontario Health Insurance Plan didn’t cover it—it was, after all, purely cosmetic—but the cost was less than a hundred bucks; Heather had paid by smartcard for it and had taken her much-happier daughter home.
She conjured up an image of her daughter’s breasts, beige, smooth, wine-tipped, with the mole between them. And she plugged that image into the matrix of Kyle’s memories, looking for a match.
Her own memory could have faded—it had been three or so years ago, after all. She tried imagining slightly bigger breasts, different-colored nipples, larger and smaller moles.
But there was no match. Kyle had never seen the mole.
He’d come into my room, have me remove my top, fondle my breasts, and then—
And then, nothing. Kyle had never seen his daughter topless—at least not during any time after puberty, not at any time when she’d had real breasts.
Heather felt her whole body shaking. It had never happened. None of it. There had been no abuse.
Brian Kyle Graves was a good man, a good husband—and a good father. He’d never hurt his daughter. Heather was sure of it. At last, she was sure.
Tears were rolling down her face. She was barely aware of them—the moistness, the salty taste as some slid into her mouth, an intrusion from the outside world.
She’d been wrong—wrong even to suspect her husband. If it had been she who had been accused, he would have stood by her, never once doubting her innocence. But she had doubted. She had wronged him terribly. Oh, she had never accused him directly. But the shame of having doubted was almost unbearable.
Heather made the effort of will, extracting herself from psychospace. She removed the cubic door and staggered out into the harsh light of the theatrical lamps.
She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and sat in her office chair staring at the faded drapes, trying to think of how she would make it up to her husband.
31
The lab’s door chime sounded. Two grad students were working in the lab along with Kyle. One of them went to the door, which opened for him.
“I’d like to see Professor Graves,” said the man who was revealed on the other side of the doorway.
Kyle looked up. “Mr. Cash, isn’t it?” he said, crossing the room, hand extended.
“That’s right. I hope you don’t mind me coming by without an appointment, but—”
“No, no. Not at all.”
“Is there somewhere we can talk?”
“My office,” said Kyle. He turned to one of the grad students. “Pietro, see if you can make some headway on the indeterminacy bug, would you? I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
The student nodded, and Kyle and Cash headed down the curving corridor to Kyle’s wedge of an office. When they entered, Kyle bustled about cleaning off the second chair, while Cash admired the Allosaurus poster.
“Sorry about the mess,” said Kyle. Cash folded his angular form into the chair.
“You’ve had a weekend, Professor Graves. I’m hoping you’ve had a chance to consider the Banking Association’s offer.”
Kyle nodded. “I have thought about it, yes.”
Cash waited patiently.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Cash. I really don’t want to leave the university. This place has been very good to me over the years.”
Cash nodded. “I know you met your wife here, and you did all three of your degrees here.”
“Exactly.” He shrugged. “It’s home.”
“I believe the offer I made was very generous,” said Cash.
“It was.”
“But if need be, I can offer more.”
“It’s not a question of money; I was just telling someone else that earlier today. I like it here, and I like doing research that’s going to be published.”
“But the impact on the banking industry—”
“I understand that there are potential problems. Do you think I want to cause chaos? We’re still years away from posing a real threat to smartcard security. Look at it this way: you’ve had a warning that quantum computers are likely coming down the pike; now you can get working on a new encryption solution. You survived Year 2000, and you’re going to survive this.”
“My hope,” said Cash, “was to deal with this situation in the most cost-effective manner possible.”
“By buying me off,” said Kyle.
Cash was quiet. “There is a great deal at stake here, Professor. Name your price.”
“To my rather significant delight, Mr. Cash, I’ve discovered I don’t have one.”
Cash rose. “Everyone does, Professor. Everyone does.” He headed for the office door. “If you change your mind, let me know.”
And with that, he was gone.
Heather needed to convince her only living daughter of the truth. If the family was ever to reconcile, it had to start with Becky.
But that raised a larger question.
When was Heather going to go public with her psychospace discovery?
At first she’d kept it secret because she’d wanted to develop a sufficient theory for publication.
But now she had that—in spades.