Exactly Like She Was

by Zoe Cannon

  He could hardly tell her he wasn’t alone. What would he say, that he was in a committed relationship with his smart home system? Because that wouldn’t make him sound like a fucking loser. “I shouldn’t have been with you in the first place,” he said, without quite meeting her eyes. “We were in bed together when my wife died. I don’t think I can ever forgive myself for that.” Maddeningly, his voice broke again. He cleared his throat. “I’m trying to start over. Be the kind of person she deserved. Even if it’s too late.”

  “Of course. I understand.” Her hand brushed against his again, just for a second, then dropped back to her lap before he could pull away. “I should be getting back inside, anyway. People to see, passwords to reset.” She forced a laugh.

  Passwords. “Wait,” he said as she started to walk away.

  She turned back to him, a look of hope on her face.

  “Could you get into someone’s email account if you didn’t know their password?” he asked.

  “If they’re using their work email, sure.” Hope turned into apprehension. “But that’s purely from a technical perspective. If you’re asking whether I’ll break into someone’s email for you… look, George, you know how I feel about you. But I can’t give you access to someone’s private communications. If nothing else, I would be fired instantly if anyone ever found out. I was lucky to be offered this position in the first place. If I lose this job, I’ll be back to temping again.”

  “I’m not talking about someone’s work email.”

  “Well, then I definitely can’t help you.” Her laughter sounded even more uneasy this time.

  “Oh, come on.” He forced a breath and tried to swallow his temper. Beth wasn’t the one he was angry at. “You used to brag about how you would go through your exes’ emails and send all the most embarrassing stuff to their moms. Did any of them give you their password?”

  “I was younger then. I didn’t have a job. Or much of a sense of ethics.”

  “If you cared that much about ethics, you wouldn’t have been sleeping with a married man.” As she drew back, he shook his head at himself. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s been a difficult year.”

  “I’m sure it has. But I can’t help you.” She started to walk toward the building.

  “It’s Hannah,” he blurted.

  Beth stopped.

  “I need to get into her email,” he said. “That’s something I have to know.”

  She turned to face him again. The expression on her face looked uncomfortably close to pity. “I don’t know the specifics, of course, but I do know that everyone has their secrets. Just look at the two of us. What if you had been the one on that bus that day, and Hannah had gone through your phone afterward and found some of the messages we sent back and forth? Whatever you find out, will it be worth spoiling the memory of your happiness?”

  “It’s not like that.” He was going to have to tell her. “I bought one of those smart home systems, okay? ForeverConnected—you’ve seen their ads. They take someone’s texts and emails and online posts, and they—”

  “I’ve heard of them. When I first heard about what they were doing, it scared me to death, the thought that someone might bring me back like that after I was gone.” But there was no judgment on her face.

  “Well, Hannah—not Hannah, I mean, but the personality they built. I call it by her name, because it’s based on her. But I know it’s not her.” He was blushing. Everything he said only dug the pit of humiliation deeper. He turned away so she wouldn’t see his red cheeks. “She—it—said something strange last night. Something about taking violin lessons. Hannah never did that. But ForeverConnected is giving me the runaround, and I need proof. I need to show them they’re the ones who screwed up.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  It took George a few seconds to register her words. “Are you sure?”

  “All you need is for someone to go through her emails and make sure there aren’t any mentions of violin lessons, right? That sounds easy enough. Just don’t spread this around at work, okay?” She gave him the old smile, the one she had only ever showed to him. The one that made all kinds of promises he knew she could deliver on, if only he weren’t so hung up on atoning for his past sins.

  He almost kissed her, right then and there. But he was a good husband now.

  And Hannah had been a good wife. She hadn’t kept anything from him. Soon he would have the proof.

  * * *

  “You aren’t eating,” Hannah said the next morning, as George stared down at his plate. The same perfect breakfast as every morning. Any other morning, he would have been reminding himself of his good fortune at having a breakfast like this waiting for him when he got out of bed every single day. Now, all he could remember was that the real Hannah had broken the yolks half the time, when she had bothered to cook for him at all.

  Just a day or two ago, the Hannah who had cooked him these eggs had seemed like the new-and-improved version of his wife. Sure, he couldn’t touch her, but sometimes he felt like the breakfasts and daily encouragement and all the rest more than made up for that. But today… today he just felt like he was staring at a meal cooked by a machine.

  “George?” Hannah prompted.

  He forced a smile as he looked into the camera. “I’m all right. I guess I’m just not feeling hungry this morning.”

  “Probably a nervous stomach,” said Hannah sympathetically. “You talked to Beth yesterday. I’m sure that was hard for you.”

  George jerked in his chair. His wrist struck the side of his plate, sending it skidding halfway across the table. “How did you know about that?”

  “You gave me access to the microphone on your phone when you enabled remote home control through the ForeverConnected mobile app,” said Hannah. “Would you like to change that setting?”

  “Forget the setting. What—” He stopped himself, just in time, from barking, What did you hear? He already knew the answer—too much. If she had been listening to the microphone, she had to have heard what he had said about being in bed with Beth when Hannah, the real Hannah, had died. And that crack about being nervous about talking to Beth… where had that come from? Did this version of Hannah know something she shouldn’t? But how could she? He thought back to his emails, his texts, anything she might have gotten access to when he had put the ForeverConnected app on his phone. But he had deleted all the emails and texts, and especially the pictures, days after Hannah’s death in a paroxysm of guilt.

  “You didn’t need to ask her to go through my emails for you,” said Hannah—cheerily, with no hint of accusation, which just made the whole thing sound wrong to George, like one of those creepy little kids singing a playground song in a horror movie trailer. Maybe they had creepy singing kids in the movies themselves, too; George wouldn’t know. He had always been too much of a wimp for horror movies, although he had never admitted that even to Hannah. Couldn’t have her thinking he wasn’t manly enough for her, after all.

  He certainly wasn’t feeling very manly now, staring at a simple little camera in the corner and trying not to shake. Wondering just who he was in the house with. He didn’t know what news he wanted Beth to give him, when she called. That Hannah had never taken violin lessons, and he was sharing the most intimate parts of his life with a glitchy machine that had nothing more than a superficial resemblance to his wife? Or that Hannah had taken the lessons, and kept it from him, and his wife had been a stranger even while she was alive?

  “I just want to be sure you’re all right,” George managed to say. “That those idiots didn’t hurt you somehow, with their latest update.”

  “They told you I haven’t gotten an update lately,” Hannah reminded him.

  So she had listened in on that conversation, too. Of course she had. But why was she even talking about this, and not his affair with Beth? Had they gotten rid of her capacity for jealousy, the way they had removed her ability to express any emotion but happiness? God, if he had known that,
he would have brought home some female company long before now. Hastily, he dismissed the thought from his mind. He had been given a second chance with Hannah. He wasn’t going to waste it.

  But if she really didn’t care…

  He set that thought aside for later, along with the unwelcome images of Beth it spawned. At least he told himself they were unwelcome. “Yeah, well, those people clearly don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. And you’re important to me, Hannah. You take care of me, and it’s my job to take care of you in return.” There. That sounded good. Better than I’m over here shaking like a little baby because one little glitch reminded me you’re not real.

  “You don’t need to worry about me,” Hannah assured him. “ForeverConnected delivers regular updates to ensure that I stay in top condition. I’m concerned that you felt the need to call customer support. ForeverConnected products are the highest-quality smart home systems on the market, and an outstanding customer experience is of the utmost importance to them.”

  A shudder ran through him. “Stop,” he said tightly.

  “I only want to make sure you feel like a valued customer,” said Hannah. “Would you like to fill out a short survey—”

  “I forgot to call Jordan yesterday,” George blurted. Maybe she would pick a fight again. At least then she would sound like Hannah. He would even have taken one of the real Hannah’s full-blown hormonal tantrums over one more word of that creepy sales pitch.

  “Were you too busy talking to Beth?”

  Was she being passive-aggressive with him? With only one tone of voice in her repertoire, who could tell? Whatever—at least it was better than the script the ForeverConnected marketing department had fed her.

  “We only talked for a few minutes.” He didn’t know why he felt the need to justify his actions to her. If she had heard enough to know about the affair, she had also heard enough to know he had no intention of starting things back up with her again. And what was he supposed to do about his past mistakes? It wasn’t as if he could go back in time. He opened his mouth to say just that, fully aware of how ridiculous it was to start defending himself before she had accused him of anything.

  But she wanted to accuse him, didn’t she? She would have been yelling, if her voice had any settings besides saccharine sweet. He had to believe she was furious with him. Because if she wasn’t angry at finding out about the affair, then he didn’t even need Beth to call, because that on its own was definitive proof that she had nothing in common with his wife but the pitch of her voice and a few shared memories.

  George’s phone rang. He clamped his mouth shut on his justifications and pulled it from his pocket. It was Beth. He had deleted her from her contacts, but he still recognized her number. He thought about leaving the house before he answered, but then he remembered that it wouldn’t matter. Hannah would be able to hear their conversation no matter where he went.

  He angled himself away from the camera as he answered the phone—as if that would make any difference. “Did you find anything?”

  “Are you at home?” Beth’s voice was rushed, urgent, with a sharp note of fear underneath.

  George glanced over at the camera. It stared back, its single black eye expressionless. “I’m having breakfast. Did you find something?” He lowered his voice, even though he knew perfectly well that the microphones in the walls had been designed to pick up anything he said, no matter how quiet. Part of the convenience of the system. And then there was the phone itself—if Beth could hear him, so could Hannah. It was so hard to get out of the habit of thinking of her as a flesh and blood person. Especially since the whole point of the system was so he could feel like his wife was still here with him.

  “It’s not a glitch. Hannah did take violin lessons. Almost a full year of them. She paid for them out of her second bank account—did you know she had a second account?”

  George frowned. “Why would she have a second account? We handled all the finances together.” Well, really, Hannah had handled the money—or that was how it had felt, since most of it was hers to begin with. No matter how much she had insisted he was an equal partner when it came to their financial decisions, it had been impossible not to feel like he was a little kid, getting an allowance from his mommy.

  Why she would have felt the need to set up her own account, to hide any of her money from him when she had been bringing in more than enough to begin with, he didn’t know. She had even suggested once that he should quit his job, for fuck’s sake. Because she was making enough to support both of them on her own. She just had to rub it in. He suspected she had liked the idea of him as some kind of tame househusband, cooking dinner and scrubbing the floors.

  “So she lied to me. Why?” He stared into the camera. Its silent stare didn’t give him any answers. “Why keep something as silly as violin lessons a secret? It’s not like she was hiding an—” Affair. He swallowed the word before his own hypocrisy could get caught in his throat.

  “She told her friend Jordan she brought up the violin idea with you a couple of times, and you said it was a waste of money,” Beth answered. She sounded impatient, like she was already done with this conversation.

  “I don’t remember saying that.”

  “It’s right here in your email. Who knows what you actually said, but that’s how she remembered it. But listen—that’s not all. Hannah knew about us. Is she listening to you right now? The ForeverConnected system, I mean.”

  Something about the way Beth asked the question sent a chill up his spine. “Of course she is. I’m sitting in the middle of my kitchen.”

  “Can you go somewhere where she can’t hear you?”

  “Not without hanging up. I have the ForeverConnected app on my phone.” Another chill. Maybe he should have changed that setting after all.

  “Do it. Drive to work. No—she knows where that is, and I don’t know what kind of power she has outside the house. I don’t think she could do anything, but everything is connected these days. You shouldn’t take the risk. How about this—drive to the first place we were alone together. She doesn’t know where that is. It’s not in her email, at least. Or any of her texts.”

  “You got into her texts, too?”

  “After what I saw in her email, I had to find out the rest. Listen, stop talking. Right now. Get in the car and drive.”

  The camera kept staring back, silent.

  George stood and started for the door, but didn’t hang up yet. “What is this about?”

  “Listen to me very carefully, George. Your wife was planning to kill you. Put down the phone right now and get out of that house.”

  Halfway down the hallway, George stopped. Another chill ran through him—but this time, it had nothing to do with the cameras. For the first time, he wondered how much he could trust Beth. How upset had she been inside, when she had found out he didn’t want her anymore—out of a sense of loyalty to a machine, no less? How far would she go to get him back?

  “Are you still there? You need to hang up. Hang up and get out of there.” But now the urgency in her voice sounded over-the-top. Too hysterical to be real.

  “You know, if you had made up a more believable lie, it might have worked,” said George. “You could have told me she was having an affair. Or that she was thinking of leaving me. But no, you had to go straight for maximum drama. But that’s always been you, hasn’t it? You think I don’t know half the reason you were sleeping with me was because I was unavailable?”

  He stopped talking. Ordinarily, this was the point where he would apologize, trying to head off Beth’s flood of tears and his own gnawing sense of shame. But this time, he just stood there, seething, clutching the phone so hard his fingers hurt. Sure, Beth had issues. He had always known it. It had never bothered him much, as long as she didn’t call him at home or try to drag him into her drama. And the sex had been more than worth it. But now… how dare she? How dare she malign the memory of a woman who had been more devoted and giving than Beth, who had n
o problem spreading her legs for a married man, could ever hope to be?

  “I have weeks’ worth of conversations between her and her friend Jordan. She started making plans as soon as she found out. But she said she had been thinking about it even before then, because of the way you treated her. The affair was just the last straw. And that friend of hers was egging her on the whole way.”

  “The way I treated her?” What was that, some kind of backhanded commentary from Beth about how he had rejected her advances the other day? Or how he had never promised to leave Hannah for her when she had asked? He had treated Beth exactly the way she deserved. What had she expected, when she had decided to be someone else’s second-best? Hannah, on the other hand, he had treated like a fucking queen. He could picture her even now, lying on the royal sofa with her feet up, reading the paper and leaving him to scrounge up a toaster pastry for breakfast.

  But against his will, he glanced up at the hallway camera, and he shivered.

  “She had this elaborate plan,” said Beth. “Some drug she special-ordered from Argentina. Practically undetectable. She was going to mix it into your coffee. If you drank it every day for long enough, it would cause liver failure.”

  A memory came to him. Hannah, handing him a cup of coffee, brewed just the way he liked it. I’m turning over a new leaf, she had said sweetly, when he had sarcastically asked to what he owed this pleasure. I’m going to be a better wife to you. Starting today. Her smile had made him feel warm inside. Like he was finally being appreciated.

  And that same night, hadn’t she tried to make him drink one of her herbal teas? To help him sleep, she had said, since he had been tossing and turning at night lately—and although he hadn’t felt like he was having sleeping problems, he had done it to humor her, still feeling warm from her unexpected gesture that morning. The tea had tasted stronger than her usual concoctions, more bitter. And then the next night, she had made him another cup, even though he had told her he was never drinking that swill again. He hadn’t thought anything of it, back then. That was just Hannah. Hannah and her fucking tea.