Hope, Levy, Marc [good summer reads TXT] 📗

said, adding wryly that he was unavailable, period.

Only a precious few colleagues were allowed access to his office.

“Please,” Hope begged. “Call him and tell him Hope wants to see him.”

The receptionist had watched the director from behind her desk for enough years to know that a man as rigid and severe as he was couldn’t have a mistress, especially not one forty years his junior.

“I’m not going to do that, because I have a job to keep. And anyway, he’s not here today.”

“I need to see him. It’s important,” Hope pressed.

“So why don’t you enroll at MIT? The neuroscience department. That’s where he teaches.”

Hope ran to the cab without looking back.

The professor’s class had been running for an hour when Hope pushed open the door to the lecture hall.

She crept into the back row, where she had spotted a free seat, nudging a student to lift her knees to let her by.

“Did I miss anything?” she whispered.

“Not really.”

“How long has he been talking?”

“Ten minutes, but it feels like forever,” her neighbor whispered back. “He loves the sound of his own voice.”

The professor turned around to face his students, and any lingering doubt Hope might have had evaporated.

“As you can see from my presentation, the Neurolink program has entered rollout stage. However, unfortunately, this is still limited. We won’t be able to meet the demand,” he said. His features were pulled tight. “The issue lies in pinpointing the number of recordings each person will be allowed over the course of their lifetime. By restricting the number, we’ll be giving more people the opportunity to save their memory. Now, granted, this is far from being a satisfactory solution,” he continued. “We still have some way to go to ensure Neurolink’s intelligence is capable of simply updating between two sessions, rather than having to rerecord the entire memory all over again, as we currently do. We can now estimate that an annual update will take no more than a few hours.”

“What guarantees are there that Neurolink doesn’t make mistakes during the restore process?” Hope called out.

Hushed voices rippled around the room as the professor peered into the darkness of the amphitheater, struggling to make out who had interrupted him.

“Make what kind of mistake, student-whom-I-cannot-see? If you could at least have the courtesy of standing up to speak . . .”

“Selecting the wrong body, say.”

“We covered that at the start of the year. But since you undoubtedly had very good reasons for skipping my class, you’ll be interested to know that we didn’t give Neurolink the freedom to initiate that kind of procedure, without an operator’s input. This means that type of error simply isn’t possible.”

“I did have a very good reason for not being in your class, Professor. I had been sleeping for forty years on Neurolink’s servers. I’m the very first memory you ever recorded.”

The whispers had grown to murmurs, and the students had twisted in their seats to stare at her. Hope stood up and strode toward the exit.

The professor made his apologies to his students and rushed to follow her outside, catching up with her at the top of the stairs, where she was leaning against a wall, waiting.

“You’re a little more wrinkled, and your beard makes you look different, but behind those glasses, I recognize those eyes.”

“So it is you,” Luke sighed. “You came back. God, you look so young. And different.”

“You leave God out of this,” Hope replied. “Didn’t you know, when you came into my room at the Center?”

“Of course I didn’t. How could you think that? Why didn’t you come to see me earlier?”

“Because I’d lost my memory,” she snapped. “Or didn’t you know that, either?”

“Hope, what are you accusing me of?”

“Where is he? Where’s Josh?”

“I have no idea, I swear. Once you’d gone, he was never the same again. He left the Center, and he gave up our work. He shut himself away in your loft. I did everything I could to drag him out of there, to make him see reason, but he wouldn’t hear it. After a while, he stopped answering the door.” Luke shook his head. “The only person he ever spoke to from time to time was that old Italian guy who had a grocery store in your neighborhood. He gave me updates. Josh bought his food there, and then he would shut himself back in the loft. One day, he sold all your stuff. He bought a car, and he went to see his dad. He abandoned me too. I never heard from him again.”

“Oh, and you just left it at that? You didn’t go after him?”

“Yes, I did. I wrote to him, begging him to come back to Boston, but all my letters were returned with an ‘unknown address’ label. I even called the mayor of the town where we grew up. He told me Josh’s dad had moved away a long time ago. Where should I have looked?”

“And once he’d gone, you became the head honcho at the Center. Good for you,” she sniffed.

“No. Just research director. And that happened much later, when Flinch died. What are you going to do now? If you want to stay in Boston, you can stay at our place.”

“I’m going to go and find him.”

“You know he’s my age now, right? I’ll be sixty-two this year.”

“I don’t care how old he is. Our love hasn’t aged. He waited for me.”

“Hope, think things through,” Luke warned her. “You have your whole life ahead of you.”

She didn’t reply. She stepped back slowly, then turned on her heel and left.

When she got back to Simon’s apartment, Hope found the strength to make the call she had been dreading since arriving back from Nantucket. She dialed through to California and held her breath when a woman’s voice answered and asked who was speaking.

“I’d like to speak to Dr. Sam . . .”

“I’m sorry, miss. My husband died ten years ago.”

It took everything she had to retain her composure. She had been prepared for