Except the surrogate couldn't do it.
He looked through his client's eyes, saw his wife, and...
...Knew that he wouldn't hurt this woman for any price. Never before had the pain of his clients—cowards and escapists, all of them—contained such wonder as she possessed.
This beauty would haunt him.
I flew into Pam's office.
"This—" I blinked and cleared my throat, lowering the pages I was brandishing.
Pam was giving me a death glare.
"Hi Hannah, thank you for knocking."
"Sorry, I—"
"Go on." Pam sat back in her chair and sighed, gesturing with her pen. "Let's hear it, since you can't seem to contain your zeal."
I smoothed my skirt and took a breath. I was stunned. Damn, I had just barged into Pamela Wing's office like I owned the place. That wasn't what shocked me, though.
For the first time in nearly two months, I had forgotten my misery.
I had forgotten my hollowness.
I needed more of this story.
"This is..."
"As ever, Hannah, your eloquence astounds."
"It's very partial," I stammered.
"Keenly observed. The author assures me she has another twenty pages on the way."
"I'd like to read them. If that's alright with you." I gazed out the window. If I met Pam's eyes, she would see my desperation. "The... protagonist. It seems obvious he'll hijack the body of his client, you know? And..."
I could feel Pam's eyes on me.
"And that's an interesting quandary. So much is unstated here." I swallowed. "The cultural commentary on our attitude toward pain and escape. And consumerism. The Thoreau epigraph about desperation is pretty perfect, too. This feels really relevant. I mean, people do lead lives of quiet desperation, until something or someone comes along and—"
I clamped my mouth shut.
Fuck. Okay, how did this become me spilling my guts to my boss?
Pam raised a brow. She looked curious, not deadly.
"I think you're right," she conceded. "It's relevant. We'll talk more about it when we've read the next pages."
I turned to go, pausing outside my door.
"Ms. Wing?"
"Hm?"
I lifted the manuscript.
"You don't really represent speculative fiction, do you?"
"No, but I make exceptions for my established authors."
Established authors.
So it was true; Pam was letting me read something remotely important.
For the first time since Matt and I parted ways, I imagined how it would feel to be a partner with Pam and Laura. That was my dream. At least, it was the old Hannah's dream.
"It's not without flaws," I said after a beat. "Mostly small conceptual oversights that need explanation. But it's..."
I glanced at the manuscript. Did my subjective opinion mean anything here?
"Ms. Wing, it's the most compelling thing I've read all year."
Chunks of The Surrogate arrived on a weekly basis throughout September. I read them like a junky getting my fix. I'd never really liked science fiction, but The Surrogate didn't read like science fiction. It was a love story.
Just as I'd anticipated, the surrogate pursued his client's wife, but not in the body of her husband. Not initially. He contrived reasons to meet with her in his own aged body and in the bodies of other clients. He met her as a man, a woman, a child...
He loved her through every face of love. To her, the faces must have seemed like facades, but one continuous truth joined them.
Finally, the surrogate schemed his way back into the husband's body.
My eyes raced across the page. God, where was this going? Body theft was a crime punishable by death, and anyway, what was the surrogate thinking? Did he plan to seduce the woman from her husband's body? She didn't even know him!
The scene was getting insane. The surrogate was about to go to bed with the woman he loved, and he was pretending to be her husband. It was impossibly wrong, and yet I wanted it to happen. Later he could explain, later, but now— "Hannah Catalano?"