Excerpt from The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

After the ceremony was over, Nathan touched the hollow of my throat and smiled, a small secret smile that was just for me.

I can't remember ever wearing that necklace again. It had been a ridiculous extravagance. When would I ever wear a sapphire?

But I watched for that smile. I watched for it every time I dressed up for a date or an event, every time I came home from a conference, every time we made up after a fight. I filled my pockets with that smile. I tucked it away for later, to get me through the lean times when we couldn't look at each other.

Even then, I think I knew I'd need it.

* * *

Three and a half hours after I put the Neufmann gown on, I was ready to be finished wearing it. The silk was fitted closely through my ribs and waist, flattering enough, but as uncompromising as an ethics committee. I couldn't seem to get a deep enough breath. The banquet hall was full of people, all of them looking at me or talking about me or thinking about me. Or worse: not thinking about me at all. I kept catching people's eyes by mistake, flashing smiles that felt raw and strange on my face.

I wondered if there was enough oxygen for everyone present. I wondered if maybe there was some problem with the ventilation system, and whether the carbon dioxide levels in the room were rising. Everyone in the room exhaled once every few seconds. There was no avoiding that. They had to respire.

Every time they did, I felt the air grow a little heavier.

People were talking to me, endlessly talking to me, and I knew that there were hours still to come, hours and hours of people looking at me and moving their mouths and raising their eyebrows and waiting for me to say things back that would satisfy their vision of the person I was supposed to be. Hours of their opinions and compliments and complicated insults. Hours of smiling.

There were seven other people seated at my banquet table, their wineglasses kept in a perpetual state of half-emptiness by a series of bored waiters. The man seated to my left was a senior jurist from the selection committee. He was talking to me, just like everyone else, and I arranged my face into a shape that would seem pleasant and interested. He was important. I should have known his name.

David? No. Daniel?

"I've been terribly impressed," the man was saying, "by the finesse your technique displays. I've never seen such singular control of the acute hormonal mode of neuropsychological conditioning." I smiled and nodded, pretended to take a bite of risotto as though I could possibly have swallowed it. It rested on my tongue like a pill. It tasted like nothing at all, like the flesh of the roof of my mouth, like the edge of the wineglass in front of me. I could not eat it. I had to eat it. The man on my left (Douglas?) was looking at me, waiting for me to accept his compliment.

There were hours still to go.

After much too long, the risotto slid down my throat and the name appeared fully formed in my mind. "Thank you … Dietrich," I replied. "It's been a team effort, of course—"

"Nonsense," he said, and my throat clenched the way it always did when a man in my field interrupted me with that word. "You have a fantastic research team, there can be no doubt of that—but no, Dr. Caldwell, this is about your work. Your legacy. You get the credit, yes? You are the pioneer of the Caldwell Method. It's all right to bask in it, at least for tonight."

He lifted his glass. I obligingly raised mine to meet it, because don't be a bitch, Evelyn. The movement caught the eyes of others around the table, and soon, everyone held their glasses aloft, their faces expectant. Dietrich led them in a toast. "To Dr. Evelyn Caldwell, changing the world."

Federlauer, his last name came to me at last, Dietrich Federlauer, how could I have forgotten? Stupid, stupid.

Excerpted from The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey. Copyright © 2021 by Sarah Gailey. Excerpted by permission of Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.