Page 107 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“You clever thing.”

“Really it was Vi who got the funding together. She’s a bit of a whiz at that.
Lots of international contacts.”
“I’m sure that’s only the tip of Vi’s iceberg.” She made a quick attempt to
estimate the extent to which new information concerning the relationship
between Vi and Jacob might shake her. Sam had had his affairs, and Jill had
come to an understanding of them as a form of boundary setting, actions taken
against a fear that any one person could or did know “everything” about you. Jill

was never more aggravating than when she got busy understanding things, and
yet these rationalizations of hers might not be such a big problem this time
around, as she was finding that the thought of various deep, sweet secrets
between Jacob and Vi had something of a mechanical effect on her. Air seeped
out of her and very little came back in—she breathed as though subject to

strangulation and sat on her hands to suppress tentacle-like tendencies such as
thrashing about, and clinging. The more Jacob told her about the testing of his
program, the more she wondered if her first misgivings hadn’t been right after
all. He was genuinely willing to be a guinea pig for his own prototype, she could
see that, but maybe this was also Leaving Jill, Phase 1: Practice.

—

“OK, I’LL HELP. But since I don’t know anyone else who’d ask me to spend two
weeks pretending he’s no longer in the world, tell me this first: Are you really
not thinking about leaving me?” she asked.
That glint of amusement again. “Get this through your head, Jill Akkerman:
I’m not leaving you. And you—are you leaving me?”
“I’m not leaving you, Jacob Wallace.”

She watched him put her expression, posture, and phrasing through his lie
detector. She passed. His gaze lost intensity.
“Remember that psychologist who said we had an unhealthy dependence on
each other?” asked the boy who’d learned Korean along with Jill and the couple
who’d eventually adopted her. Her parents had wanted to have a new family
language, and Jacob had learned too, so that he could be a part of that family.
He’d been an honorary Akkerman for over half his life now.

“Yeah . . . we owe our careers to him, I think. He made us want to see what
his job would be like if someone did it properly.”
“He might have been right, though,” Jacob said.
“Oh?”