Chapter 8: Great Question

I filed for divorce at nine o'clock on Monday morning, at a counter, and the clerk gave me a slip of paper with a hearing date in January.

On Tuesday, Brogan and I sat in the last row of a lecture hall.

The room held two hundred students, a wall of windows and a tidy stage with a fake living room set up on it.

There was a couch, a lamp, a coffee table and a white speaker with one green light.

"He tests his pitch on undergraduates," Brogan said. "They're polite, and they don't know what to ask."

"Then I'll ask," I said.

He looked at me sideways.

"You're sure."

"I've been sure since Sunday."

At ten sharp the door at the front opened, and Neil came down the aisle in his grey quarter-zip with a clicker in his hand.

Lia walked behind him with a laptop under her arm.

The students settled down the way people do for a professor they like.

"Good morning," Neil said. "Today's topic is the home that listens."

He turned to the fake living room.

"Hearth, lights on."

The lamp came up, warm and gold.

"Hearth, play something soft."

A piano began, low and unhurried.

Two hundred students made the small impressed sound of two hundred phones lifting at once.

"A home should know you," Neil said. "Your voice, your face, your habits. It should meet you at the door, and it should never make you ask twice."

I gripped the edge of the desk until my knuckles went white.

Brogan laid two fingers on my sleeve.

I breathed out through my nose.

For forty minutes Neil talked about ambient computing, with funny asides and a slide of a cat opening a smart fridge.

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