18. Natalie

18

NATALIE

I f anything has the potential to stoke the fires of guilt that have licked away at me all week, it’s dinner with my family. I can’t begin to imagine what they’d say if they knew I spent a night quite literally sleeping with the enemy (and his boner).

Which is why they can never know.

Life may have kicked my family in the teeth—and the eye sockets—pretty damn thoroughly a couple of times, but going home isn’t the wretched experience it once was. God knows, it took upwards of a decade for us all to find our feet, but we’ve clawed our way back to a semblance of normality that we can all be proud of.

After five or six years of doing jobs way below his pay grade, Dad was eventually approached by the London School of Economics about a professorship in Financial Systems. The regulator may have banned him from working in the financial sector again, but there was nothing to stop him from teaching that stuff. His tenure’s been a massive success, providing a steady income that’s allowed him and Mum to escape the horrors of that council flat and move into a decent semi-detached house in a nicer area.

Most importantly, it’s given him back his dignity. His sense of worth.

The biggest change, though, has been in my brother. We call him Winky, which is seriously awful, I know, but always affectionately meant. When he had his accident, one of our aunts bought him a teddy bear with an eye patch. I apparently christened the bear Winky, and somehow the name transferred to my poor brother.

‘Hi, Winkster,’ I say now, throwing my arms around him. The full-on emo phase that attracted the attention of bullies like Adam Wright is long gone. These days, my brother is a bona fide tech nerd, and he dresses like one. Today he’s in a red hoodie bearing the circular logo of Totum, the company he’s worked for for the past year or so. I’m fuzzy on what Totum does, exactly, except for a vague understanding that it reconciles patients’ medical data between all the trusts in our National Health Service (and their equivalents globally) and massively improves efficiencies of treatment. As a young adult with a horrific eye injury, my brother was under the jurisdiction of about three million eye doctors, so it’s no surprise that he’s evangelical about technology that improves the flow of information and consistency of care.

Less importantly but more critically, Stephen’s ultimate boss, the billionaire Aidan Duffy, is hot as fuck. If he wasn’t blissfully married, I’d definitely ask for an introduction—even if my limited experience of hot billionaires is adorned with warning bells and red flags.

‘Still drinking the Totum Kool-Aid, I see,’ I note aloud, more for the benefit of Anna, his wife. He’s my older brother, so mutual piss-ripping is obligatory whenever we see each other .

‘He’s a total corporate whore,’ Anna muses. ‘I swear, he has a bigger boner for Aidan Duffy than me.’ I grin at her as I release him. I really like Anna. She’s great fun and unfailingly positive which, given Winky’s lifelong potential for anxiety is, I think, a good thing. She is, like my brother, a badass tech engineer—they met at his previous firm, a FinTech startup—but she’s far cooler than he’ll ever be.

‘Never,’ I protest. ‘You have way better boobs than Duffy.’

‘She definitely does,’ my brother says, with a lascivious grin at his wife. If they keep this up, my parents will have another grandchild on the way to follow sweet little Chloe, who’s asleep upstairs in the full-on nursery Mum insisted on creating in the box room.

Mum may not have a French chef, and this kitchen may be poky compared to a certain billionaire’s vast space full of blue lacquer and endless marble, but she and Dad have made a life for themselves here, and there’s more love around this dining room table than I glimpsed at Adam’s palace, that’s for sure.

She’s made cottage pie, and as I lay my napkin on my lap I’m uncomfortably aware that I’m wearing the sweatshirt and leggings Adam bought for me. When I’m not at either of my jobs, I can’t take them off. Aside from the special pieces Evan and I have made for my role at Alchemy, these are the highest quality things I own.

It’s been a month since I’ve been here for dinner, which is not okay. Stephen and Anna are here far more often, but given the amount of time Mum spends looking after Chloe while they work, it’s no surprise that their lives are more entwined with those of my parents than mine is. Still, between Gossamer and Alchemy and my hideous commute, I don’t exactly do a good job of carving out time for my family.

I’m happy here. I’m comfortable here. I love them all, and they make me happy. Even so, being here reminds me where I’ve come from. It reminds me of what we all lost, what my parents have, even now, failed to regain in material terms. They’ve made a decent home for themselves, but it’s not what I grew up with, and my brief interlude at Adam’s has reminded me all too painfully of just how clawing and nasty and consuming my ambitions are.

If people like him and Omar Vega can make it, then so can I. I know it, and I want it, yet the chasm between the size of my dreams and the harsh reality of Gossamer’s lack of scale, lack of progress, gnaws at me every fucking day. My parents are happy now. My brother is happy now. They’ve made peace with the trajectory of their lives. It’s only me who rails against it, who spends her days treading that exhausting, relentless hamster wheel of aspirations that often feel so out of reach as to be a mirage.

Mum breaks my reverie. ‘How’s your health, honey?’ she probes gently. ‘All going smoothly?’

‘It’s all fine, thanks,’ I say quickly. I can’t tell her I had a crappy hypo this week—it’ll make her worry even more than she does. Unlike certain other people I can name, she does her best not to hound me about my blood glucose or breathe down my neck, but I know she stresses about it constantly. It’s another burden she’s had to bear all these years, and I hate it for her.

I also have zero intention of launching into any story that leads to me disclosing even the slightest interaction with Adam Wright, who’s borne the role of fairytale villain for years now where me and my brother are concerned .

No fucking way.

‘Actually, I have some health news,’ Winky says now, and I beam gratefully at him for taking the spotlight off me. ‘I had a pretty intriguing call from my ocularist yesterday.’

Unfortunately, the Bennett family is a collective expert on eye-related medical jargon. Ocularists make and fit prosthetic eyeballs, like the one Winky’s had for the best part of twenty years now. It’s not awful—the colour of the iris is a perfect match for his brown one—but it’s a bit weird, honestly. It kind of stares. He’s objectively a good-looking guy, but the prosthesis does him no favours, to say the least.

‘Oh yes?’ Dad asks, setting down his fork. He and mum exchange one of those glances that hurt my heart—all hopeful and invested.

Winky clears his throat. ‘Yeah. He said he’s been working with this cutting-edge medical devices company—OcuNova, they’re called. They’re based out of Cambridge and they have a prosthetic that’s meant to be next-level.’

‘Next-level, how?’ I ask. As I’ve always understood it, the trauma my brother’s eyeball and socket suffered at Adam’s hands meant that most of his optic nerves were severed during the removal process. Over the past few years, he’s enquired about disruptive technologies, including stem cell treatments. He’s always been an early adopter of technology of all kinds and way more open to playing guinea pig for potential solutions than I would be in his place, but he’s never proven a good fit for any of the fledgling treatments out there.

I suppose his interest is a function of the industry he works in, as well as the constant handicap with which he lives, but it’s been tough to watch him get excited about various options over the years, only to be knocked back over and over .

‘Well.’ He shifts in his chair and gives us the trademark dorky, adorable grin that used to signal the start of a tirade about Dungeons and Dragons and is now more likely to precede a love letter to Totum. ‘It’s really cool, actually. Their prosthetics are seriously great-looking. We’re talking 3D printed surfaces with irises and even veins that would match my real eye. Apparently, their pupils can even change size depending on the light. It’s insane.’

I grin at him. That is insane. I can’t believe shit like this is technically possible. No wonder Winky’s geeking out on it.

My dad’s shaking his head in amazement. ‘That’s just incredible. And they think you’re a suitable candidate?’

‘There’s more.’ My brother shovels a load of cottage pie into his mouth and we all wait while he chews and swallows, avid for more detail. ‘So they’re working on lots of AR stuff, too—they have tie-ins with various other tech and biotech firms. Get this: the prosthetic has a camera and an AR system built in, and they’re designing various digital overlays.

‘Some of them will just enhance what I’m already seeing through my right eye—they’ll expand my field of vision, basically, by analysing what the camera sees and marrying it with my actual eyesight—but there’s no limit to what else the overlays will be able to provide.’

‘Woah,’ I say, trying to wrap my head around what he’s saying. I’m definitely far less tech fluent than Winky. ‘So your eyesight will be half natural, half digital?’

‘Pretty much. And it will act like a smart crystalline lens too, so as my range of vision shrinks in my right eye with age, the prosthetic will compensate. So I won’t get that annoying thing like you have when you have a TV dinner, Mum, where you have to keep taking your glasses off to see the screen and then putting them back on to see your food.’

‘That’s the worst ,’ Mum mutters. ‘I gagged on a piece of pork gristle the other night because I was so glued to Traitors. ’

‘Well, there’ll be none of that.’

‘Do you know what would be amazing?’ Dad asks. ‘Face recognition that brings up someone’s name every time I bump into them at the shops and can’t bloody remember their name.’

We all laugh, because Dad’s getting worse with names every year.

‘That’s child’s play,’ my brother scoffs affectionately. ‘This stuff is way beyond that.’

‘So they want to work with you?’ I prompt, because I’m not sure he’s got to the point of his story yet.

‘Yep.’ He pops the p proudly.

Anna leans forward. ‘Apparently he’s the perfect candidate.’

‘Of course he is,’ Mum says fondly.

‘Basically, it’s because I’m completely blind in one eye, no optic nerve activity to speak of, but I’ve got vision in the other so I have a good baseline for comparing the real thing with the digital experience,’ he says. ‘And Dr Smythe knows I’m an early adopter, so he was pretty sure I’d go for it. I can’t believe it. I’m meeting them this week, but I’ve been poring over their technology all morning and it’s bloody incredible. I’m absolutely blown away.’

Anna’s gazing at him with so much love and delight, her lips pressed tightly together like she’s trying to hold in the emotion.

I know how she feels .

For the past twenty years, my brother’s missing eye has been a handicap for him.

Now, it feels as though it could be a superpower.