I Am Not Your Ex-Wife

He’s yelling at me again, spittle flying from his foaming mouth over cracked lips and a bottle-brush beard. I am glad he is safely behind the glass. He’s apoplectic; I can see veins throbbing on his balding temple where wisps of hair from his comb-over have tried freeing themselves from the middle-age rage that they are witness to.

It helps to focus on the little details when they get angry like this. Keeps you sane, keeps you calm. Keeps you from watching the clock, too—they hate it when you glance at the clock.

This one is called Jim. I’ve known a few Jims: nice Jims, boring Jims, ambitious Jims. I’ve even slept with one when I was in uni. This one, however, is the worst Jim I’ve ever met—and he knows it. 

That’s why he pays good money for surrogate therapy.

Us surrogates don’t get much background on the client when they come to us. We get information about our double, though. Mine is a young woman named Maria, some poor lass who had a few drinks with Worst Jim and ended up in his bed. At some point, she came to her senses and left him, and he’s upset.

She’s pretty, this Maria. I tried to do my makeup to look more like her, just like every session, but there’s only so much I can do. I push my skirt hem down and hope he doesn’t pay too much attention to my legs. The glass pane does the rest, projecting a soft image over the top of me. Worst Jim gets to see Pretty Maria in the flesh, and he gets to scream and yell and rage out his frustrations at her. All I need to do is sit here and listen and respond, for an hour, and then get paid.

I don’t know how much Worst Jim forks out for the pleasure, but I know it’s much more than what trickles into my account. Still, having a shit job is better than having no job. My Acting for Screen degree was made redundant once the gen-AI kicked in and no one paid for understudies.

It must be a lot of money, though. Worst Jim has a fancy watch, one of those old analogue timepieces. He doesn’t even bother winding it to the correct time. The strap squeezes into his soft flesh like a rubber band. I satisfy myself by imagining some horrible thrombosis in his digits.

The wall clock goes off with a soft twinkling that slowly escalates until Worst Jim gets the message. He runs a flabby hand over the errant hairs on his head, rubs the spit from his beard, and storms out.

I count to ten, then get up and head out the door behind me. We have a separate exit for surrogates, and it deposits me into a quiet bluestone alley behind an old Malaysian restaurant. It smells like cigarette smoke and char kway teow. My stomach rumbles. I check my account and wait a few minutes in case the funds magically appear ahead of schedule, but they don’t.

I pull my raincoat around me as the skies darken and hurriedly make my way home.

***

Ilya is already sprawled on the couch, a bowl of half-eaten cereal balanced precariously on the edge of the coffee table while she scrolls her feed. She’s my forever-roommate, with me through shit boyfriends and auditions and, eventually, surrogate therapy shifts.

“Busy day?” I ask. My keys land on our scratched countertop. The liner is peeling something fierce. I make a mental note to add it to the list of repairs I should send to our international and perennially unavailable landlord.

“You know it,” Ilya says. She puts the phone down and languorously rolls onto her front, propping her head up in her hands. “Had Clive this morning. God, that man can bitch about anything. How was Old Faithful?”

“Same as usual. A bit meaner, actually. I don’t think he’s getting laid much.”

“But he’s so handsome.”

That earns her a raincoat thrown at her head. She giggles, then sighs, removing the wet polyvinyl and sitting up. “You feeling okay?”

I shrug. “I’m fine, just a bit drained. And a bit starving.”

Ilya grimaces. “We have two cereal boxes left until tomorrow if you want to split them?”

I think about it. “You got a cigarette instead?”

“Feeling fancy, are we?” She reaches into her bag on the coffee table and pulls out a sad, limp cigarette and a lighter. “Knock yourself out.”

Officially our apartment is a non-smoking area. But I light up anyway and take a drag, feeling the nicotine prickle in my chest. A weight lifts. I plonk myself down on the floor, grab the metal ashtray we stole from the pub, and exhale.

***

No one truly wants therapy—they want closure. And for many people, closure is righteous violence.

For one of my regulars, a sallow-faced man named Samuel, there’s an emphasis on the righteousness of it all. He clutches his crucifix tightly when he looks at me, the revenant ghost of his ex-wife Lydia appearing, the testament to the faults in his faith. The first few sessions we had were relatively quiet—he admitted that the affair was his fault, how he knew adultery was a mortal sin . . . it looked like surrogate therapy might be working.

But then it dragged on and he kept scratching the itch to see Lydia again—Me-Lydia, not the one who had divorced him and blocked him on every platform before filing a restraining order. Before long, he was projecting. And then he was yelling, spitting vitriol deposits onto the tempered glass, and cursing me like a TV preacher.

Today he talks about how he’s seen me with another man, out there on the street. A foreigner. He really doesn’t like that. He’s not racist, he claims, he just doesn’t like to see Me-Lydia mixing with their kind. There’s something paternal about it before he inevitably twists it all around and tells me I’m a whore.

Yeah, mate, you’re paying me by the hour. I can’t say that though, so I try to placate him by playing a conciliatory wife. It doesn’t work, and I’m left waiting out the clock while another angry man screams at me.

I head outside, hoping and praying I’ve left one last cigarette in my handbag. No dice. My phone buzzes: BestHelp, my corporate overlord.

“Hi, Eliza, how are you doing?”

Is this going to be a complaint? “Can’t complain. You?”

“That’s great, Eliza.” The woman on the other end uses my name in a way that makes me feel strangely violated. “You might notice your pay packet this week is a little lower than the last.”

Oh. “Why’s that?”

“There are new regulations requiring stricter insurance policies. This does mean your coverage extends to include fifteen percent of the upfront cost of any dental surgeries you request while working with BestHelp.” She almost sounds like she thinks this is a good deal. Almost.

“Ah . . . can I see the policy breakdown?”

“Absolutely, it’s all available through our employee portal. Have a great afternoon!”

***

In a nothing-hour between sessions, I wander down the strip mall and pretend I’m a normal person.

Then I see Worst Jim standing outside a café, the kind selling ten-dollar long blacks and has earnest chalkboard slogans about mindfulness. He’s wearing a checkered shirt straining at the buttons, sleeves rolled like he’s about to do something meaningful with his hands. He’s laughing—laughing—with some other guy.

The sound catches me off guard. I’ve only ever heard him angry, seen him red-faced behind the glass, spitting and ranting at the ghost of a woman. Now he looks . . . human. It’s worse than the rage.

I freeze. For a moment I forget that my hair is different. So too are my clothes and the way I carry myself. I forget that he shouldn’t recognize me because I’m not her. I’m no one. But my stomach still drops like I’ve done something wrong. I pull my coat tighter and cross the street, keeping my face down.

When I glance back, he’s still talking, no sign he’s seen me. Relief comes in a thin trickle, but it doesn’t last. The thought lingers—the glass isn’t enough anymore. The work is seeping into everything, staining the edges of my life. It’s in my dreams, my skin, the way I hold myself when I’m out in public. I can’t tell where Maria ends and I begin.

When I arrive home, I feel I’m still being watched.

***

We’re eating instant noodles again. Payday was yesterday, but after rent and utilities, the fridge is back to its usual echo. Ilya sits cross-legged on the counter, slurping straight from the bowl.

“So,” she says through a mouthful, “you hear about the new BestHelp pilot?”

I shake my head.

“They’re offering a pay bump if you opt into the ‘Trust Program.’ No more glass—apparently the clients respond better to ‘authentic environments.’’’ She does air quotes with her chopsticks. “They say it’s all safe. Cameras everywhere, panic buttons, the works. Double pay for compliance.”

My appetite dies a little. “They’re removing the glass?”

“Yeah. I know it sounds insane. But Ying says she signed the new client agreement this morning and they gave her an instant raise. You should’ve seen the grin on her face.”

Ilya laughs but it doesn’t reach her eyes. She’s pretending it’s a joke. I can tell she’s already decided to do it.

“You really think it’s safe?” I ask.

“Safe enough. Cameras, security protocols, and, like, what else am I supposed to do? My savings are at zero, and I can’t go back to hospo. My back’s still fucked from the café.”

I want to tell her not to. I want to tell her I have dreams where the glass shatters and they climb through. But the words don’t come. She needs the money. We both do.

Later, she clicks the checkbox on the new client agreement while I sit beside her, pretending to scroll my feed. The little pop-up says Welcome to the Trust Program. You’re making a difference.

She exhales, shuts the laptop. “See? Easy.”

I nod, but my stomach twists. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I picture the glass disappearing, the empty space between her and them. And I wonder how much that’s worth.

***

It turns out it’s worth a black eye, a chipped tooth, and a trip to the clinic.

Ilya grins through it all, even as her swollen face weeps. She called me instead of the ambulance, and we take a rideshare to the hospital—cheaper that way, she said. Her hand won’t stop shaking. She keeps trying to make jokes about how the guy was smaller than he looked through the glass, how she probably scared him more than he scared her, and how she’s seen worse in drama school. But when she closes her mouth, the tears start leaking through the cracks.

By the time we reach triage, she’s lolling in and out of consciousness. The nurse tries to keep her awake, but Ilya’s voice keeps slipping away from her. The only lucid question she manages before they sedate her is whether or not she’ll get paid for the last session.

I stay with her while they run her through the scans. The waiting room smells like antiseptic and overripe fruit. The TV is playing some true crime documentary about workplace safety. I stare at the screen and try not to think.

When they finally let me see her again, she’s small against the sheets, eyes rimmed red. She starts crying before I say a word.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she whispers. “I thought I could handle it, but I can’t. I only wanted to make rent.”

“You’ll find something else,” I say. Because that’s what you’re meant to do, even though we both know it’s a lie.

“There isn’t anything else,” she says. “Not for us.” She presses the back of her hand against her eyes and sobs until the nurse comes asking me to leave.

Clive, in his infinite generosity, transfers her the full session rate—he doesn’t want legal trouble. BestHelp calls five minutes later to say they’ll match the payment if Ilya agrees to forgo prosecution.

Outside the hospital, rain needles down. I stand under the awning for a long time, watching the streetlights blur and smear. I can’t tell if it’s the rain or my eyes that are stinging. It feels like there’s no boundary anymore—no separation between the sessions and everything else. The inside is leaking out, and the outside is pushing in. I feel like I’m always behind the glass, even when I’m not.

That’s when my phone rings.

“Hi, Eliza,” says a smooth and soft voice. My handler, the head agent for my region. “I wanted to check in after the incident. How are you holding up?”

“I’m fine,” I lie. “Just tired.”

“I understand. This work can be . . . draining. But we’re piloting a new program for surrogates in your position. It’s called a Detachment Implant—helps compartmentalize the emotional spillover between sessions and real life. It’s important to maintain a healthy work-life balance.”

I don’t say anything. I just listen to the rain.

“It’s painless,” she continues. “Just a small neural modulator. You’ll still be yourself, only . . . able to separate work and life more clearly. We’ve had excellent feedback from early participants.”

I ask how much it costs.

“Oh, no upfront fees,” she says brightly. “We just deduct it in installments from your pay. You won’t even notice.”

I try to tell her I don’t want any part of it. But then I think about Ilya’s face, her shaking hands, the way she said there’s nothing else. I think about Worst Jim laughing in the sunlight.

“Fine,” I say. “Sign me up.”

“Excellent. I’ll book you in for the procedure. You’ll feel better after this, I promise.”

The line dies with a quiet click.

I stand there a little longer, letting the rain soak through my coat. For a moment I can almost feel clean again. Then I remember the deduction.

***

The detachment system works better than I expect.

Installation itself is unremarkable—a white room, a humming chair, and a technician who never looks me in the eye. They patch the back of my neck with a thin adhesive film, feed a few wires into a slender port behind my ear, then tell me to count backward from ten. I don’t make it to seven.

When I wake there’s no scar, no pain, no anything. Just a faint buzz at the edge of awareness, like the moment before a yawn. The agent calls it a neural veil: an adaptive implant calibrating itself over time. 

It learns from my basal rhythms, she says. Also reads my dream sequences while I sleep and establishes an emotional baseline. The idea is that the system will know me better than I do—enough to decide when I should feel and when I shouldn’t.

At that moment, it feels like nothing’s changed. Then, the next morning, I go into my booth and something inside me . . . clicks.

The session passes like a slideshow: Worst Jim’s mouth moving, the spittle against the glass, my own voice saying the words I’ve been trained to say—but I feel none of it. The hour goes by in what feels like minutes. 

My mind flicks back automatically when I leave, and it’s like stepping out of a fog. I stretch, breathe, and feel fine. By the end of the week, I’m doubling my sessions. There’s no need to decompress anymore—no need for cigarettes on the balcony, no long baths just to remember what it’s like to be Eliza instead of someone else. I work, I rest, I eat, I sleep. It’s efficient.

BestHelp loves the new me. My metrics are through the roof. Clients report high authenticity. I don’t dream about them anymore; I don’t fantasize at all, actually. I don’t even flinch when I see someone who looks like Jim on the train.

The agent checks in once, to make sure I’m integrating smoothly. I tell her it’s perfect.

And it is; I can do more sessions each day. I can take the better-paying clients, the rough ones, the long-haul cases. I don’t feel drained afterward. My account balance is finally crawling upward.

Could even save up, I think, almost laughing at the absurdity.

***

The glitch hits on Sunday afternoon.

Ilya’s home, curled on the couch with a hot water bottle and a blanket around her shoulders. Her eye’s almost healed, but the bruising’s still yellow and faintly green like a fading sunset. She’s scrolling her feed, muttering about how no one reads anymore unless it’s fed through an algorithm. I’m half-listening from the kitchenette, stirring instant soup and pretending we’re normal people again.

She laughs at something on her screen. “You remember Clive? Guess who’s suing BestHelp for ‘emotional negligence’? Can you sue for that?”

I start to answer, but my mouth feels wrong—like my tongue’s turned to clay. The air folds around me. There’s a soft pop in my ears rushing like static, and then—nothing.

“Eliza?” Ilya calls. “You okay?”

I turn toward her. She looks smaller than usual, wrapped in her blanket, lips cracked from the cold. Her face moves—concern, then worry—but it doesn’t land. It’s like watching a playback on mute.

“I’m fine,” I hear myself say. My voice sounds distant, like it’s coming through the speakers in the therapy booth.

She frowns. “You don’t look fine.”

I blink, and she blurs slightly, edges softening like a low-res projection. My vision sharpens again, and for a second, I swear I can see the glass—the faint shimmer of it—between us.

Ilya keeps talking. Something about quitting the job, about moving out of the city. I nod in the right places. The detachment hums quietly in the back of my skull, adjusting itself. I can feel it parsing the rhythm of my heartbeat, the pulse in my temples, the shape of my breathing.

“Eliza?” Her voice sounds far away now.

Then, suddenly, I realize what’s happened. I reach up and press my fingers to the spot behind my ear. But there’s no button, no switch, no off. Just skin.

“I think—” but the words don’t form right. The world around me dulls, the colors dimming to a flatter gradient. My thoughts rearrange into quiet, orderly lines.

She touches my arm and I feel it only faintly, as though through layers of fabric and time.

Somewhere deep inside, a part of me tries to panic. But the system catches it before it reaches the surface.

Everything is fine. Everything is manageable. Everything is contained.

***

The agent calls the next morning.

Her voice is syrup-smooth, like always. The kind of voice designed to make bad news sound palatable. “Hi, Eliza, I read your incident report. How are you feeling today?”

“I—” pause. The system hums faintly under my skin, like a tinnitus I can almost ignore. “It switched on when I was at home. I wasn’t in session.”

A soft sigh on the other end. “That’s not normal,” she says. The kind of not normal that means not ideal, but not disastrous either. “You’re not the only one, though. We’ve had cases of overextension in the last rollout. It’s just a software issue.”

“So it’s . . . a glitch?”

“A compatibility mismatch. The neural veil adapts to your rhythms, remember? Sometimes it overlearns. But don’t worry—we can patch that.” Her voice is candy-pink and saccharine. “If you come in tomorrow we’ll do an upgrade. Should only take an hour, and on company time. You’ll be paid for the appointment.”

I can hear the click of a keyboard, the smooth precision of someone who’s done this too many times.

“Will it hurt?” I ask.

“Of course not. Your mind won’t be aware. You’ll wake up refreshed and rebalanced.”

“Okay,” I say finally.

“Perfect. I’ll send the confirmation. See you at ten sharp.”

When the line goes dead, I stare at my reflection in the black screen of my phone. There’s a faint shimmer along the edge of my face, like a heat mirage.

I blink, and it’s gone.

***

The session room smells of antiseptic and sweat. My reflection stares back at me from the glass—except it’s not the soft projection of someone else anymore. Just me, pale and dazed, hair clinging damply to my temples. There’s a bruise blooming along my jaw, dark and tender. Two more ring my wrists like bracelets.

I flex my fingers. They tremble.

For a moment, I think I fell or slipped. Maybe I imagined it. But the chair’s been knocked sideways, the table shoved against the wall. The clock above the door says my session ended twenty minutes ago. I can’t remember a second of it.

A low, thin breath drags itself out of my throat. Then another that’s quicker, harder. The walls close in. My chest tightens. The panic comes, sudden and huge, like a riptide.

I reach for the implant instinctively, my fingers pressing against the base of my skull, but it’s already there—awake before I am. A bright, cold pulse spreading outward, a static hum smoothing everything flat. My breathing slows. My vision flickers, and then—

—when I open my eyes, I’m home.

The lights are low, the air smelling faintly of cigarette ash and instant coffee. My coat is hung neatly on the rack. My boots are dry. The clock says it’s past nine. I blink a few times, disoriented. There’s a message on my phone: Session complete. Payment received.

I check my account. The money’s there. A full-rate session. I have no memory of it.

The hum behind my ear is louder now, like it’s pleased with itself.

Ilya’s sitting at the table, her laptop open, face half-lit by the glow. “Rough day?”

I open my mouth then close it again. “I think I—” I rack my brains. “Did we . . . talk about an upgrade?”

“Jesus, Eliza. You should’ve said no. It’s not a patch, it’s a full-sense cutoff. Like anaesthesia for your mind.”

I stare at her. “What?”

“They’ve been rolling it out quietly,” she says. “A friend of mine in the next district got it last month. You don’t just stop feeling—you stop being. For the whole session. They call it ‘consciousness exclusion.’’’ She says the words like they taste bad. “You could be sitting there for hours and you wouldn’t know what happened. Anything could happen.”

My stomach turns. “But . . . I got paid.”

I sit down slowly, feeling the bruise on my cheek stretch. Ilya’s looking at me, but I can’t tell if she’s angry or scared. Maybe both.

“I don’t remember leaving work,” I whisper.

The hum in my head deepens, almost like it’s listening.

I want to cry, or scream, or something. But the impulse never makes it out of me. It just fades, smoothed away before it forms.

The soup on the stove begins boiling over, hissing at us softly. Neither of us move.

***

I realize it slowly, the way you realize a dream has turned on you—too late to wake up. The air feels close, warm with the heat of another person’s breath.

Worst Jim is in front of me. No projection, no shimmer, no flicker of Maria over my skin. Just me, sitting in a narrow room that smells of sweat, disinfectant, and him.

He’s older than I remember, or maybe just heavier, his eyes two pits of exhausted fury. His hands twitch at his sides like they don’t know what to do without something to grip.

“I thought you were gone,” he says. His voice cracks on the last word.

My mouth is dry. “Jim, the session’s just started. Please—”

He steps closer. His face trembles. “You don’t get to walk away from me again.”

The panic flickers somewhere deep, instinctive—but the implant dulls it instantly, flooding my mind with that cold hum. My thoughts fall quiet. I can feel my heartbeat flatten into a calm, perfect rhythm.

He reaches for my arm. The contact is electric, sudden, and the bruise on my wrist flares where he grabs it. My breath catches—but the system catches that, too, smoothing it out, pressing everything down.

I hear a voice—mine and not mine—say, “It’s okay, Jim. I’m here.”

And then he hits me.

The impact lands like a punctuation mark: Brief. Final. Detached. 

My head turns, vision warping at the edges. Somewhere, I know I should fall, or scream, or defend myself. But the world stays orderly, flat, serene.

The implant hums louder, overriding everything—pain, fear, thought—until there’s nothing left. My body moves, but I don’t feel it.