I've always kept a journal, ever since I was a young girl and my mother had given me one as a gift. It was beautiful; hand-bound in leather, with the sort of musty smell that made me think perhaps someone had given it to her long ago. It was the smell of used book stores, and libraries. Now the smell brings her to mind: the corners of yellowing, tissue-thin pages, fluttering with the tinge of exhaled smoke, and the waxy scent of her bar soap. And, of course, all of this simply covering a smell that is so uniquely her, that captures some sort of deep truth about who she is as a person. It is the smell that I can pick out amongst all the others as she comes up behind me and puts a hand on either side of the textbook I'm not really reading, the paper I'm not really writing. Because I haven't written anything, not in a long time. One day, I was presented a threshold into a room full of secrets I could not unknow, and I was told that if I wanted to enter it, I must stop writing a journal.

For everyone's sake.

For their sake. A written confessional is a suicide note for us all, of course, I'm not stupid. My complicity in this huge, conspiratorial scheme is not accidental. I was led to where I am by a series of choices I made of my own free will. And now? What's changed?

Do I love her?

The answer is not so simple. The answer is not emphatic. It is maybe. There are certainly moments where seeing her pushes my chest out, pumps it with air til it threatens to burst, or leave me breathless. There are times she looks at me from across a room—just looks at me, honestly—and I feel it begin, that flash of an ache, that dull pleasure that pierces my abdomen between my belly button and my clit.

But do I love her?

There are moments when I go over to her apartment, letting myself in without even bothering to knock anymore. I will walk confidently up behind her, and she will straighten her back to turn and I won't let her. Instead, I will tilt her head back and kiss her with all the desire she'd struck up earlier in the day, with one of her looks, with a text message or an offhand comment in passing. I tilt her head back and I kiss her and my hand strokes from the tip of her chin down to her collarbone, slowly but surely passing over her trachea, both of us altogether too aware how vulnerable she is. And the desire will ramp up, and I will moan and my hand will stop wandering and it will grip—lightly, too lightly to cut off her breathing or even cause her any discomfort—but just roughly enough that we both know she is mine, that she is submitting, that she trusts me utterly and completely with her body.

Her body which is not really her body.

Her body which belongs to my employer. I've seen a dozen pictures of bodies exactly like hers, in full detail.

And she has no idea. She trusts, blindly, and it scares me because I am not blind. But still I test her faith in me. Move my hands to her breasts and flick a finger across her nipple which is already hard because she's been thinking about me, move that same hand down into the waistband of her skirt and slide a finger through her lips which are already soaked because she's been waiting for me. And while I fuck her, while I take her complete trust and use it to reduce her to pleas and whimpers, and breaths, and "God, Delphine"s, and "harder"s, I am not blind to what is happening.

That is why I am writing this. Not to absolve myself, but to incriminate. She deserves to know, not because I love her but because my guilt is becoming too much, and she is beginning to realize something is not right. And I am a good soldier, so I have told the DYAD, and I am a loyal employee so they did not even bother asking me to find out more. They know I will do what I can, as fast as I can because it is what I was trained to do. Most importantly, I am a good girlfriend, so Cosima has no idea of any of this. So she watches me, wondering what I can handle. Watches me, and tries to figure out how to break it to me. Watches me, so trusting that she considers telling me something that sounds so absurd to most people, but is so normal to me now. Clones, large corporations, conspiracies.

I am smoking more cigarettes now, and she is smoking more pot. I tell her I can hardly see her behind all of the smoke. She laughs at my pun and stubs out the joint in between her thumb and forefinger. She leans forward, crawling on her hands and knees across the bed to kneel on it in front of me. She stubs out my cigarette and begins running her fingertips up my bare thigh. She's high, and I've just been fucked by my boss at the institute, and this moment seems entirely off. I catch her wrist, and she looks up at me, eyes hazy and pupils dilated from the weed.

"What aren't you telling me?"

The question shocks her; it shocks me. The truth is, I don't want to hear the answer because the answer means my time playing house is over and my time doing massive spying and damage control has begun.

"What are you talking about?" She's smiling joylessly, anxiety souring the expression at the corners. "There's nothing. I would never lie to you."

And we make love. That is the word for it this time. This time it is slow and sad and I know she is trying to explain everything through her movements. She has a way of doing that, of thinking she can somehow convey an idea through her body, through hand motions or kisses or juts of her hips. I know and she does not. I am not blind, and slowly she is beginning to see.

So I am writing this for her, and for me. I am writing it so that if something goes bad, the truth does not end with me and the whole world does not remain blind. There is no returning from this precipice, but I can certainly detail the landscape. If I tumble over, I will take the DYAD with me.