I imagined my child-sized Harvey with a man-sized head, and I laughed so hard I lost my breath. I let my head fall back against the headboard, though the motion and the amusement sent a succession of throbbing stabs through it. Finally, I forced myself to settle for fear that the pain would break the seal and saturate my new bandage with fresh blood.

“Were you the same back then?” I asked, struggling to catch my breath.

“I don’t suppose so.” He seemed to know now that my laughter had been at his expense. “I wasn’t a serious child, if that’s what you mean.”

I drew my lips into my mouth to keep them from smiling or suggesting that his reckoning was too biased to be believed.

“My father saw to it that I had a childhood, no matter how hard he worked.” When he spoke of his father, Harvey relaxed at the edges. “Serious matters were for later in life, he always said.”

“What a relief to finally be an adult then,” I said with a smile. “Free to be serious about everything, all the time. No one to insist upon balance.”

I don’t know why I thought he would smile at that, and he certainly wouldn’t laugh. I’d never seen or heard him do so. I had no idea how to inspire him to either. There was only the subject of science that obviously and consistently engaged him.

“Have you ever had the procedure, Harvey? Have you ever extracted a Mem?”

As though perpetually drawn from a maze of deep and encompassing thoughts, Harvey first cleared his throat and then adjusted in his seat again.

“My father was against it. For me, at least. He was entirely enamored of its study. But he would never have let me or my mother take part, not in that way. He said there were too many outcomes impossible to foresee.”

“You were a lucky child.”

“Yes,” he said, looking delicately at me. “I was.”

His eyes softened the longer we watched each other so that I couldn’t bring myself to discuss my own father, whose affection I knew I’d have to remand to the real Dolores. If I did I would also have to confess knowing that his love did not extend to an extract, and so perhaps my opinion of how he treated Dolores was moot. If his real daughter thought him protective and wise, what did it matter that I was offended on her behalf? He hadn’t trusted her to manage the pain of having witnessed the accident or else, given her recent debut and courting season, he hadn’t thought it worthwhile to allow her the chance. The consequences from which Harvey’s father had wisely shielded his son were either beyond Dolores’s father or unimportant.