“An hour ago? In the middle of the night? Where was she going in the middle of the night? What happened?”

“The accident occurred just a few blocks from your home,” Scott told him. “We don’t know whether she was coming home or going away. There were no other cars involved. Apparently, she lost control and went off an embankment. She was pronounced dead at the scene. We’re still trying to piece together the information. You know about as much as I do at this point, I’m afraid.”

Jeremiah fell silent again as the news took shape in his mind. There should have been rage. He should have lunged toward Charles Scott and strangled him where he stood. But all he could feel in that moment was a horrifying sensation of falling, of being engulfed. Hot tears began to sting the back of his eyelids. He didn’t know how to react to this. He buried his face in his hands and pushed hard against his forehead and temples to keep from crying outright. None of this made any sense.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Adams. If I could have foreseen all this tragedy happening in your life in these few months... Well...we never know what the Fates have in store for us, do we?”

Jeremiah almost welcomed the anger those words began to coax from him. Fate? This was murder! But his shock and a sudden shred of senseless hope pushed it down again.

“Are you sure about this?” he asked. “I mean, are they sure it was her? Maybe it was some sort of mistake. How do you even know? I mean, unless you were watching her, how do you know?”

“We’re sure,” Scott said, his voice uncharacteristically quiet. “We have safeguards in place so that we are warned about things such as this. I’m sorry.”

“She was only forty-six, for Christ’s sake. She can’t be dead.”

“I know. It’s a terrible loss. Terrible.”

“You’re planning to let me out now, right?” Jeremiah looked the older man hard in the eyes. “I mean...this experiment is over. It’s done now.”

“Right now, Mr. Adams, I would like to turn on the viewer. The police should be arriving at your home to inform the clone. Dr. Young thinks it’s important that you experience this in real time. I want to make certain that happens.”

Jeremiah looked up at the wall without words as an image appeared of his double switching on the hallway light and opening the front door. He was dressed, like Jeremiah, in a bathrobe, his hair messy and his face tired. Two uniformed police officers, one male, one female, stood on the front steps, hats in their hands in front of them.

“Jeremiah Adams?” the woman asked, turning the volume down on a radio hooked to her belt.

“Yes.”

“Is your wife Diana Adams?”

“Yes.”

“Sir, I am Officer Mahoney, this is Officer Towle. May we come in?”

The clone opened the door wider and stepped aside to give them entry. Jeremiah noted the clone’s eyes darting nervously back and forth, from one officer to the other, and his face grew markedly paler. Police holding hats in the middle of the night will do that to a man, he thought, even to a copy of a man.