The day after that, they viewed her funeral and Jeremiah wept openly in front of Brent. His sobs, though, were punctuated with the sting of determined anger, as he steeled himself for what he was about to do. It wasn’t going to end this way, he told himself. The anger was the only thing that kept him in one piece.

In the kitchen afterward, Brent took two beers from the fridge and looked at Jeremiah with an unreadable expression on his face. Jeremiah thought he’d rattled him with the crying.

“I’m fine, Brent. Don’t worry.”

“It’s not that.”

“What, then?”

“I wish I’d listened to you sooner. About all of this, I mean.”

Jeremiah got a few handfuls of ice from the freezer. He wanted to alleviate some of Brent’s guilt, but he had to do it under the din of the blender. This wasn’t for anyone else to hear.

“I don’t know that it would have done any good. I got the note to the clone. It didn’t help. It’s not your fault, Brent.”

“It’s not your fault, either,” he said. “You know that, right?”

Jeremiah didn’t answer.

“There was nothing you could have done,” Brent told him. “You couldn’t control what you were thinking under the Meld.”

“I shouldn’t have been thinking about the dog,” he said. “I shouldn’t have tried to keep that a secret. It was pride, some ridiculous sense of power. It was stupid of me. And Diana paid the price for that. This is on me. This is all on me.”

“You didn’t know,” he said. “There was no way you could have known.”

“I did try.” Jeremiah was fighting back more tears. “I tried to warn her, I tried to tell the clone to protect her.”

“I know you did.”

“I wanted to save her. I thought I could. I thought I could do something.”

“You’re doing something now,” Brent said. “Just get through this and it will be over. I’m going to help you. You’re not in this alone anymore.”

Chapter 34

Day 166

They were scheduled to watch the clone at home on Sunday afternoon. Jeremiah didn’t want to see it. A day after he’d buried Diana, after all the planning and details and gatherings were behind him, the clone would be forced, finally, to deal with the reality he was left with. Jeremiah didn’t want to witness that.

There is so much ritual involved after a death, he thought. People come together for the wake, stiff handshakes and teary hugs giving way, after a while, to more boisterous reminiscing and a few stifled bouts of uncomfortable laughter right in front of the casket. Then the funeral, all solemn, righteous and wooden, filled with quiet, pious reflection, until everyone goes off to have a few drinks afterward. All of it, of course, as a means to some sort of closure.

But there’s never any closure. Not really. All the ritual is nothing more than a way to stave off the inevitable finality of the long goodbye. It’s easy to stand for hours at a wake, surrounded by people who’ve come to help ease the burden. You feel sheltered. Getting out of bed on the morning of a funeral isn’t hard, precisely because it’s necessary. What’s hard, Jeremiah understood, is the day after. And the next day, and the next, when there doesn’t seem to be any reason to get out of bed at all, and there isn’t anyone around anymore to tell you they’re “terribly sorry for your loss.”