The tears that wet her cheeks surprised him for a moment but didn’t soften him.

“If I could take it back,” she said, “I would. I wish I could make it right somehow. All I can do is tell you I’m sorry. I know that’s not enough.”

“No,” he told her. “It’s not.”

He left her there and went into the kitchen without another word. A minute later he heard her get up and walk out the door.

Charles Scott came in before nine the next morning, exactly on schedule, with a suit and tie on a hanger. “I thought it best,” he said, “if your son sees you dressed for work as he would expect. Best not to make this any more confusing for him than it already is.”

Jeremiah had hardly slept the night before and had already been up for hours. He had no idea what he was going to say to Parker once he saw him. How could he explain this? How would he make Parker believe any of it? Jeremiah went to change and shave in the bathroom. Scott paced nervously back and forth, grappling, Jeremiah assumed, with his own issues of making this work.

Jeremiah scanned his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He looked more or less exactly as he had six months before, exactly as his clone looked when he’d left for work that morning, down to the same bandaged left hand. It felt odd to look so much like his old self and feel like someone completely different. He never could have imagined, when all of this began, that so much could change in a matter of months. He took a deep breath and tried to calm himself. Breaking out of the lab, confronting the clone, cutting off his finger—all of it felt easy compared to the prospect of facing his own son.

Scott knocked on the bathroom door. “Let’s go,” he said. “The car is waiting.”

They had secured an exact replica of Jeremiah’s car, right down to the coffee stains on the front carpet and the dent on the bumper. He’d be picking Parker up in that. Scott would follow close behind. “Just to be safe,” Scott said, which Jeremiah understood to be a precaution against any sudden decision he might make to flee. He had no such plans, though. They were holding his money, just as he was holding on to the package. They’d agreed to make the swap at the last possible moment. “Just to be safe,” Jeremiah had said.

Since he’d last been to Parker’s high school, a locked-door policy had been implemented. Jeremiah had to press an intercom button and tell a receptionist his business there before the door would be unlocked.

“Jeremiah Adams,” he said into the speaker. “I’m here to pick up my son. He has a doctor’s appointment.” The door buzzed open and he went inside and through to the front office.

Waiting by the front desk, Jeremiah was preoccupied with trying to act normal. He didn’t know why. He’d never seen this receptionist before. She didn’t know who he was. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d somehow give something away, ruin everything in the final moment. He stood there imagining an intricate scenario that involved her pressing some secret button under her desk and alerting the police that there was an imposter posing as a parent.