But what the cameras never captured—what they never seemed to care about—was what came beforehand. How did these people say goodbye? He doubted that was as silent a thing. More likely there were moments of tension and fiery exchanges. Fear and uncertainty coming out as unintended anger, the way it had for him in the weeks leading up to the cloning. He imagined frustrating, terrible things that no one would want to watch. But at least, he thought now, those were shared fears. Jeremiah hadn’t even had that comfort. He couldn’t even tell his family he was leaving. He couldn’t say goodbye to them.

He would have liked his last night at home to be special somehow, even if he was the only one who knew why. He had come home with a decent bottle of wine and stopped short of buying flowers for Diana. If anything were going to make her suspicious, he realized, it would have been flowers. He hadn’t done anything like that for a very long time. Neither had she.

“I suppose I would have liked to explain a few things to them,” he told Natalie Young. “I sort of feel like I was cheated out of that.”

“What would you have explained?”

“Well, it hasn’t been easy these past few weeks, you know. I’ve been a little on edge with all of this. I haven’t been easy to live with.”

“Go on.”

He recounted for her an evening about a week before when he had gone upstairs to Parker’s bedroom door fully intending to maneuver his way into playing a computer game with him.

Parker hadn’t even looked up from the screen when Jeremiah spoke to him from the doorway. It was like he wasn’t even there, or like he was a figment that couldn’t penetrate the laser fire and bomb blasts of the game. So, without even meaning to, Jeremiah had let everything inside him come out in a burst of anger that—to Parker—must have looked like it came out of nowhere. And once it began, Jeremiah hadn’t known how to reel it back in.

“You’re on that thing twenty-four hours a day! You’re wasting your life with this crap!”

Parker had said nothing, but Jeremiah saw his face redden with a tormented mix of anger and the frustration that comes from not being able to do anything with it. Jeremiah could see that his son was fighting to keep himself quiet.

“From now on there are going to be rules. You hear me? You’re not going to be on that computer whenever you want. You can play for one hour after school and then one hour after your homework is done. Do you understand?”

“My homework is done,” Parker said without looking up. “I already finished it.”

“Good. So, turn that goddamn thing off and clean your room or something. Read a book. I don’t care what you do, but just turn it off.”

He turned on his heels and almost ran into Diana, who was standing in the hallway with an empty laundry basket, her eyes wide in quiet surprise. Jeremiah just shook his head and skirted past her down the stairs where he sat heavily on the couch and turned on the TV. She followed him.