He turned back to his clone, who was leaning heavily now against the wall and still shaking his head.

“My entire life? Everything I remember? My childhood? My marriage? You want me to believe it’s all been a lie? That I’m not the man I’ve always thought I was?”

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all of this,” Jeremiah said, “it’s that no one, none of us, is ever really who we think we are. We tell ourselves lies to feel better, but they’re just lies. The truth is a lot harder to look at. But the trick is, you can’t let it crush you. You either accept who you are, or you change it. In your case, you just have to accept it. And you have to do that now.”

“Just accept all of this and hand over my son?”

“You don’t have a choice,” Jeremiah snapped. “Right this minute there are people on their way here who’d kill all of us in a heartbeat to keep this thing quiet. Including your son. And mine.”

The clone said nothing.

“You’re his father,” Jeremiah said. “Every bit as much as I am. Act like it! We’ve got to do this.”

The anguish still there on his face, the clone closed his eyes and offered a feeble nod of his head in reluctant acceptance.

Relief washed over Jeremiah just as Natalie started back up the stairs. Parker’s clone came up cautiously behind her and stopped as soon as he saw the scene in the hallway.

“Dad...? What?”

“Parker,” he said. “We need to do one more thing. You need to go with Dr. Young. Do exactly as she tells you. You can trust her.”

The boy looked at him in utter confusion, eyes widening in alarm, and Jeremiah laid a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “We need to do this, Parker. No one’s going to hurt you. We just need to fix this one thing.”

“And then we can go?”

“Then we can go,” he said. “Anywhere we want.”

Jeremiah felt a lump in his throat as he watched the boy follow Natalie into the bedroom as though he were walking toward a firing squad. His own clone made a move to follow, but Jeremiah stopped him with a hand to his shoulder. Natalie closed the door behind them.

“That’s your son,” he said. “He’s every bit as real as you are.”

“And he won’t remember anything about this?” the clone asked. “Nothing about the experiment, about seeing two of us? About seeing his own clone in there?”

“If everything goes right, the only thing he’ll remember is that he came home from school, fell asleep and you woke him up in time for dinner.”

They listened in silence to a few muffled sounds coming from the bedroom, none of them as worrisome as they thought they ought to be. They exchanged anxious glances, but everything that needed saying between them had already been said.

It was only a few minutes before Natalie emerged from the room, struggling with the slumping body of Parker against her shoulder. He looked awake, but zombie-like, and was able to walk uneasily under her guidance. She nodded back toward the room.