No one was supposed to die while he was in here. That wasn’t part of the deal. Why had the damned clone agreed to let her take the Meld? If this was suicide, it had to be connected to that, he thought. His mother would never have done it. There was no way. It may have been in her genes, but suicide wasn’t in her character. No matter how upset she might have been about the move, her memory, all of it, there was simply no way he could reconcile that she’d killed herself. She’d always been one of the most contented people he’d ever known, almost to a fault. There was no way.

Jeremiah ruminated on the clone’s visit with his mother when she hadn’t even recognized him. He had no way of knowing for sure whether the clone had seen her again since then, but he found himself hoping their final moments together weren’t clouded by her failing mind. The Meld had shown she didn’t have dementia, but there was surely something wrong.

What occurred to him next was so shocking it made him bolt upright again. Charles Scott had heard the conversation about what the doctor had seen when she took the Meld. He must have been monitoring these viewings, either in real time or taped playbacks. And so he knew Patricia Adams hadn’t recognized the clone. She had looked right at the thing and declared that it wasn’t her son. Scott must have seen it. If not, all of it, every word of it, was in Brent’s report.

And now she was dead.

If it wasn’t suicide—and he couldn’t accept that it was—then what was it?

Standing frozen in the middle of the room, still in his underwear, surrounded by the mess he’d made, a kind of dread washed over Jeremiah. He wanted to vomit. He retched and heaved, but it was no use. There was nothing inside him.

Charles Scott was desperate that this experiment continue without interruption. But was he desperate enough to kill? By getting involved with all of this, had Jeremiah sacrificed his own mother?

Chapter 21

Days 106-109

When he was a child, Jeremiah had loved his mother ferociously. Without a father, she had, by necessity, filled many roles for him—hero, teacher, best friend. She’d done a good job at all of it. They had been close, and she made sure to teach him things a father might have taught a son. Most of which she likely had to learn first for herself. By the time he was fifteen, he could fix a toilet, drive a stick shift and sweet-talk girls, and all with guidance from her. He could talk to her about anything, and she was always honest with him—except for the one thing that came to matter more and more as he grew up.

“It doesn’t matter why your father left,” she’d told him once. “The only thing that matters is that he isn’t here, and that’s his loss, not yours.”