“No, not that I’ve seen. Look, Natalie, this isn’t anything to worry about. I’m sure it’s blown over by now. They looked okay at the funeral. They’ve probably already forgotten about it, with everything that’s happened.”

“Perhaps,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “Still, anything out of the ordinary could be important data. Any atypical behavior by the clone, or anyone close to him, needs to be looked at.”

“You’re reading too much into it,” he told her. “Haven’t you ever had a drink on an empty stomach? It happens.”

She was quiet for a moment and then shrugged as though agreeing with him. She changed the subject abruptly, as she often did. It always gave Jeremiah the feeling she was connecting dots he couldn’t see. It made him nervous. Especially now.

“What do you miss most about your life, Jeremiah? What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about that?” she asked expectantly.

“To tell you the truth,” he said, “it’s mostly little things that I miss. Sitting at the kitchen table on Sunday mornings. Dinnertime. Talking with Parker about school. I even miss bugging him about homework or cleaning his room. I suppose I miss being a father. I miss Parker most of all. That gets worse the longer this goes on.”

“Worse, how?”

“You know how it is with kids. Things change so fast. I feel like I’m getting more and more disconnected from him. I don’t know what he’s thinking about. I don’t know what new game he’s playing or what music he’s listening to. I don’t have all those little details anymore. I feel cut off.”

For a moment, Natalie’s expression looked almost sympathetic. Her eyes lingered on his, and her mouth tightened in a way that suggested she understood. But the expression was fleeting and she got right back down to business.

“I’d like to do another session with the Meld in a week or so, just to keep up with what you’re feeling,” she said. “But let’s call it a day for now. You look like you could use some rest.”

Rest was the last thing Jeremiah got over the next several days. Every time he tried to sleep his mind would spin in fifteen different ways. He now knew, without a doubt, exactly how far Charles Scott and the people working with him would go to save this project. And somewhere in the back of his mind he wondered what role Meld had played in all of it. Was it the drug that had made his mother so confused? Was that what made her question the clone? His own role in bringing it to the public, in assuring the world it was perfectly safe, was eating at him. There was blood on his hands, he realized. He was complicit in every single death, including that of his own mother.

Underneath it all, Jeremiah worried about what he might have revealed to Natalie through the Meld. Did she sense his suspicion? His memory of what happened under the drug was, as usual, foggy at best. He couldn’t be certain about what she’d seen, about how well he’d managed to control his own thoughts. And the prospect of taking the Meld with her again was looming. He couldn’t let her see what he knew about Scott. He had to hide what he knew about the greater scope of the project. He couldn’t afford to rouse her suspicion.