“You’ve been staying after school a lot lately,” he said, a hint of accusation lacing his tone.

“I told you, I was working on a project. You’re the one always saying I need to get my grades up.”

Parker started to devour his sandwich and slipped Louie a bit of tuna from his finger. The dog wagged his tail delightedly and sat rigidly at Parker’s feet, staring up at the food as though he could make it fall to the floor by the power of his own rapt attention.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Jeremiah said to the monitor. “He’s not going to just let him get away with this, is he? What the hell is wrong with this asshole?”

Brent scribbled something down on his notepad, glancing at Jeremiah from the corner of his eye.

“Oh, knock it off, Brent!”

“What? This is my job, remember?”

“Fuck you,” he said, and turned back to the scene in front of him.

Parker made a move for the back staircase, Louie at his heels, and the clone asked where he was going.

“I have more homework.”

“Why don’t we go get an ice cream first? We haven’t done that in a while. What do you say?”

Good move, Jeremiah thought, have a nice talk in a nonconfrontational way. For a moment, he was almost sort of impressed, knowing that, had it been him standing in that kitchen, he might not have played it so cool. He might have started screaming and searching Parker’s pockets for a pipe.

“I can’t, Dad,” Parker said, avoiding the clone’s eyes, and went up the stairs, two at a time.

“Follow him!” Jeremiah urged uselessly.

Instead, the clone just started cleaning the mess Parker had left on the counter and, infuriatingly, began humming a mindless tune into the heavy silence of the kitchen. For a moment, Jeremiah entertained the idea of playing another game with his son. Maybe he could tweak Clyde’s outfit, swap the Ramones T-shirt for something with a subtle antidrug message: Drugs Are for Absolute Fucking Losers. Do You Want to Destroy Every Brain Cell in Your Head? But he knew he couldn’t parent his son through a video game, and he couldn’t trust himself to make contact again.

Once the counter was sufficiently cleared, the clone reached up to a high cabinet over the refrigerator, took down a bottle and fixed himself a tall gin and tonic, light on the tonic. Jeremiah winced. A mixed drink on a Tuesday was unheard of. The clone must have been feeling the strain, he thought.

Settling back in front of the TV, the clone rotated through the channels and sipped his drink until the front door opened again sometime around ten o’clock. Diana came in without a word of greeting, dropped her purse on the floor by the hall table and went straight to the kitchen. The clone got up and followed her. Jeremiah could see his face had settled into a hard expression, his brow furrowed and his lips tightened.