“Sarah Sunshine, who despite her name was kind of serious and gloomy.”

“There’s a Benjamin Bunney at the Child Study Center.”

“Amazing. What’s your next question for me?”

“Do you understand that Huntington’s disease is a fatal, autosomal-dominant neurological illness that usually strikes in mid-life, causing involuntary movements, severe emotional disturbance, and cognitive decline?”

“That would be a yes. Who wrote these questions, the Marquis de Sade?”

“It gets worse. Now I am supposed to tell you that because it is an autosomal-dominant disorder, each child of a parent with Huntington’s disease has a fifty percent risk of inheriting the illness.”

“Tell me something new.”

“I wish I could. They’re working on it. There’s going to be a blood test soon.”

“Which you’ll want me to take.”

“Which I hope you will want to take.”

“Same diff.”

“Not really.” Rebecca paused. They eyed each other. “May I go back to the questions?”

“Sure.”

“The next one is, Do you have children?”

“Don’t you think I would have mentioned it by now?”

“It’s the next question. I’m putting down ‘no.’ Okay, next. If your answer was no, has your meeting today at which you learned your test results changed your decision about having children in the future?”

“No.”

Her pen was poised again. “No?”

“No. I had already decided not to have children a long time ago, before this. Turns out I was right.”

She looked up at him then, tears filling her eyes. “I didn’t know that. You didn’t tell me that. I’m sorry,” she whispered. “You shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t have made you do this.”

“Do the thinking about it or do the study? Or have you be the person to ask me these questions?”

“Oh, both. All three. All of it. You shouldn’t be here.”

“No. You were right,” he said. “I needed to do it. I had been living in fear. Denying the reality while wallowing in it at the same time. It’s important. So now I know. Now I know that I don’t know. That nobody knows. Which is what I kind of already knew, you know? Seriously.”

They sat there together in silence in the little office at the Yale Medical School, just down the hall from the room that housed a horrific collection of deformed fetuses in jars that she had thought to show him, but now wouldn’t.

“So, do you want children?” he asked, breaking the silence.

“I don’t know. Why? We should finish these. I’m supposed to ask you the questions.”

“It’s important. The most important thing, really, because I don’t ever want to disappoint you.”

They didn’t talk with their friends about the possibility of Huntington’s. It was George’s choice, because of the way he had felt in his adolescence that knowledge of his family history set him apart, affected the way people acted. One girl told him flat out that she couldn’t see him, because her mother said his family had a disease. An English teacher offered a kind of rapaciously invasive sympathy, as if every kindly inquiry for his mother’s condition entitled her to some nugget of private medical information in return. Even more enlightened people than that could be careless with their assumptions about so many things, he had found. It was freeing to meet people who hadn’t known him growing up and weren’t obsessed with his possible Huntington’s cooties every time they saw him trip on a crack in the sidewalk. So the Huntington’s possibility was nobody’s business.