They seemed like decent-enough people, earnest in their beliefs. The only hope of salvaging this overheated and heedless world, they believed, was to find a new way of being human. The Fourth treatment was a step in that direction. Or so they claimed, and Sandra wasn’t sure they were wrong … though they might be naïve.

And there was Bose himself, a Fourth by default and at the wrong age. Some of the qualities she loved in Bose might have come out of that treatment—his easy calm, his generosity, his sense of justice. But most of Bose was just—Bose. She was certain of it. It was Bose she had fallen in love with, not his blood chemistry or his neurology.

But he had told her bluntly there was no hope of getting the Fourth treatment for Kyle. Bose had received it because it was the only way of saving his life; Kyle didn’t qualify, mainly because the treatment wouldn’t really cure him. As Bose had said, it would only render him an infant in a healthy man’s body, perhaps permanently. And that was an outcome Bose’s friends, after all their colloquies and ethical debates, couldn’t countenance.

Kyle slumped in the wheelchair with his head inclined, his eyes tracking the swaying oaks.

“I got a letter from Orrin Mather yesterday.” Bose’s friends had been characteristically generous about helping Orrin and Ariel during the investigation that followed the fire, finding them a home where neither the law nor the criminals were likely to come looking. “Orrin’s working part-time at a commercial nursery. His shoulder healed up nicely, he says. He says he hopes things are going well for me and Officer Bose. Which I guess they are. And he says he doesn’t mind about me reading his notebooks.”

(I would of given you permission, Orrin had written, if you had asked, and Sandra accepted the implied rebuke.)

“He says what I read was everything he ever wrote, except for a few pages he finished after he got to Laramie. He enclosed them with his letter. Look—I brought them with me.”

You can keep these pages, Orrin had written. I don’t need them anymore. I believe I’m finished with all that business. Maybe you will understand it better than I do. It is all bewildering to me. To be honest I would rather just get on with things.

She listened to the creek as it rippled through the grove. Today the creek was running shallow, as clean and bright as glass. She guessed this water would eventually wend its way into the Gulf—or evaporate, perhaps, to fall as rain in some cornfield in Iowa, as snow in some wintery northern town.

The sum of all paths, Sandra thought.

Then she took up the pages Orrin had sent her and began to read them aloud.

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

ISAAC’S STORY / ORRIN’S STORY / THE SUM OF ALL PATHS