He pours me another glass, misunderstanding. But then, I’ve only just figured it out myself.

“What would you do to get rid of all of them?” I say. “To go back to the way things were.”

Again, I hear Jackie:

Think about what you need to do to stay free.

Patrick swallows the last of his scotch, considers the bottle, and pours another finger. I have to take it from him before whisky spills all over the counter—that’s how badly his normally steady hands are shaking.

“Anything,” he says after a long gulp. “Absolutely anything.”

“Anything” is a funny little word, overused and rarely literal. I’d do anything to get a date with her. I’ll pay anything to get front-row seats to the concert. Anything you want. I don’t need anything. “Anything” never covers the whole gamut of existence.

I lean over the counter, close enough to smell the sweetness of scotch on his breath, until our noses are almost touching.

“Would you kill?” I say.

Patrick doesn’t blink. For a moment, I wonder if he’s still breathing. He’s that still.

I have to remind myself of who and what Patrick is. The quiet guy. The one who doesn’t want to get involved, who would rather talk theory than practice. The man Jackie called a cerebral pussy all those years ago in our crappy Georgetown flat with the rat-eaten secondhand sofa and the Ikea furniture whose veneer fell off a year after we’d assembled it. Also, he’s a man who once swore to tread carefully in matters of life and death, who recited the promise I must not play God.

When he speaks, he says one word:

“Yes.”

The kitchen, stuffy and still, turns cold.

Then he says, “But you know we don’t have to.”

“Exactly,” I say.

All we need to do is take away their voices.

Chapter Fifty-eight

FIFTY-EIGHT

They say there’s no rest for the wicked, so neither of us sleeps tonight. Instead, I go back into the rec room and retrieve my folder, the one with the red X I hid from Morgan only two days ago, and take it to Patrick’s office.

He’s waiting for me in the dark but flicks on his desk lamp when I come in.

Page by page, Patrick goes through the data. He stops at the section containing formulas written in Lorenzo’s neat, continental hand. “You did this?”

I shake my head, then realize he can’t see me. “No. Lorenzo.”

“Huh.”

“What?” I say, straining to read in the faint light.

“It’s some kind of beautiful.”