A lone figure emerges from stage right. I don’t know whom I expect. Del Ray, most likely. Or another Julia King. Anyone.

I don’t expect my own son.

The gasp of the televised crowd—if there is a crowd at all; it could be canned—is drowned out by the intakes of fifty breaths in the lab. Blinking under the floodlights, Steven shuffles shyly toward center stage, toward Reverend Carl’s outstretched arms.

“He’s seventeen,” I whisper to Lorenzo. “Only seventeen.”

There’s no need to explain; Lorenzo has seen pictures of my children. Once upon a time, those pictures littered my office.

“Caught,” Reverend Carl says. “Caught in a place no man or boy should be.” He turns to Steven. “Isn’t that right, son?”

Steven starts to speak, then only nods. Rage boils inside me, through every vein and artery, until the pressure builds to a trapped scream.

I miss most of the remaining speech. I can’t hear anything except the sound of my own heart, deafening in my ears. The few words that make it through settle in my gut like lead weights: “fornicator,” “traitor,” “example,” “trial.”

Reverend Carl calls the audience to join him in prayer, bows his head, and takes Steven by the hand. Another close shot pulls in, showing their intertwined fingers. Carl’s are wrapped like tenacious constrictors; Steven’s are limp, five helpless digits having the life squeezed out of them. A few inches up from my son’s hand is a wide metal band circling his wrist.

A million years ago—it was only twenty, but it feels like a million, it feels like tens of millions, like all the lifetimes of the entire world—Jackie asked me what I would do to stay free. Last night, over a kitchen counter that seems as distant as that Georgetown apartment, I asked Patrick if he would do anything, if he would kill.

Right now, with a half-baked formula on the table and Reverend Carl scolding Steven on the television, I put all the questions together and come up with a single answer.

Yes, I would do anything. I would kill.

The woman who thinks these words doesn’t sound like me at all.

Or maybe she does.

In any case, I sort of like her, this new Jean. I like her a hell of a lot more when I catch Morgan smiling up at the flat-screen.

Chapter Sixty-eight

SIXTY-EIGHT

At five o’clock on Sunday afternoon, on what should be a bright pre-summer evening full of barbecue smells and june bugs, Morgan informs us no one will be going home.

“Cafeteria’s on the third floor, people. Dorms on the sixth and seventh. If you need to make a call, see Sergeant Petroski.” Morgan nods to a makeshift security station at the entrance to the lab. “Nightie-night, folks,” he says before turning tail and striding out.