He handed her the glass, and, embarrassed, she handed him his wedding photograph.
“Is it true?” he asked quietly after she’d emptied the glass. “Is she really dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on,” he said. “Please don’t do that. You wouldn’t be here if she wasn’t. That’s how it works, right? So just tell me. I can’t take this anymore.”
Her head began to throb again. Every time he said she instead of you, it was like a blow to the side of her head. “That’s what Palingenesis says.”
“But you haven’t actually seen her? She could still be alive.”
“It’s possible,” she admitted.
Instead of being excited by the prospect, he became angry. “So why aren’t you helping the police find her? They said you’re the only one with access to her GPS coordinates.”
“It’s complicated.”
“It’s not complicated,” he snapped. “My wife is missing. You’re the only one who knows where she is. What’s complicated about that?”
“I wanted to meet you first. Hoped we could talk,” she said, aware of how selfish it sounded. Her existential crisis suddenly felt insignificant against this man’s grief and worry. She didn’t think she could live with herself if it turned out her original was still alive, hurt or in danger. Of course, if her original were alive, then Con wouldn’t have to live with herself very long. One of the hard-and-fast laws governing cloning in America—under no circumstances could there be two.
“Meet? What for? I thought you had her memories.”
“Not all of them.” It hurt to admit, especially to him.
That seemed to surprise him, and he took a moment to recalibrate. “How much are you missing?”
“My last refresh was December 26, 2038. I don’t know anything after that.”
His eyes cleared as he recognized the date. “That’s the night I saw her sing for the first time. You don’t remember that?”
Con shook her head, already inserting his part of the story into the timeline. That meant that after meeting Levi Greer, she’d moved to Virginia and stopped doing her refreshes. Never even told him about having a clone backup. Why? Didn’t she think she needed them anymore? The questions kept mounting, each one a jagged splinter beneath her skin that would only be extracted by answers that Greer seemed less and less willing to provide.
“Well, now we’ve met,” Greer said, voice hard and low. “So what is it you want to talk about that’s so important? Why won’t you help the police find her?”
“Because I needed to see this, alright?” she said, gesturing at him and the house. “I don’t understand. How are we married? How is this my life? I—”
He cut her off, slapping his hands together in front of her face. “It’s not your life, Con. And we’re not married.”
Greer took a step forward; she took an involuntary step back—a cruel, ancient dance choreographed by generations of men and women. She tried to read anything in his face that might tell her what he was really about. Was he the kind for whom arguing with a woman led inevitably to violence? Con liked to think she wouldn’t have married that sort of man, but some men didn’t show themselves until it was too late. If he took another step, then she would know. She set her feet. This was as far as she would go.
But he didn’t. He stayed where he was, his expression turning from anger to exhaustion and despair. “I just need to know what happened to her. I can’t take this. You don’t know what it’s like not knowing.”
Except she did know and had put this man through hell anyway. Maybe because of the existential threat he represented, she’d resisted thinking of him as a real person up until now. It was cruel of her.
“Please,” he implored her. “Tell the police where she is. Whatever you want. I’ll do anything.”
“I will. I promise,” she said. “Can we just talk? After? I have a lot of questions. There are things I need to know too.”
He wiped away tears and nodded. “That’s all you want?”
That was everything.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
When Con left Levi Greer, she’d had every intention of keeping her word. She’d even pulled up Darius Clarke’s contact and had her finger on the call button. But then the questions started piling up again, and the need to know, like an itch beneath her skin, returned with a vengeance. Are you really about to call the police? it accused her. Did you really risk coming into Virginia just to turn it all over to Darius Clarke? The moment she told him what he wanted to know, he’d cut her out of the loop. Then she’d never get her answers; there wasn’t a doubt in her mind. So she’d given the GPS coordinates to her car and let it drive her here to a small farm in Buffum, an unincorporated community in Dinwiddie County.