by Susan Ward
I was digging in my drawer for another bag of cookies when a knock came on my bedroom door.
“Yes,” I yelled.
I heard Mrs. Freeburg say, “May I come in, ma’am?”
Cody crinkled his nose. “Ma’am?”
“I don’t think she knows what to call me,” I whispered, shooing Cody off the bed with my hands before I added loudly, “One second, Mrs. Freeburg.”
“This is so dumb,” he lamented, settling in the chair beside me.
I made a face at him. “If she finds you lounging on the bed, she’ll give you the death stare again. I think she’s lived a very sheltered life and is a little confused by, you know, how we are.”
He frowned. “Californians? Or you having a gay best friend?”
“Be nice after she comes in. She’s important to Damon. I want her to like me.”
“I don’t think Mrs. Freeburg likes anyone, not even Mr. Freeburg.”
I choked back a laugh as I headed across the room. Smiling, I opened the door. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Was there something you needed?”
“His Highness would like to see the two of you in his study, ma’am.”
My brows jetted up. How peculiar. I couldn’t imagine why Damon hadn’t just come to get me himself or shot off a text. “Is everything all right?”
“I really couldn’t say, dear.”
Dear? I glanced over my shoulder at Cody, and he shrugged.
“Tell Damon we’ll be along in a minute, Mrs. Freeburg.”
She nodded and stepped back. I closed the door and stared at Cody, suddenly anxious and worried, though I couldn’t imagine over what. “That was weird, wasn’t it? She called me dear. She’s never done that before. And why wouldn’t Damon just come in here and get me himself? Something is wrong, Cody. I can feel it.”
“Girl, you’ve been in the wilderness too long. It’s making you paranoid.”
I sighed, sure that he was right and wishing my stomach would stop churning. It was an extreme reaction to have to a slight deviation in habit by Damon. It seemed Cody wasn’t the only one who took little things and made them into big ones.
“Are you going to go see what he wants so we can finish the show, or are you just going to stand there?”
“I want to check how I look first.”
I hurried toward the mirror above the fireplace, wiping the edges of my mouth to make sure I didn’t have Oreo residue there.
“Am I presentable?”
“Yes, it’s an improvement to get the crumbs from your face before you go find out what your fiancé wants. Even when what he wants is probably just to ask you what we’ve been doing in here all day.”
I rolled my eyes. “He knows what we do when we hang out.”
“Then that leaves only one reason for all his drama of sending Mrs. Freeburg to get us. Damon’s probably got another one of his surprises for you. That guy’s nuts about you, Khloe. There’s no denying it.”
I sighed. “I’m sure you’re right. Do you know he gives me a present every Saturday morning on the breakfast tray he brings me himself?”
He took my hand and headed toward the hallway. “Gloat, gloat.”
I pouted. “I’m not gloating.”
“Yes, you are, but that’s OK. I’m glad you found Damon and are happy together. Even if that means I’ll eventually have to give you up to another guy.”
“Cody.” I shook my head. He was impossible. “Not going to happen. Not ever. We will never have to give up each other. Gideon accepts me as a permanent fixture in your life, and Damon…well, he’s coming around.”
We were both laughing by the time we reached the study. Good. I needed to keep Cody’s spirits uplifted until whatever was going on with Gideon was resolved. Hopefully in a happy way. No, I was sure it would be.
Without knocking first, Cody opened the door to Damon’s study. “After you, ma’am.”
I gave him the look, certain I would never hear the end of that. My gaze locked on him, I rounded the entry and stepped into the room.
My eyes flared wide.
Damon wasn’t alone.
“Mom, Dad,” I cried with a sudden burst of excitement. “When did you get here? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
“Baby girl,” Mom said, springing from her chair and running to give me a hug.
“This is a wonderful surprise, but you should have called! Did Damon know you were coming today?” I shifted my gaze to him. “You and your surprises. You’ve grown quite impossible. You don’t need to give me one every day.”
“Khloe,” Damon said with labored calm as he rose. “Why don’t you come sit next to me, love?”
I frowned. Why was he behaving so strangely?
“Chrissie,” my dad said quietly. “Let Khloe go so she can sit down.”
Sit down? Why was Dad being that way? Somber as he never was. I cast a nervous glance at my father. His face was austere and his black eyes intense, and that coupled with how fiercely Mom hugged me caused my nerves to prickle.
Over my mom’s shoulder, my gaze did a fast float around the room, and it was then I saw Dr. Hern sitting discreetly apart from my family with Gideon.
My stomach fell to the floor.
Oh no.
Shattered, I stood there in a daze, thoughts racing in and out of my head. Damon’s bizarre treatment of Cody yesterday. His quietness over breakfast. Mom and Dad showing up without warning and bringing my care team along with them.
“We should sit down,” Mom said, stepping back from me and returning quickly to her place beside my father.
My gazed zoomed in on their linked hands. How fiercely they clutched each other, until my mom’s knuckles were almost white.
Standing on unsteady feet, the smile drained from my face. I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to sit down. I just wanted out of the room. My heart was racing, nothing new for me, except that it was fear sending blood through my veins, an instinctive response to the overwhelming feeling of darkness closing in on me.
The fear was rapidly joined by anger.
They all knew whatever Dr. Hern was here to tell me. It was written on every line of their faces, every one of them, and not even Damon had told me the truth.
How long had they known?
How bad was it?
My gaze shifted from Dr. Hern to Damon.
Bad, Khloe. It’s bad. Would this be it? The day someone told me there’d be no more tomorrows?
Damon surged to his feet and caught me before my knees buckled. He pulled my trembling body close and held me tight. “It’s going to be all right, baby.” His voice was anguished and raw. “Dr. Hern has a lot to get through. I promise, Khloe, it’s not as bad as it will sound. Hear him out completely. Can you do that for me?”
“What’s not as bad?” I pressed my face to his chest, my mind racing from every ugly possibility. “How could you do this, Damon? Not warn me what was going to happen today? You’ve known since yesterday, haven’t you? That’s why you blew up at Cody then behaved strangely this morning.”
He flinched from my harshly accusatory tone, but he didn’t deny it. “I understand how you feel, and you have every right to be upset. Gideon’s report hit me harder than anything I’ve ever faced in my life. It’s not always easy to know what the right thing is to do. The medical team suggested we wait to have this discussion until everyone necessary was here.”
“Wait?” I felt lost, betrayed, and afraid. How could Damon keep this from me for a day? Make love to me the night before knowing this? I was reeling.
His amber eyes bore into mine, unwavering. “I felt it best that your parents were here as we discussed your options. I didn’t want you facing this without them. You’ve been so happy…I wanted you to have one last night not having to think of all this. And I wanted your mum here for you as Dr. Hern explained things.”
“I had a right to be told first.”
He swung me up, cradlin
g me as he carried me to the sofa and sat with me on his lap. “You’ve carried this on your shoulders alone for too long, love. You also have a right for someone else to share your burdens. That’s all I’m trying to do—wrong though I can see in how I did it. But you deserve to have with you the people who love you when you need them the most. Not to be alone with me trying to manage all this. I know if they’d spoken to you first, you would have told Dr. Hern not to release your prognosis to your mum and dad, and you wouldn’t have permitted me to ask them to come here. I couldn’t do that. You need them here with you, Khloe. I need them here with us. And they need to be here.”
I didn’t doubt that from how he held me. He was so strong and solid. When his arms were around me, I felt as if nothing could ever harm me. I wanted to hang on to him and never let go, but it hadn’t occurred to me until then that Damon might need someone to lean on, too. That us going alone with whatever the medical team was here to tell me might be too much to ask of him. After being slapped in the face with what awaited me in the study, I’d hardly been someone he could lean on.
I brushed at my icy cheeks, untangled from Damon’s hold, and eased from his lap to sit on the sofa. I took in my parents in a fast glance, turned my head, and said, “Dr. Hern, we’ve gotta stop meeting this way.”
Chapter Nineteen
Khloe
The Past
IT WAS NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE to process. My prognosis followed by…that. I felt faint. No, worse: disembodied, and I wanted to cut Dr. Hern off before he went further, but I couldn’t make my mouth work.
I took another sip of my wine, unsure where it’d come from. Damon, probably. I turned my head enough to see him out of my peripheral vision. Twenty-four hours he’d known about this—all of it: my failing heart and Dr. Hern’s lab of horrors—and he’d been able to expertly withhold it from me.
My gaze lowered to fix on my glass. None of what Dr. Hern’s research team had been up to was new to the other people in the room. Certainly not to the medical team, which included Gideon, whom I’d always thought of as a close friend. I chanced a glance at my parents. Dad was as I expected, unreadable, but my mother had no such superpower to strip emotion from her face. No, she wasn’t shocked by the things Dr. Hern explained in gruesome detail. But then, of course, how could she be? They’d opened their checkbooks and let Dr. Hern loose on a Frankenstein mission.
They’ve known about this project for five years. My stomach somersaulted. How was it possible to know this and carry on each day naturally? I felt like I wanted to scream in revulsion, vomit, then run as far from here as I could.
I wished my mind would shut off. My mouth pressed into a hard line. I focused every ounce of my awareness on a blank spot in the room, willing myself not to hear his words with the same technique I used to block out the pain of treatments, needles, and disappointments.
Dr. Hern’s steady stream of words no longer held meaning. Thank God I was an expert at shutting down my consciousness. I couldn’t reconcile what was pouring out of Hern’s mouth with the parents I’d always loved…or even Damon.
“…we’ve determined Khloe-Phanes Two, as it’s an exact tissue match to you, is our most promising option for a long-term, sustained, full return to health, and the team agrees the surgery should take place as soon as possible,” Dr. Hern concluded. A slight smile rose on his face as his gaze turned into something less impersonal, and he asked, “Do you have any questions?”
“No,” I murmured, lost in my own hurricane of thoughts and dismay.
“Good.” Dr Hern sounded relieved and unfamiliarly upbeat. “The team has been training for a month to perform the transplant. We can move forward when you’re ready, Khloe.”
Move forward? They all thought it was decided, just like that? I lifted my chin as I met Dr. Hern’s gaze directly. “I want to see…it.”
It stuck in my throat. I didn’t know what to call it. It wasn’t me. It didn’t deserve to be called Khloe. The cloned heart was part of me and in a way no part of me. Something beyond comprehension and imagining. A gruesome reality I needed to fully see even as much as I didn’t want to.
Damon’s hand closed over mine. “It’s probably better that you don’t,” he advised carefully.
“Don’t tell me what’s better.” I jerked my hand from his and stood up. “I want to see it now. There will be no surgery unless you take me into the lab so I can see it. I want to completely understand what my parents”—feelings of betrayal slashed my insides—“were willing to have done on my behalf.”
“Khloe,” Mom began anxiously. “I’ve not seen it. Only Damon and your father have. Do you really think it wise—”
“Don’t even try to stop me, Mom,” I said over top of her words and turned around to lock my sights on her. Thus far, I’d refrained from looking at them. But, oh, not any longer, and for the first time in my life I silenced my mother with a single glance. “You’ve all been making quite a few monumental decisions on my behalf. Decisions you’ve failed to ask my opinion on or even inform me of. That stops today. Take me into the lab, Dr. Hern. Explain to me step by step what you’ve done with my father’s money, then I’ll let you know whether I can live with myself being part of it.”
“Khloe, calm down,” Damon urged anxiously.
I whirled on him. “Calm down? Are you as immune to what they’ve done as my parents clearly are? Did you not hear what they’ve accomplished, Damon? And worse, that they’ve put my name on this gruesome project?”
His amber eyes held mine evenly. “I understand why everything you’ve heard has been overwhelming for you—”
“Overwhelming?” I sputtered furiously. “Try horrifying, Damon. Let’s get away from the ugly reality that my heart is failing, meaning I’ll die soon. Let’s also ignore that if they can clone an organ, then they can clone a human and what that means. Add to the list of what doesn’t seem to matter to anyone else here that everyone here has treated me for the past nine years more like a lab rat than a human being who is able to think and make decisions. Toss on top of that as unimportant that you all want to put into my body something I’m completely opposed to and forever cast me as Patient One in this new Frankenstein horror chapter of history. Let’s not consider any of that right now, because they’re inconsequential to the grimmer ramifications this will lead to and what it will do to humanity.”
“You’re not thinking rationally, love.”
“I’m the only one in the room who is.” My anger broke, and I choked back a sob. “Out of everyone here, Damon, you disappoint me the most. I expected you to understand my feelings on this and maybe agree with me that this is a road we shouldn’t go down for a cure. I really thought we’d be on the same side in this.”
He closed his eyes and looked to be counting to ten. When he opened them again, he was intense and heated. “So did I. I expected us to be on the same side in this. That you would see that this is our miracle we’ve been waiting for. I thought you’d be as desperate as I am to reach for the stars. Did what Gideon and the rest had been doing in the lab shock me yesterday? Yes. Did I contemplate the moral questions and ramifications? Yes. Did I agonize about knowing of this before you did? Yes. But in the end, there was only one question for me, more important than all the rest: Was this what we had to do to save your life? Yes! What others do with the Phanes science in the future is not within our power, only what we do with it. And I am positive there’s never been a purer intent behind any endeavor ever in history. The Phanes Project has been your parents’ silently carried hope. It’s hope. It’s love. It’s strength. It’s all our tomorrows, Khloe. Your parents created a miracle for you.”
What was in Damon’s voice had the power to overrule my will and pull my gaze to my parents. Seeing my mom’s heartbroken, pain-filled gaze shattered me, but it was what was on my dad’s face that almost dropped me to the floor.
His expression was open in a way I’d never seen before. It was like everything that was in
him was on his face. His pain. His tenderness. His strength. His love. There, unfurled across his arresting features and in the brilliant shards of emotion in his eyes.
I wanted to fling myself into Dad’s arms, have him say this wasn’t real and promise me there was another way.
But there was no other way. We wouldn’t have come to this point if there were. And every part of it was very real whether I wanted it to be or not.
Sharp pain pierced my heart. I lowered my face so I could see nothing but the floor. “Damon, see to it that my parents are settled into a guest room. And, Gideon, take me to the lab now. Only you. I want you to explain, to show me everything…” My voice faded to near soundlessness. “And make me understand how my parents could agree to this.”
I SPENT FOUR HOURS in the lab with Gideon. By the time we were at the incubator, standing over my heart beating independently and attached to all kinds of curling tubes and electronic whatever, I was numb. I doubted I’d ever forget the picture in my head of Khloe-Phanes Two. That little piece of me they’d grown in a lab dish from cells my mother kept from my birth.
It was horrible and amazing rolled into one. I could see it pulsing with a strong beat I hadn’t had for nearly a decade. It was alive. It was me. Was it a miracle? Or was it something darker, something much, much worse?
My stomach turned. I excused myself and hurried into the hallway. For the first time ever, I couldn’t feel my own heart struggle to keep up with the rapid movements I forced my legs to perform to get back to the safety of my bedroom. It wasn’t possible for any sensation or thought to claim me. I couldn’t feel anything.
Inside my room, I had a vague awareness of Damon sitting in a chair, waiting for me. I don’t know how I knew he was there. My vision was unfocused, and my unresponsive senses picked up on nothing.
