She Was at Risk

by P. D. Workman

  “That’s just because we used to be together. Not because we’re together now.”

  “Okay. I’m going to trust you on that one. I’d look like a real idiot if I hired you to find out if she was having an affair, when it was you all along.”

  “It’s not. If she’s with someone… it’s not me.”

  “I wondered because of some of the early symptoms of Huntington’s too. Because the babies’ father must have Huntington’s, and some of the early symptoms… depression, anxiety, erratic behavior…” He trailed off.

  Zachary cleared his throat and shook his head. “I don’t have Huntington’s Disease. I have PTSD, major depression, other stuff. I’ve always had it. Or at least, since I was a kid. It isn’t from Huntington’s.”

  Gordon nodded. He seemed relieved to have put this part of the conversation behind him. “We should discuss terms, then.”

  Gordon was a wealthy man, so Zachary had no problem charging him the high end of his usual rates, even though he would have been happy to surveil Bridget for nothing. Gordon agreed without trying to negotiate Zachary’s rate.

  So he was on the case.

  He already knew Bridget’s usual schedule and travel patterns. It would be easy for him to start surveillance.

  No need to put an electronic tag on her car or to have Gordon install one under the mud mats or some similar out-of-sight location. If Bridget found a tracking device, she would know where it had come from. Zachary had used them in the past, so he couldn’t afford to be caught doing it again.

  But it was unnecessary. He’d be able to predict where she was going and to see any deviations from her usual practices. It was easy when he already knew her so well.

  5

  Zachary wasn’t sure how to approach the usual dinnertime conversation with Kenzie. He decided right off the bat that he would not disclose who it was he was surveilling. She didn’t need to know that. Gordon would expect confidentiality. If Kenzie knew that Zachary was following Bridget again, she might just blow a gasket. Even if it was a paid job.

  When they sat down to eat and Kenzie asked him how his day had gone, he had prepared his answer and spoken in his usual voice, giving no sign it was anything other than a usual job. He’d done plenty of surveillance, after all. Couples who fooled around had been his bread and butter for a long time.

  “Picked up a new case today,” he told Kenzie casually. “Possible extramarital affair. It will involve some surveillance. But from their usual schedules, I don’t think there will be anything overnight. Just daytime.”

  Kenzie nodded. She didn’t give him a second look. “Sounds good. Nice of them to keep their dalliances to the daytime for you.”

  Zachary gave a little laugh. “You’d be surprised. The majority of affairs that I have investigated have been during the day. When one spouse is supposed to be at work or looking after the kids. There aren’t that many who are sneaking off to hotels at night. That would be too suspicious.”

  “If one of them travels a lot, though, they wouldn’t have to worry about that.”

  “Yeah. When one travels a lot, they are usually both having affairs.”

  Kenzie speared a tomato from her salad and looked at him. “Do you get a lot of cases where someone who is having an affair hires you to see if their spouse is having an affair?”

  Zachary nodded. “Frequently. People who are unfaithful tend to be more suspicious of their spouses.”

  “But isn’t it sort of hypocritical to investigate your spouse, when you’re the one messing around?”

  “Sure. But they do it anyway.”

  Kenzie chuckled and shook her head. “We’re a strange species.”

  “But I don’t think, in this case, that the husband is having an affair. Could be, but I don’t get that feeling from him.”

  “So what makes him think that his wife is having an affair?”

  “Well… it actually might be a case that interests you. They have just found out that one of their children has Huntington’s Disease. And neither parent has it.”

  Kenzie nodded eagerly. “And Huntington’s is autosomal dominant. It doesn’t skip generations.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Has he been tested?” Kenzie leaned forward. “It tends to come from the father more often than the mother, for some reason. And sometimes it doesn’t show up until late in life, so it can be missed if parents and grandparents died before showing any symptoms.”

  “He was tested. He doesn’t have it.”

  “So then it has to come from the wife or she is having an affair. Has she been tested?”

  “Doesn’t want to be. She says there is no Huntington’s in her family and, from what he knows of her family history, she’s right. He’s talked to her parents and they don’t know of any cases of Huntington’s Disease in the family.”

  “Well, I can see why he would be suspicious, then. I’ll have to look up the genetics of Huntington’s Disease, see if there can be sporadic cases, but I’ve never heard of any.”

  “Sporadic means that it just shows up without either parent having it?”

  “Yes. A chance mutation rather than an inherited trait. Sometimes the cells make mistakes during fertilization or division. Something goes wrong in the transcription. We all have mistakes in our genes. It’s not quite as clean as what you learn in high school genetics. All kinds of mistakes can happen during those processes. But there are redundancies so that, in most cases, one mistake doesn’t cause any problems with your health.”

  Zachary nodded. “He didn’t say anything about that. Just that one of the parents had to have Huntington’s.”

  “It’s a nasty disease.”

  “That’s what he said. But they can have a lot of years before they are affected, too, so they could still have a good life.”

  “Yeah. It’s usually a mid-life thing, but I know some cases don’t show up until late in life.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be the one making that decision,” Zachary said, thinking about what Bridget and Gordon were going through.

  Kenzie frowned. “What decision?”

  “Oh… terminating the pregnancy.”

  “This was a prenatal test?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s not usually done. I’m surprised.”

  “I guess it makes sense… if you can avoid having a child with a medical problem, but…”

  “All kinds of ethics involved in eugenics. When is it okay to make decisions based on an embryo’s or fetus’s genes? At least we are past the point now when it is considered okay to kill or sterilize someone because they are less ‘desirable,’”

  Zachary shuddered at the thought. “But there are still medical practices where it is okay to decide not to treat someone.”

  Kenzie gave an uncertain shrug. “End of life care, maybe. Do not resuscitate orders. But other than that, doctors are required to treat people. You can’t just decide not to help someone who needs it.”

  “But some people get prioritized. Triaged.”

  “In a mass disaster, sure. But again, that’s based on who has the best chance of survival. Not personal feelings.”

  “Never?”

  He could see the emotions chase across Kenzie’s face. She wanted to say that of course not, doctors never made triage or end of life decisions based on their feelings toward patients. But she had probably seen situations where that was not the case. She was reluctant to share her thoughts on the subject.

  “Not consciously, I don’t think,” she said slowly. “I’m sure that yes, people’s prejudices do enter into care decisions sometimes. But doctors go through a lot of training, and there are ethics boards and all kinds of guidelines for making informed decisions.”

  “I’ve heard that the mortality rates for women are a lot higher for things like heart attacks.”

  “Yes. Probably more a function of men being studied more than women, though. Not doctors deciding that they’ll just let the women die.” Her tone was
sarcastic. She knew she was exaggerating what Zachary had said, wanted to show him how ridiculous it was that a doctor would make that kind of decision.

  “And Blacks have higher death rates with almost any kind of illness or injury.”

  Kenzie looked for a counter to this statistic. She ended up just shrugging and shaking her head. Zachary didn’t believe that Blacks were somehow more medically fragile than whites. And he didn’t think that their physiology was any different, unlike the biological differences between men and women. So why were their death rates higher?

  “And look at the differences between the way someone with cancer is treated when they are fifty versus when they are eighty. Or the way that someone with autism or Down Syndrome is treated versus someone who is neurotypical. Some classes of people are considered more disposable than others. If you look at the guidelines for the people who decide how to prioritize people for transplants—”

  “Don’t talk to me about transplants,” Kenzie said icily.

  Zachary froze, his fork hovering, stopped between his plate and his mouth. He hadn’t ever heard that tone from Kenzie before. They’d had their arguments and differences, but he’d never heard that level of controlled fury in her voice before. He just stared at her, not sure how to handle her reaction. He had clearly stepped over some line. He had thought that they were just talking about statistics. They often talked about medical science, especially death, because it was relevant to both of their professions.

  “Uh…” Zachary shook his head. “I’m sorry…”

  Kenzie stood up. She picked up her plate. She’d only eaten half of her dinner, and Zachary watched in shock as she scraped the rest into the garbage and left the room without another word. Clearly, the discussion was closed. They were done.

  Zachary looked down at his plate, unsure what to do. He wasn’t hungry. He had only been forcing himself to eat because it was suppertime and he knew that he had to continue to do so to get his weight up to where his doctor would be happy with it. He enjoyed talking with Kenzie and it was one of the things that helped him to get through a meal and to ensure he didn’t forget all about eating. He didn’t want to eat anymore, but he also didn’t want Kenzie to think that he was refusing to eat because of the way she had reacted. He didn’t want to make it a power struggle. He wasn’t refusing to eat as a way to control her and shame her for what she had done; he just didn’t want to eat any more.

  He stayed at the table, listening for Kenzie. She went to her room, shut the door, and didn’t come back out. She didn’t bang around, slamming doors and drawers like Bridget would have done. Or call a friend to do something with her or go out on her own. She was still in the house, close by, but blocking Zachary out.

  He sat at the table for another twenty minutes, until he was sure that she wasn’t coming back out and wouldn’t know how long he had stayed at the table after her. He got up, scraped his own plate, and put it in the sink. Then he changed his mind, rinsed it and put it in the dishwasher, and did the same with hers. It wasn’t full enough yet to run the dishwasher, but he did it anyway, just to show that he was being a good partner and not expecting her to do everything for him. He was willing to help with the household. She probably wouldn’t care about this while she was so angry with him, but the more he could do to appease her wrath, the better.

  He reviewed the argument in his head, trying to find the point at which he had pushed it too far. She usually didn’t mind his challenging what she had to say, giving different scenarios and figuring out if there was the possibility that a death had been homicide rather than an accident, or something like that. But there had been times. He had pushed it too far before, but this seemed to be a new line that he hadn’t crossed before. Or the line itself had moved.

  He went back to his computer, checked his email for anything new, and then returned to his surveillance plan.

  He was going to follow Bridget. And not only was it okay, but he was actually being paid to do it.

  When Kenzie didn’t come out of her room for the rest of the evening, Zachary had to decide whether he would stay or should go back to his own apartment. If he were infringing on Kenzie’s space, then he should leave. He wasn’t sure if it were because he was in her private space too much, taking advantage of her hospitality. He didn’t think he was, because she had given him no signals until then that anything was bothering her. But he should pay attention in case it was.

  He couldn’t exactly ask her whether she wanted him to stay or not. That would aggravate her further. He should be able to figure it out. He should be able to make a reasonable decision based on what he already knew. They had been together long enough.

  Despite all of the criticisms he heard in his head, many of them in Bridget’s voice, he wasn’t sure how to make everything better. He couldn’t read Kenzie’s mind and know what he had done wrong or how he could fix it.

  Eventually, he decided to sleep on the couch. He wouldn’t go to her bedroom and incur her wrath for presuming he could sleep with her after a fight. He wouldn’t go home and abandon her and make her think that she didn’t matter to him or that the only reason he was there was to share her bed. Sleeping on the couch seemed like a reasonable compromise.

  The warm blankets that they had used during the evenings that it got chilly beneath Kenzie’s front window had been put away in the linen closet. He grabbed one and a spare pillow. Kenzie had a bedroom made up for guests, but she had never invited him to use it, so he didn’t want to presume. He put the pillow down on the couch, lay down, and pulled the blanket over him.

  He had slept on other couches plenty of times before. It wouldn’t be any harder for him than sleeping on the bed.

  Except that his thoughts were chasing around his head in an endless loop, asking what he had done wrong and why he wasn’t fixing it.

  He didn’t know.

  He would fix it if he could, but he didn’t know what he had done.

  6

  He had been tossing and turning for a while, trying to convince himself that he could sleep. It would be fine. He would sort things out with Kenzie in the morning when they had both had a chance to sleep.

  But he wasn’t having any luck in settling down the hamster wheel spinning in his head or the restless, skin-crawling feeling all over his body. He wanted to be with Kenzie, not fighting with her.

  He heard her door open and went rigid, listening to see if she were getting up to the bathroom or for a snack to supplement her light dinner. She padded down the hallway toward him. Zachary wasn’t sure whether he should pretend to be asleep so she didn’t have to talk to him, or to see if she wanted to talk it out.

  Which would she want?

  Kenzie paused at the mouth of the hallway, looking toward him. She took a few steps toward him. “Hey. Are you still awake?” she whispered.

  Zachary sat up. “Yeah.”

  She closed the distance between them and touched him on the shoulder. “Come on.”

  He hesitated at first. He’d been asking himself what to do, and now she had told him, but he didn’t want to screw things up any worse. He’d had fights with Bridget that had ebbed and restarted several times over the next few days without warning. He remembered his parents having loud arguments and physical fights, subsiding to quiet, and then restarting again later. He didn’t want to start talking with her and take the chance of saying the wrong thing.

  She grasped his upper arm and gave a little tug. “Come. You don’t need to sleep out here. Come cuddle.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Would I say to if I wasn’t sure?”

  Would he have asked if he’d known the answer?

  “Okay.” He followed her back to the bedroom and they got into bed, both moving slowly, unsure of the other’s raw feelings, not wanting to upset the fragile truce.

  Zachary settled with his arms around her and breathed in the scent of her hair. She was a strong woman. Passionate. She had a mind of her own and used it. They were bound to dis
agree on some things. And while he spoke from a place of ignorance, knowing only what he had heard and read other places, she was the trained medical professional. She knew how things really worked. She wasn’t just going from medical dramas on TV and the screaming twenty-point spam-bait headlines of online news.

  He should be more careful of what he said.

  “It’s okay,” Kenzie said. “I was just tired. I overreacted.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… to step over the line.”

  “Shh.” She kissed him and cuddled close, her face against his chest. “No more apologies. It’s fine. And tomorrow is a new day.”

  Zachary let out a long, relieved exhale.

  Tomorrow was a new day. And he would be more careful not to start any arguments.

  The next morning, they both moved around each other carefully and spoke hesitantly, not wanting to renew the discussion of the day before or to challenge each other over their reactions. Zachary felt that he had done the right thing in choosing to stay there but to sleep on the couch. He hadn’t deserted Kenzie after a fight, but had given her the space to decide for herself where she wanted him.

  They didn’t discuss his work, cheating spouses, or transplants. Zachary still wasn’t sure what she thought of terminating a pregnancy due to a prenatal Huntington’s Disease test. But it wasn’t the time to discuss it.

  “So, you start your surveillance today?” Kenzie asked.

  Zachary nodded. His heart started thumping faster as he thought about it. “Yeah. I don’t expect to find anything out the first day, but I’ll start today and see what happens.”

  “You remember you have an appointment with Dr. Boyle today?”

  They each kept their own schedules, but Zachary had recently given Kenzie access to his calendar, which she synced to her phone. He had marked any client appointments as private so that she could only see the block of time without seeing any labels or notes that might be confidential. He’d been good about keeping his therapy appointments with Dr. Boyle, so he wasn’t sure why she was reminding him. Maybe she was just worried that he was going to get caught up in his surveillance and forget that he had to take a break to go to his appointment.