Chapter twelve

Seth found another donor.

He told me on a Sunday morning, standing in my kitchen with his laptop open and his voice doing the careful thing it did when he was trying to manage my expectations without letting me see that he was doing it. Forty-one percent compatibility, he said, a man in his fifties registered through a European network, willing to be contacted.

I looked at him for a long moment.

"Seth," I said. "41 percent."

"I know. But Patricia said—"

"Patricia said the threshold for a viable transplant is sixty-five, and that's the floor, not the target." I closed his laptop gently, not unkindly. "I've already looked. I've looked everywhere you're looking and further. There isn't one."

He sat down at the table and rubbed his face with both hands, and I recognized the gesture because he had been doing it since we were teenagers whenever he couldn't argue his way out of something he didn't want to accept.

"You've already decided," he said.

"Yes."

"Brynn—"

"He's getting quieter," I said. "Every week, Seth, he gets a little quieter. Julie sits next to him now instead of running circles around him, and she's four years old and she doesn't understand what she's sensing but she's sensing it, and I am not going to sit here and wait for a registry match that might not come in time when there is one option I haven't tried."

Seth looked at the table. I waited.

"He wanted them gone," he said finally. "He made that very clear."

"He doesn't know they exist. What he wanted five years ago was for me to make a problem go away, and I did, just not in the way he expected." I sat down across from him. "I'm not going back to explain myself or to apologize or to ask for anything. I'm going back to get what my son needs, and then I'm coming home."

"And if he recognizes you?"

This was the part I had been thinking about for two weeks, turning it over in the mornings before the twins woke up, walking through it the way I walked through a character before a shoot, finding the edges of it, testing the weight.

"He won't," I said. "Not at first. And by the time he does, it won't matter."

Seth looked up. "What does that mean?"

"It means I'm going back, but not as Brynn Haverton. Brynn Haverton doesn't exist anymore, and Darius Whitmore doesn't know Sloane Vale." I folded my hands on the table, steady and deliberate. "I've been offered a film deal based in London for six months. I'm going to accept it. The press will cover the announcement, which gives me a legitimate reason to be in the country, a public profile, and a schedule that puts me in the right rooms."

"And Darius?"

"His world and the world I'll be moving in overlap. They always did. It won't take long before we're at the same event, and when we are—" I paused. "I'm going to make him uncertain."

Seth's eyes narrowed. "Uncertain how?"

"Selective amnesia," I said. "Perfectly calibrated. Warm enough that he can't dismiss me, vague enough that he can't place me, just familiar enough to make him question himself." I kept my voice level. "I've spent five years learning how to make people feel exactly what I need them to feel on camera. This is the same skill. Different stage."

He was quiet for a long moment, and I could see him working through it, looking for the flaws, the places it could collapse.

"What if Cassia recognizes you?"

"Cassia knew a woman who was afraid of her. That woman is gone."

"What if someone talks? Someone from before?"

"I've been invisible for five years. The people from before either don't move in these circles or have no reason to connect Sloane Vale to a woman they barely registered when she was standing in front of them."

Another silence. Seth looked at me with the expression he reserved for moments when he thought I was right and wished I wasn't.

"I don't love this plan," he said.

"I know."

"It has about fifteen ways it could go wrong."

"I know that too."

"And you're doing it anyway."

"Yes," I said. "Because Jake needs me to."

Seth nodded once, slowly, and that was the end of the argument because with Seth it had always ended there, at the point where sentiment gave way to what actually needed to happen.

He reached across the table and topped up my tea without asking, which was his version of agreement.

"There's something I need to tell you," he said then, and his voice shifted into something I didn't immediately recognize, something careful and a little unsteady, and he looked at his own hands rather than at me. "Before you go. It's personal, and I've been trying to find the right time for a while now—"

My phone rang.

Patricia's name on the screen, which meant it couldn't wait, which meant I had to answer it.

I looked at Seth and he shook his head quickly, already composing himself back into something normal. "Go," he said. "It's fine. It'll keep."

I held his gaze for one more second, because whatever it was had been sitting with him for a while and I could see the weight of it, and then I answered the call and the moment closed.

We didn't come back to it that evening. By the time I was off the phone, the twins were awake and the day had moved on and Seth had put whatever it was back behind his eyes where he kept things he wasn't ready to say.

I noticed. I filed it away. I would come back to it.

That night, after Seth had gone and the apartment was quiet, I sat on the edge of Jake's bed.

He was asleep, his breathing slow and slightly too effortful for a child his age, one hand curled loosely beside his face. The nightlight threw a soft amber glow across his cheek, and he looked, in the way sleeping children always do, entirely peaceful, entirely unguarded, entirely himself.

I watched him for a long time.

Then I made him the only kind of promise I had ever been able to keep, the quiet kind, the kind made without words, the kind that lives in the chest rather than the throat.

I am going to fix this, I told him silently, and I need you to hold on while I do, and I know you're tired, and I know you don't understand all of it, but I need you to trust me one more time the way you always have, because I have never once let you down and I do not intend to start even if it means seeing the man who broke me 5 years ago.