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Todos los capítulos de ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE: Capítulo 71 - Capítulo 80

115 Capítulos

Chapter Seventy-One: Theodore's Second Choice

I called Judith from the hotel lobby.She answers on the second ring."Theodore Voss," I say. "Eighth signatory on the petition. Hadrian's estate lawyers told him the children's trust wasn't sufficient protection.""I heard twenty minutes ago," she says. "The estate lawyers filed a supplementary motion alongside the petition. They're arguing that the session findings, if they stand, create grounds for civil action against the Voss estate. The trust assets would be exposed.""Is that true?" I say."It's a creative argument," she says carefully. "Not without merit. A finding of misconduct against a deceased estate holder can in some circumstances affect asset distribution depending on how the estate is structured.""In some circumstances," I say."In the specific circumstance of Hadrian's estate," she says, "the structure is complicated enough that the argument has surface plausibility even if it would likely fail on close examination.""Theodore didn't get close examination," I say. "H

Chapter Seventy-Two: The Questions He Came Back With

I sleep.Actually sleep. The full, uninterrupted version that has been intermittent since October. Dominic texted at nine to ask if I needed anything and I texted back asleep already and he sent back one word: good.I wake at seven feeling like a person who has been given something back.I eat breakfast. I water the herbs. I read for an hour, not the prenatal book this time, just a novel I've been carrying in my bag for three months and finally opening properly. It is about ordinary people doing ordinary things and it is exactly what the morning needs.At nine-thirty I get ready for the second Cassius meeting.Same approach as yesterday. Same logic. The person, not the presentation.Elowen texts at ten to confirm the location. Same hotel. Same private dining room. She has decided that consistency of space is useful when the person you're managing is someone who reads environments carefully.She's right.I take the train instead of calling a car. The Blue Line downtown, standing with m

Chapter Seventy-Three: The Calls He Made

The petition collapses on Friday.Not dramatically. Not with an announcement or a press release or any of the formal machinery of a reversal. It collapses the way things collapse when the person holding them together decides to put them down. Quietly. Systematically. One call at a time.Rosamund tells me the sequence on Friday afternoon.Cassius called four families on Wednesday. Two withdrew that day. The other two said they needed until Thursday. On Thursday morning he called the remaining three. By Thursday afternoon all seven original signatories had formally withdrawn. The petition was filed null with the Conclave clerk at four-seventeen Thursday afternoon.Eight days ahead of the deadline.The motions stand.I am in the break room at St. Raphael's eating a sandwich and reading Rosamund's text when this information arrives and I sit with it for the full ten minutes remaining on my break without doing anything else.The motions stand.The Lunare standing motion. The human rights m

Chapter Seventy-Four: What Edinburgh Means

I didn't answer Administrator Pren that night.I sit with the call the way I sit with things that are large. Let it take up space without immediately deciding what to do with it. The instinct to act quickly has served me well in emergency rooms and less well in the rest of my life and I've been learning, over the last two months, to distinguish between the situations that require immediate action and the ones that require something slower.Edinburgh is the second kind.Dominic stays until ten. We don't talk about Edinburgh specifically. We talk around it, which is sometimes more useful. He tells me about the Conclave's international structure, which is more fragmented than the North American version. Regional bodies with their own governance. The Edinburgh Conclave covers the UK and parts of Scandinavia. They have standing but not unified authority.I listen. I file it.He goes home.I sit in my apartment with the November city outside and I think about seventeen Lunare candidates in

Chapter Seventy-Five: Seventeen Faces

I found the email on Sunday morning.Dominic has already gone. He left at seven with the quiet efficiency of a man who has early obligations and doesn't make a production of departures. I heard him in the kitchen, the specific sound of him being careful not to wake me, and I stayed still and let him think it was working.I've been awake since six.The email is in my inbox when I pick up my phone at seven-fifteen. Administrator Pren. Edinburgh. The subject line sitting there with the patience of something that knows it will be opened when the time is right.I make coffee first. Decaf, the herb pots watered, Sunday morning doing its ordinary thing outside the window. Then I sit at the kitchen table and I open it.Seventeen photographs.I scroll through them slowly.They are not glamorous photographs. They are the kind of images that appear in professional directories or on organizational websites or are pulled from social media accounts that were never intended for this purpose. Ordinar

Chapter Seventy-Six: Six Lunares in Chicago

Thalia arrives on a Tuesday.She texts from the airport at noon with the specific energy of someone who has been moving toward a destination for a long time and has finally arrived at it. I am at work. I text back a welcome and the address of the restaurant where we're meeting Thursday evening and tell her Rosamund will be in touch about the logistics.She sends back one word: “Ready.”The others arrive over Wednesday and Thursday.Rosamund sends me their names as they check in. Brief, factual texts, the way she communicates everything important.Margot. Dublin. Landed Wednesday afternoon.Soren and Adaeze. They know each other. Stockholm. Same flight.Ezra. Lagos originally, Edinburgh now. Landed Thursday morning.Five people I have never met.Five people who carry what I carry.Six, counting me.For the first time since Mira Seca dissolved thirty years ago, a group of Lunares in one city.I think about this on my Thursday shift. Between patients, during the specific moments of clari

Chapter Seventy-Seven: What He Did to the Room

Petra picks me up at ten. Just the right time. She is in the car before I get downstairs, which means she left her apartment earlier to arrive in Wicker Park by ten, which means she has been operating at elevated anticipation levels since last night when I texted her.She did not ask what it was and that is very unusual of Petra.She asked one question: "The good kind or the terrifying kind?"I texted back: "I don't know yet."She texted back: "Ten o'clock. I'll drive."She is wearing her nice coat, which tells me she dressed for an occasion without knowing what the occasion is, which is the most Petra thing she could possibly do."You look like you're going to something," I say as I get in."I might be," she says. "You don't know.""You wore the coat," I say."I like this coat," she says. "It's become my favorite one""You save it," I say. "For things."She pulls out into the street. Swerving with experience"Do you know what it is?""No," I say. "He said come see. He said bring you.

Chapter Seventy-Eight: The Month Before Moving

December arrives and the city changes.Not the temperature, which has been cold for weeks. The quality of things. The specific energy of a month that knows it contains an ending and a beginning and leans into both.I work four shifts the first week. Dominic has the apartment painted while I'm at the hospital on Tuesday and Wednesday, which I agreed to in advance because I don't want to be around paint fumes for twenty-three weeks and because Petra supervised it remotely via photographs sent every forty minutes, which is somehow simultaneously excessive and exactly right.The pale green is perfect.I see it Thursday morning when Dominic takes me to check the progress. The morning light hits it and it is the exact color of something new. Not spring specifically. More like the moment before spring. The moment when the ground is ready.I stood in the doorway of Lucia's room for a long time.The piano against the wall. The pale green. The east light."Yes," I say.Dominic stands behind me.

Chapter Seventy-Nine: Ten Weeks

Ten weeks sounds like a lot until it isn't.I learned this in December.The days have the specific quality of a countdown that you're aware of without being anxious about, the way the last weeks before something important always feel. Full and moving and slightly faster than you'd like.I work through the first two weeks of December. Diane has rearranged my patient load the way she said she would, more assessment, less physical demand, and she was right that it's better. I am good at assessment. I've always been good at assessment. The work has a different texture but the same satisfaction.I stop at thirty weeks.Not because I want to. Because Dr. Vega and Diane and Dominic and Petra form an inadvertent coalition on the same Tuesday afternoon, each from different angles, and I look at four people being right simultaneously and decide that the practical choice is to accept it.I tell Dominic that I accepted it, not that he was right.He accepts this distinction without comment.The ap

Chapter Eighty: The Stone and What It Means

I save the photograph to my phone.Both of them. The flowers and the stone. I put them in a folder I've been keeping since November, the one that started with the session record and has grown to include Rosamund's texts and Administrator Pren's email and the photograph of Lucia Castillo standing outside her home in Mira Seca.The folder is becoming a history.Not my history specifically. Something larger. The history of a community finding its way back to itself from thirty years of scattering.I show it to Rosamund the next morning.She is quiet for a long time after she reads the words on the stone.We are sitting in her kitchen, which has become one of the rooms I visit regularly now. Just because she is one of the people I want to be near, and being near people you want to be near is something I am learning to do without requiring a reason.She sets my phone down on the table."Who?" I say."I don't know," she says trying to make coffee. "I have my suspicions.""Tell me," I say.S

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