She stared at him, tempted by the suggestion, heat shooting through her as she remembered where they’d been a few minutes ago. He’d pulled away from her when he realized that what they were building between them was more intense than what he’d had with his brother. Now he was ready to try again, and she was the one who was feeling cautious.
“I think it would be better to do it the old-fashioned way. I mean talking. You researched me. Did you find anything that was similar?”
He shrugged. “Okay, if you want to play twenty questions. We’re about the same age. But what else do we have in common?”
“Not our location. You grew up in the DC area, and I always lived down here.”
He nodded. “What we’re looking for could be anything. From chemicals in the air to the treatments we got on our teeth, to the medicines we took, to the food we ate.”
She made a low sound. “I suppose neither one of us was near a nuclear test site.”
“I guess not. And it was early for oil spills to contaminate Gulf seafood.”
“Nice of you to think of that, but that wouldn’t have applied to you, anyway. Anything strange about your diet? I mean, were your parents on any kind of health-food kick?”
“Actually, they were on a low-carb kick for a long time.”
But you had gone out for pizza,” she heard herself say, then regretted the reference to his brother’s murder.
His face clouded. “That was a special treat.”
“I’m sorry.”
He lifted one shoulder. “It will keep coming up.”
She focused on the original question. “Well, it’s definitely not from low carb. I ate a pretty normal American diet—with Cajun touches because we lived down here. So that’s not it.”
“What about mental illness in your family?”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“This has something to do with our brains. Maybe you can only do it if you’re schizophrenic,” he muttered.
“You really think that?”
“No. But something else, maybe.”
“If you dig around enough, you find out that everyone has a relative that was ‘off.’ You have an Uncle Charlie who was committed?” she asked.
“When he came back from Iraq and was never quite right again. What about you?”
“I guess my mother’s sister suffered from depression. They didn’t talk about it much.”
“Okay, what about physical illnesses? Anything unusual?”
“No, what about you?” she asked.
“I had all the vaccinations.”
“I did, too. But people have suspected vaccinations for various problems—like autism.”
“I suppose,” he allowed. “I wonder what our moms ate when they were pregnant with us.”
The question made her mind zing back to something she remembered, and she cleared her throat. “There is something else. I once heard my parents talking about how hard it was for my mom to get pregnant.”
He went very still. “And she had some kind of treatment?”
“I think she went to a fertility clinic.”
