I’m about to answerRegina’s motherbecause I want my face seared into his memory—the face of the mother of the woman he killed.
Before I can speak, Tessa says, “My mother.”
It catches us both off guard, me and this man, this murderer.
“I’m guessing you don’t know the kind of man your daughter married.” He snarls at me, exposing small, crowded teeth. “I’m guessing you don’t know how he took advantage of his patients, extorted money from them, then violated them.”
His words ricochet off the walls, the floors, the counters, the bassinet, any hard surface. He continues to shout that Gabe can’t get away with this, that he wants his son back. I brace myself forOpal’s cry, for Jasper calling to Tessa from upstairs, what either of those sounds might do to this unhinged man. The house remains quiet except for his booming voice.
When Tessa starts to speak, he shouts “I don’t want to hear your excuses” with so much venom that Tessa squeezes my hand tighter.
Outside, clusters of tourists hustle by, determined to mind their own business. Could this man actually harm us with so many witnesses around?
“Everyone said, ‘You have to use Dr. Irons. He’s the best. He can get anyone pregnant.’ The wait list was over a year. I tried to convince my wife there were other doctors, but it had to be Dr. Irons. She wouldn’t trust anyone else.” He scratches his head with the butt of the knife. “Ex-wife. I have your husband”—he waves the knife in Tessa’s direction—“to thank for that too. She doesn’t want to accept the truth. She keeps telling me to let it go. How can I let my boy go?”
“You can’t,” I say because it’s true. When your child dies, you want answers. At any cost.
There’s a glimmer. A moment of gratitude before he goes cold again. I shift my attention toward the bassinet. Opal remains silent. He hasn’t seen her. We have to keep it that way. I need him back here with me.
“How’d your child pass?”
“Leigh syndrome. I’d never heard of it either. Funny thing, though. My wife isn’t a carrier. Ex-wife. I had her DNA tested after Marcus ... it’s through the X chromosome, so only the mother can pass it to a son. If we had a daughter—” He laughs in disbelief. “If we had a daughter, maybe she’d be a carrier. She wouldn’t have developed Leigh’s. She’d still be alive.” He points the knife at Tessa again. She clutches my hand a little tighter. “And your husband would have gotten away with it.”
Tessa’s hand goes limp in mine. “You’re Maya’s husband.”
He emits that cruel little laugh again. “I forgot that you recommended your husband until I saw you at the clinic—”
Tessa wears an expression I can’t decipher, something dawning on her. “Itwasyou, when Aram—” Then she snaps to and grows insistent.“I didn’t know Maya went to Gabe. I didn’t refer her. I didn’t know about any of this.”
Any of this.I think I understand what’s going on, but it’s difficult to piece things together when he’s brandishing a knife in our direction. He had a son who died. The son had a disease that only affects boys, one that’s passed down through the mother? Somehow, the presence of the disease indicated that his son was not his wife’s, that the child inherited the disease from the woman whose egg Gabe had secretly used.
“I’m sorry about your son.” Tessa is alarmingly good at controlling her emotions. “I’ll go to the police with you. I’ll back you up. I know what Gabe did.”
What Gabe did to you too,I want to scream. If this man learns she’s a victim, too, maybe he’ll stop pointing the knife at the wrong person. I open my eyes wide, motion with my chin toward the list of papers on the coffee table, willing her to tell him, to let him have sympathy for her. But this man has no sympathy. Just grief. And desperation.
“You think I haven’t tried talking to the police?” He steps closer to us, the knife inching toward Tessa’s face. “I went to the police, wrote the attorney general, the AMA. Thing is, I don’t have evidence.” To my relief, he starts pacing again, the knife retreats. “Maya wanted Marcus cremated so we could spread his ashes at the beach. I liked that, letting him live on in his favorite place. I wasn’t thinking straight. I didn’t realize how unlikely it was that he would have this syndrome since it didn’t run in my wife’s family. I didn’t want to believe it. Now ... now, no one else believes me.”
“I believe you,” I say. He glares at me. I recoil, unsure why this was the wrong thing to say, if we’ve passed the point of reason.
As he continues to pace and talk, Tessa makes strange facial movements, flicking her nose toward the glass doors. Outside, three women stop mid-powerwalk, Dan Huntsman’s wife and two others I don’t recognize. Tessa mouths, “9-1-1.” The women stare at her with an array of emotions, ranging from conflict on the face of Dan’s wife to outright disdain on oneof her friend’s faces. Dan Huntsman’s wife says something to the other women, and they walk out of our view. Tessa slumps back, defeated.
“They weren’t very careful, your husband and his associates.” Tessa’s gaze darts in my direction.Associates.Regina. Aram. “I guess that’s what arrogance gets you. Or maybe they were gloating. You know what they were doing was legal? The stuff I could prove, anyway. Egg harvesting. Totally legal. I know because when the AMA and the attorney general were useless, I hired my own lawyer. After a hundred thousand dollars of legal fees, he tells me that without Marcus’s DNA, we can’t prove that your husband used someone else’s egg on my wife.”
He collapses into the armchair beside the couch, leans forward, allows the hand with the knife to dangle between his legs. Momentarily, his eyes drift downward, unfocused and distant. I glance at Tessa, motioning toward the knife. His grip is loosened around it. We can grab it, overtake him. Then I notice the brace around her midsection. She’s in no state to attack. Before I act, his attention returns to us, knuckles white around the knife’s handle.
“I called her friends who used him, which only pissed off Maya more. See, people don’t want to know the truth if it will destroy their world. Maya still doesn’t want to know. But then he gets away with it. And I can’t let that happen.” His voice is pleading now, desperate and depraved. He doesn’t want to be doing this. I believe that. He also won’t stop. “I tried talking to his associate, the girl with the tattoos.” I flinch, and Tessa’s hand squeezes mine. He’s talking about Regina. This man, who killed my daughter, is talking about Regina. “I didn’t mean—this isn’t how I wanted it to happen. If she’d just talked to me. If she was willing to help, then—”
“What did you do to her?” I recognize the voice as my own, but I don’t feel it emanate from me, all that vigor and anger behind it. He peers over at me, tormented. I am no longer capable of having sympathy for this man.
“I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
My mind is whirling now, and despite the stiffness in my knee, I start to lunge forward. Tessa holds my hand firmer, keeping me grounded on the couch. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, she shakes her chin no. My heart is pounding so forcefully I have to concentrate to hear the story I don’t want to know, the truth I’ve traveled thousands of miles to uncover.
“I thought if I brought her here, if I made her face him, what they did ... I didn’t mean—I didn’t want to hurt—it all just got out of control. And then—then I had no choice but to—”
His words drop mid-sentence as he notices Tessa motioning with her chin in the direction of the French doors, where her next-door neighbor, the one with contempt for me, plays with a pink flower on Tessa’s bougainvillea.
All the torment vanishes from his face, replaced with a rabid, seething anger.
