“What have you done?” I whisper, realizing too late how asinine it is to piss off the man who has me strapped to a gurney.
Holden goes quiet. I fight the urge to look at him. Instead, I stare at the ceiling. Cement with exposed piping running through it. I wish I were tiny, small enough to slip into the pipe and follow it out of here.
“Paige and your mom told you about Cecily? Her illness?”
I lift my chin, refusing him the dignity of a response. He continues like I’ve given one.
“She was four years old, Jo. Four,” he says. “And the doctors—my colleagues, my friends—gave her less than six months. She’d be dead before her fifth birthday.” He takes an unsteady breath. “In the span of one hour in her doctor’s office, we watched all the dreams we had for her die.”
As he talks, I test my restraints again. Ankles are cinched tight enough to hurt, but the wrists—
“Her mom couldn’t handle it. Three days after the diagnosis, she’d packed her things and taken off. And two days after that, I lost funding on my study, the one keeping Cece alive. So we moved home. Took the weight off my parents’ shoulders with the clinic and put extra eyes on Cece. But the basic treatment wasn’t working.”
Paige mentioned Holden’s return to his hometown, described it like a reluctant adventurer returning.
“Just because my trial lost backing didn’t mean the concept was a failure. The drug, Dyebucetin, it saves the dying from death, but we needed more time!” He clenches his fists. “It takes a lot to convince a sick body it’s well. Transplants from people my age would do nothing. But a child? Cells that are still growing, learning?” He waves a hand. “It was the most reasonable assumption. I had no choice. Cece was getting worse. I had the power to save her.”
“I don’t care about your reasons,” I say.
“She was innocent,” he says, a sudden rage lighting him up, face red and flushed. “And she was dying.” His jaw sets. “The entire purpose of my study was to figure out how to cure the incurable. Save the unsavable.”
I can’t stop the tears now. They come so fast, my vision blurs, and my throat closes.
“Isn’t there someone you’d do anything to save?” Holden asks.His eyes are frantic, and for a moment, he is as monstrous as all the stories.
I shake my head, hard, so hard I swear I can feel my brain smacking into the sides of my skull.
“Not even your friend?”
I have wished to swap places with Harper more times than I care to admit, but I can’t fathom trading someone else for her. A stranger. A kid, a teenager, like her. Someone else with their whole life unfurling ahead of them.
And even if I could, she’d never forgive me. I would never forgive me.
“We’re kids,” I say.
“And so was she.” He moves to the cabinets, hands shifting mindlessly over the random assortment of medical equipment. “It was never meant to be this way. I’d thought one round of treatment, one full circulation of healthy cells, would be enough. And for two years, it was. And then it wasn’t.”
Bile burns in the back of my throat. “So you did it again.”
All at once, the emotion clears from his face. “You can judge me, but all of those kids…” His lips curl in disdain. “This town barely blinked when they were gone. Their names never made it past the local news. No one fought for them. Not the way I fought for my child.”
Violence isn’t a language I’ve had much interest in speaking, but it’s what Holden deserves. He’s wrong, deluded, shrouding himself in mistruths to protect himself from what he’s done. The posters on the corkboard are proof enough that someone cared. That lots of people cared.
“Ingrid Halstead’s parents did,” I say. A dark grin tugs on my lips. “I bet that made it harder.”
He waves a hand. “Ingrid was a mistake,” he says.
Vitriolic anger burns through my limbs, making me tremble against my binds. “And Jasper?”
“Opportunity,” he says.
It would be too easy to be caught on some camera transporting a kid from another town or out of state. He’s trading risks.
“He’s seven. He trusted you. And you—”
“Did what I had to do.”
“All those kids,” I say. “All for one? How the hell is that a fair trade?”
