Cameron said kindly. “You’re not fine. Please tell me what’s wrong.”
To her own surprise, Tracy looked up and heard herself say, “My son died.”
She wasn’t sure if she’d ever said those words before out loud. She realized now she’d been holding them in, as if by not saying them she could make them less real. Of course, it hadn’t worked. Blurting them out to Cameron Crewe, an almost total stranger, was a profound relief.
“I’m so sorry.” Cameron squeezed her hand more tightly. “What was his name?”
“Nicholas. He was killed in a car accident.”
“When?”
“Six weeks ago.”
Cameron couldn’t hide his shock. “Six weeks ago? My God, Tracy, that’s horrible. This just happened?”
Tracy looked at him blankly. Had it just happened? It felt like a lifetime ago to her. Eons of loss had come and gone since the day of the accident.
I must stop calling it an accident. It was murder.
Althea, whoever she is, murdered my son.
Her face hardened.
“You shouldn’t be here, you know. Working,” Cameron said. “You must give yourself some time. Six weeks is nothing. It’s the blink of an eye. You can’t possibly have processed what happened yet, never mind come to terms with your grief.”
Tracy said simply, “If I didn’t work, I’d die.”
Cameron nodded. He understood this better than anybody. It was a mistake. But he understood it. The need to be distracted. The need to find a purpose, any purpose, beyond the pain.
“I lost a son too, you know,” he told Tracy. “Marcus. He was fourteen.”
“I know,” Tracy said numbly. “The same age as Nick. He had leukemia. Your foundation has made large donations towards cancer research and developing stem cell treatments.”
She’s reciting from my file, Cameron realized. Poor thing. It was as if she were in a trance. He’d been there himself, in those early, dark months after Marcus’s death.
“That’s right,” he said calmly. “Marcus was sick for a long time. That was hard, but it also meant we had time, his mother and I. To prepare. I’m so grateful for that now. I’m not sure I could have coped with losing him suddenly. Like you did with your boy.”
“How did you cope?” Tracy found herself asking. Cameron seemed so calm, so together. Not like her. Was there a trick to this, a path of some sort that she’d missed?
Cameron quickly disabused her of that notion.
“Very badly,” he replied. “Charlotte and I tried to hold it together afterwards. But we grieved so differently. She needed to talk. I needed to work.”
Like me.
“And I know it sounds stupid, but just looking at her face was a constant reminder of Marcus.” Cameron added. “I couldn’t handle it.”
Tracy thought about Jeff. How Nick had been his clone, alike in every way. How the thought of seeing Jeff again and talking to him about Nick had filled her with such indescribable panic, such dread, that she’d run out on both him and her old life in Colorado, slamming the door so hard behind her that its echo was no doubt reverberating through the mountains to this day.
“Greg Walton thinks Althea may have been involved in Nick’s death,” she told Cameron. It was bizarre the way the words kept tumbling out of her mouth, as if her body were vomiting out a sickness. “That’s why I’m here. Why I agreed to get involved. He thinks she may have sabotaged the car that my son was riding in that night. She may even have meddled with his drugs at the hospital later, when the doctors were trying to save his life.”
“Jesus Christ,” Cameron gasped. “Why?”
“To force my hand? So I would try to find her? Or just to hurt me. I don’t know, because I don’t know who she is. But I will know,” Tracy said darkly. “I’ll know everything in the end.”
Knowledge won’t make you happier, Cameron thought. It won’t bring him back. And it won’t bring you closure, because there’s no such thing.
“Being Nick’s mother made me a different person. A better person. But now that he’s gone, that side of me is gone too,” Tracy announced. “All the softness. All the caution, the holding back, the setting a good example. There’s no one to protect anymore.”