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“Did you reach out to the half sister you’re in touch with. Cat?”
Henry shook his head. That was the other thing. His calls with her were getting weirder and weirder. Last time they talked, she hinted that she was getting closer tounderstanding who our father is. He pretended he had to go, promised to call back. But he never did. The truth was that she was a little scary. Intense. Sometimes angry, edgy.I guess it’s easy to walk away from this when you have a family.
“No,” he said. She was the natural person to ask about the tech entrepreneur. Something stopped him from calling her. “She’s... I don’t know. She’s pretty obsessed with this stuff. Maybe she’s unstable.”
This earned a squint from West. “Unstable how?”
He told the older man about how she called at all hours, sometimes rambling, sometimes morose, sometimes elated when she’d made a new connection.
“I don’t want to get her activated. She has some wild theories.”
“Such as?”
“She thinks there’s some kind of curse. Or, not really a curse but like something bad coded into our DNA.”
“Okay. Like what?” West looked down at the file, picked up the top article. Drew, who committed suicide. “Like depression?”
West handed him the paper. Drew didn’t bear much resemblance to Henry or Cat. He was slim, blond with dark eyes. Even though he was smiling in the school photo, he looked sad and ghostly.
“Yeah,” said Henry. “Like something that makes you vulnerable. Like you’re prone to depression, so you drink too much. Because you drink too much, you get into a fatal car accident.”
West shrugged. “There are lots of things we don’t understand about genetics. But I have to believe that our choices mean more than our biology.”
Henry needed to believe that, too. Especially now that he was a father.
“I can make some calls if you want,” West said finally. “Talk to the investigating officers, see what they have to say.”
Henry felt a weight on his shoulders shift. Maybe that’s what he wanted, to share this with someone. He didn’t have the resources or the time to connect the dots between his dead half siblings.
But he couldn’t quite let go of it either.
“That would be great,” he said. “You don’t think—”
“What?”
“That she’s right. That there’s some inherited darkness.”
West leaned back, looked out at the beach, took a swallow of his beer.
“I think we don’t control what we get from our parents, and we don’t always choose what happens to us. But look at you, Henry. You could have gone a different way—but here you are, successful, married, with a baby, a nice home.”
It was Piper who saved him. He knew that. She loved him and that made him want to be a better person, the kind she deserved. He said as much.
“You chose the light. We choose, Henry. That’s what I believe. Leave this with me. I’ll do some digging and you forget about it, okay? If I think there’s something bigger here, I’ll come back to you.”
Henry considered it, then lifted his nearly empty glass, clicked it to West’s bottle. “Deal.”
Somehow over the years they had become friends.
A gull called, and a coast guard helicopter passed low overhead making everything rumble.
“It’s funny you called. I was about to reach out to Gemma.”
“Oh?”
“There’s this group. People who are using modern DNA testing to find answers to long-cold cases. They are taking crime scene DNA samples and submitting them to companies like Origins, looking for connections that lead them to identifying the sample even if there’s nothing in criminal databases. They’re not-for-profit, volunteers and retired law enforcement folks trying to find answers to old cases. They’re interested in Alice’s murder.”
Henry took this in as the waitress brought their food on colorful plastic plates. A group at the bar was watching a game; they issued a collective moan at a missed play. The singer was onto “The Man Who Sold the World,” sounding more like Kurt Cobain than Bowie, gravelly and sad.
