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And they couldn’t have known—no one could—that the dying man inside the Chevy had just fought a battle for the fate of our species.

A battle he had lost.





        Our ability to read out this sequence of our own genome has the makings of a philosophical paradox. Can an intelligent being comprehend the instructions to make itself?

    —John Sulston





It is January 11, and I’ve only seen the water today in ephemeral glimpses as a train of mist plows in from the sea. The wind is rattling the storm shutters and the rain sheets continuously down the windows. I just put another log in the woodstove.

I was planning to only be here a week, but I may stay longer. There’s an overlooked wildness about this place that speaks to me.

What I am.

What I’m becoming.

Mostly, I just sit by the kitchen window, watching the sea change. In my short time here, I’ve seen it at roiling gray and glittering stillness. Obscured as a storm slams into the continent (occurring today), and as a shiny, black lacquer under the moon.

More than anyplace I’ve been, there is the feeling here that the sea is a presence, and a mercurial one—moody, fierce, serene.

And constantly evolving.

I think you and Ava would like it here. When the weather is good, there’s a short trail down the bluff to the beach, and the town is only a mile away.

I hope you’re safe. I hope you’re finding your way toward happiness again. I hope that, if we’re ever reunited, you will understand why I had to let you believe I was gone. It’s because I know your heart, Beth. You would put your own safety and freedom at hazard to find me.

I miss you madly, and I would give anything

I stopped writing. I looked up from the kitchen table, through the window, out to sea. Crossing out the last sentence, I put the pen to paper again.

I’m not being honest, Beth. I’m writing things the old Logan would write, driven by some vestigial nostalgia for my past life. If I can’t be honest with you, even when it’s painful, what’s the point?

Interacting with people has become a challenge. Imagine knowing what someone is trying to say long before they inelegantly manage to say it. Imagine being intensely aware of every microexpression that belies their words. Imagine a chasm between you and everyone else. Imagine not feeling human anymore. For me, now, speaking with a bright adult feels like what it used to feel like to hold a conversation with a ten-year-old. I know that sounds shitty, but it’s the truth.

I can recall every moment of our shared existence. I don’t just see you as the snapshot of who you were in our last moment together—our kitchen in Arlington, fixing your second coffee of the day, dash of milk, half a Splenda, and I walk over to kiss you goodbye on my way out the door, and you stop what you’re doing and look me in the eyes and kiss me like you mean it, no automatic thing, neither of us with any inkling that we will not see each other again.

I see you as the Beth you were that day in prison, twenty-five years old in your first suit, trying to hide your nerves. I see the Beth in her hospital bed, exhausted and elated, holding our daughter for the first time. I see you on the morning you heard your father had died. And on a Wednesday evening in October six and a half years ago that was utterly unremarkable expect for the fact that it was the most fun we ever had together—two bottles of wine and laughter and great conversation and a few tears—everything that is right about us.

All those moments are all equally real for me. All those moments of you. It breaks my heart that I can’t live them again. And maybe even more to know that, even if I could, I wouldn’t feel now what I felt then.

In the last year, I’ve experienced a lifetime’s worth of change.

I am hardly recognizable as that man who said goodbye to you in our kitchen. I suspect you would think I’ve become aloof, withdrawn, and interior. Maybe even cold.

The rain has stopped. The clouds are breaking up. Sunlight hitting the sea stacks. One of those rock outcroppings, if I squint my eyes just right, resembles a ship carved out of rock.

Here is the truth, which, once upon a time, I promised to always give you: If I let myself, I could spiral into a very dark place. I could let our separation and my loneliness tear me apart. But I’m too strong for that now.

These are hard things to write.

I am afraid I will never see you again.

And I am equally afraid that I will, and that our connection will have changed too much.



* * *



—

I set the pen down, closed the notebook. It was filled with similar letters—some to Beth, some to Ava. Writing to them had become a form of self-discipline. I wrote letters I would never share in order to remember what it felt like to be a member of a family. To remember what it felt like to be human. To be driven, at least to some extent, by sentiment. My ability to feel was an atrophying muscle, which, if I completely stopped using, I would lose entirely.

It was early evening, and I was hungry.

I fired off messages to the cyber, private, and corporate investigators I’d enlisted to find Kara. Then I stood, stretched, and grabbed my rain jacket off the coat rack by the kitchen door.

I headed outside across a stretch of emerald grass to the edge of the bluff.

Waves thundered against the rocks, ninety feet below.