Every Single Secret(73)

I glanced at Heath. He was looking down at his clasped hands.

“Without these emotions, they are untethered by normal connections to humanity. This enables them to pursue their own ends without being restrained by inconvenient feelings. The threat of punishment means nothing to these people. The only thing that motivates them is reward. And they’ll do anything to gain it.”

“That isn’t Heath,” I said. “That isn’t him at all.”

Once again, silence.

Then, in the calmest, most level way imaginable, Heath replied, “It is me.”

I fixed him with a defiant stare. “No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s not. Fuck you. Fuck both of you.”

Heath stood and moved to me, and I slapped him, hard, once across the face. His head snapped away, then swiveled back like I hadn’t even struck him. When he looked at me, he seemed so sad. There was a bright-red spot where I’d hit him.

“Stop doing this,” I whispered. “Please.”

He spoke calmly. Quietly. “Daphne, I’ve learned over a long time how to operate on an intellectual level. I know I should have empathy, so I display a facsimile of it. I don’t feel it, but I make you think I do. I’d like to say I do it because of some altruistic seed deep within me, but that’s not true.” He shook his head. “I do it because of the reward I get.”

“No . . .”

“You.”

I slapped him again, then a third time, with all my strength. He took each one stoically, absorbing the force of my blows, then gently reached for my trembling hand.

“For example . . .” I followed his gaze down to our entwined fingers. “Right now I’m holding your hand not because some inner impulse deep within me is compelling me. I’m doing it because I know this is what a supportive boyfriend, a loving fiancé, is expected to do in a moment like this.”

I shook my head.

“I know it’s what you want,” he said. “And I want to give you what you want. Because then I get what I want. Which is you, by my side. If I do what I should according to the laws of society, I get us, together. Always us.”

My eyes swam with tears, and I pulled my hand out of his grasp. Dr. Cerny crossed the room to stand at one of the front windows. The rain was coming down hard now outside.

Heath spoke again. “I was born Sam O’Hearn. When I was four years old, the doctor took me from my mother. We’d been living in downtown Atlanta. A crack house, for all intents and purposes. My mother was an addict, a prostitute, and I don’t know what else. And I was a difficult child. I screamed for hours, all night sometimes. I used to bang doors, over and over, sometimes until their hinges broke. It was a wonder she could care for me, a wonder I didn’t end up in the system, but for a couple of years she was able to manage it.”

His eyes registered pain. Or they seemed to. But maybe this was just another trick of his—intellectualizing normal human emotions and passing them off as authentic.

He sighed and went on. “She came across an ad in the Personals section of the Atlanta paper. The people, a doctor and his assistant, wanted test subjects and would pay for the privilege. That was the magic word, apparently. She let them come to our apartment, where they questioned me. And her.”

I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

“Dr. Cerny and his assistant, Cecelia Beck, were looking for children who displayed early indicators of antisocial behavior. Frequent, uncontrollable tantrums. An imperviousness to punishment. They arranged for an MRI and got their confirmation, that I had less gray matter in the prefrontal cortex. Abnormality in my white matter. How’m I doing, Doc?”

Cerny puffed out a breath at the window. “Just fine.”

“The assumption was that I would continue down the path my brain had set for me. I would grow up to become your run-of-the-mill psychopath. You know—the guy a couple of doors down who you’d prefer not to hang out with. You don’t know why exactly . . . just that something isn’t quite right about him. He’s charming, but he doesn’t connect on a deep level. Maybe he’s a jerk to his kids, maybe he cheats on his wife and at golf every Saturday at the club. Mostly, though, he’s the guy who just does whatever the hell he can to get whatever it is that he wants. Probably more of us walking around than you would ever think.”

Heath flicked a look at Cerny, who still hadn’t turned around. “Dr. Cerny and Cecelia believed I deserved a chance, that I could learn to override my genetics, learn to operate in a different way. They might not have been able to cure me—save me from who I was on a DNA level—but they were convinced I could be conditioned to rise above it. They believed they could prevent me from going off the rails later in life—from getting into trouble, at a criminal level or otherwise.”

“And they did,” I said. “Look at you. We’re getting married. You have a good job, friends.”

The doctor finally spoke. “No one really knows what exactly flips that switch that transforms a basic psychopath from someone who merely cheats on his taxes to someone who commits more serious crimes. We believed, with careful conditioning, we could discover the mechanism in order to dismantle it. So we asked Heath’s mother to let him come live with us.”

My head swiveled back to face Heath. “She signed away her parental rights?”