The Remedy (The Program 0.5)(95)

“Quinn?” he shouts.

“I’m here, Dad,” I say calmly.

He spins, startled, and clutches his chest. “My God,” he says. “You scared me.” He comes into the room, squinting his eyes in the low light. He stops at the lamp and clicks it on. “Deacon called me and said—” He abruptly stops when he sees me in the light.

I study every tic of his facial expressions. Flashes of worry, fear, realization. He tries to quickly cover it with parental concern, but I’ve already seen behind the curtain. I tilt my head to let him know I’m not here for his bullshit. When he still doesn’t budge, I reach into my pocket and pull out a folded copy of my death certificate. I toss it onto the coffee table between us, and my dad picks it up and opens it.

His throat clicks as he swallows, and then he drops onto the couch, devastated as he stares at the paper in his hands.

“Who am I?” I ask him. “Because obviously that’s not me.”

“You’re Quinlan McKee,” he says, but there’s no force behind the words. He lowers the paper onto his lap and takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes with the heel of his palm. He slips the spectacles back on and looks at me. “You’re my daughter—”

“Don’t you dare!” I shout, kicking the table and startling him. “I read the file. Saw the video. I remember bits and pieces.” I grit my teeth, anger and hurt bubbling up. “You’re not my father, are you?”

He holds my eyes, refusing to answer. In his stubbornness I see a bit of myself. My personality that I’ve adapted because he’s been my father for the past eleven years. I wilt slightly, the enormity of his lie breaking my will to find out the truth. I still love him.

“Please,” I say, my voice a little weaker. “Please tell me.”

My dad looks down at the paper and clears the emotion from his throat. For the first time, I see how tortured he truly is. I don’t know how I haven’t seen it before, or maybe he’s brilliant at hiding it. But that death certificate is his truth tea.

“No,” he says quietly. “No, I’m not your father.”

I begin to shake, not my hands or feet. My insides tremble, my heart broken into a million pieces. There’s a quick flash of our lives, the times we’ve sat together laughing, moments when he held me while I cried. I don’t know when I lost the truth—how I became my assignment. But his love is all I’ve ever known. And it’s all been a lie. My whole life is a damn lie.

I feel I might throw up again, but I fight the sickness. I can’t walk away now and give him a chance to regroup. He’s too good. He’ll find a way to cover, make me believe his false truths.

“What happened to your real daughter?” I ask, the words painful to say. “The certificate only lists the cause of death as an accident.”

My father sits quietly for a long moment, and then he leans his head back against the cushion, staring up at the ceiling. “Quinlan died when she was six years old,” he says.

I flinch at the name not being attached to me. I’m betrayed by the sound of it. But I don’t interrupt. I need to know what happened. How I got here. And what this all means.

“Quinn and her mother were on their way to school,” he continues, “when a tractor trailer that had been clearing snowbanks swung out a little too far. My wife died on impact, but Quinn held on. She survived long enough to give me hope that she’d recover. Long enough for me to accept my wife’s death and pin all of my dreams on her broken little body.

“A month,” he says. “My little girl fought for a whole month. She never woke up, but I was there for every minute. I would sing to her and brush her hair and cut her nails. I would bend her legs so they didn’t grow too weak. I wanted her to be able to play again when she woke up. It didn’t matter that the doctors told me her spinal cord had been severed. I didn’t believe them. They also told me she wouldn’t survive the night, and there she was, four weeks later.”

My father looks at me, and I’m completely heartsick.

“I loved her more than I loved anything else in this world,” he says, “including myself. I would have given anything, anything possible, to keep her with me. She was my baby. She was my everything.

“It was late on a Sunday night when she died. Soundlessly, like she just drifted away on the wind. I heard the monitor, and I grabbed her and begged her to stay. I yelled and screamed and told her not to leave her daddy. But she couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t stop it.

“When I finally left the room, Marie was sitting in the hallway in a chair they’d brought for her. She’d been my closest friend for years, longer than I even knew my wife. I told her Quinn was gone, and rather than crying like I knew she wanted to, she jumped up and grabbed me by the shoulders, looking me dead in the eyes.

“ ‘You’ll get through this, Tom,’ she said sternly. ‘This will not break you.’ But her fierce expression couldn’t last. Her lips began to quiver, and then we were a huddle of grief in the children’s hospital wing.”

I’m only human. Even through my anger, his grief is palpable. I have to fight back my sympathy, refusing to be weak in front him. “Where do I come into this story?” I ask.

“Marie,” he says. “She went to Arthur Pritchard and asked what could be done. I don’t know the details,” he tells me. “I didn’t want to know, didn’t want to be pulled from the illusion. Marie showed up with you seventy-two hours later, the third girl she tried. She never told me your real name.”