Page 164 of The Story of You

“You don’t understand. I’ve fallen apart without you.”

“You’vefallen apart? What about what you did to me?”

“Silas, please. You don’t know what it’s like for me. I’ve never loved anyone like I love you. When I came home to find you gone, I nearly did kill myself. I picked up the pieces of myself and located you. You were easy to find. You know I tried to reach out, but when you wouldn’t even speak to me, I left you alone … and watched from a distance.”

His butterfly in a bottle.

I scrub my hand over my face. There’s a lot I want to yell at him for, but it’s all fruitless. He’s not sorry and he never will be.

“I gave up on getting over you,” I admit. He takes a step toward me. “I accepted that I have whatever disease you have that made me fall in love with you. It makes it worse thinking it wasn’t real.”

“It was real.” He’s close enough now I get a hit of his scent. It burns through me like the best scotch. It calms my racing heart. My face is wet with tears before I know that I’m crying. “There you are, butterfly.”

“No. Don’t.” I step back. “I love you, Aleksander, but it’s over. You should have stayed dead.”

I mean it, but it doesn’t shatter me any less.

He slides the hand that was reaching for me into this pocket. “This must be a terrible shock for you. You need time to digest it, is all.”

It’s on the tip of my tongue to say that if he loves me, he’ll let me go, but I know what comes next. Letting Oliver go. I’m a damn hypocrite.

“Didn’t I tell you I’d follow you to the end of the Earth? It’s time, Silas. Time to come home.”

I can’t think. My head is cloudy and slow. “Who is that?” I ask, grasping for something to hold onto that isn’t Aleksander.

“My insurance policy. Come,” he says to the young man. “You’re going to be angry, but I wanted to … Silas, I went crazy, I did something desperate. I want you to know how hard I tried to get over you the best way I could.”

The young man latches onto Aleksander and looks at me with large, sad blue eyes.

White-hot ice prickles my insides. I want to puke. I figure out why he’s so familiar. He looks like one of us.Exactlylike one of us.

A Randall. But not just any Randall.

“Hel-Hello,” he says.

“No. Please tell me you didn’t do what I think you did,” I say.

The boy is scared. He curls into Aleksander. “C-Can we go home, Aleksander?” he says. “Please?”

“We’re going. I promise. It’s going to be all right.” He kisses the boy’s blond Randall head. “Go wait in the car. I’ll be right there.”

“What have you done?” I demand once he’s gone.

“When your mother had Oliver, we had them take some of her eggs. The procedure for freezing eggs was new at the time, but it was worth the exorbitant fee. Cancer treatments aren’t good for reproductive cells, and she wanted more children.”

“So, he’s your new experiment? What will you do when this one fails you?”

“He won’t. He’s already proven himself over the others. This one will work out. He’s not you but if I can’t get you to see … I just want to live out the rest of my years with someone I could love. It’s not too much to ask. One human, just one. I’ll leave everyone else alone.”

“Others? How many others are there?”

“There were two others.”

“What did you do with them? Are you a murderer too?”

“Of course not. I would never murder your mother’s children. I gave them away like I did with Darius.”

He’s crazy. A crazy person. I’m in love with a madman.