She Was at Risk Read online

  “What about Bridget?”

  Gordon traced a circle on the polished tabletop. He had a quick sip from his glass and poked around at the seafood on his platter. But he wasn’t interested in the food. They weren’t there to eat lunch. He was a man with something far more pressing on his hands than his next meal.

  “You know that she’s pregnant.”

  Zachary nodded.

  “Of course you do,” Gordon said quickly. “Of course. I told you that when she was in the hospital. She’s been quite sick with this pregnancy. It hasn’t been easy on her.”

  “Right.” Zachary had, in fact, thought that her cancer had returned. He was relieved that wasn’t the case, but he wished he didn’t have to think about Bridget pregnant either. He had wanted children when they had been married. She had not. She’d had a pregnancy scare before her cancer was diagnosed, and she had no interest in carrying it to term. But she had not been pregnant, so that disaster had been averted.

  “What I don’t think I told you is that she is expecting twins,” Gordon said slowly, enunciating his words as carefully as if he were being graded on his diction. “Two girls.”

  Zachary nodded again. He swallowed. His mouth and throat were very dry. He irrigated them with a good amount of Coke. “I guessed as much,” he agreed.

  Gordon looked at him for a moment, then nodded. He didn’t ask how Zachary had guessed. That was not the point.

  “In the beginning, Bridget agreed to try to get pregnant.” Gordon couldn’t have any idea the kind of pain that this disclosure caused Zachary. He had failed on so many levels with Bridget. “She was a little reluctant at first, but she agreed to give it a try, see how things worked out. Neither of us knew whether she would even be able to get pregnant and be able to carry the baby to term.”

  The doctors hadn’t expected her to have viable eggs after the cancer treatment. Instead, she had banked them before she started treatment. She had been very sick, and it had taken a lot of coaxing on the part of the doctors. They didn’t like leaving a woman with no options. She might change her mind in the future. She might decide, after the crisis was past, that she did want to expand her family or at least to have those choices open to her.

  And apparently, she had done just that. They had fertilized a couple of frozen eggs and she had become pregnant with twins.

  Gordon fiddled some more, not able to come to the point yet.

  “The further along she has gone with the pregnancy, the more difficult things have become. She has had a lot of second thoughts.”

  But what was she going to do? Terminate the pregnancy? That was what she had threatened Zachary with after she had a positive pregnancy test. She didn’t want her body ruined by pregnancy. Didn’t want to be burdened by children who depended on her. She didn’t think that Zachary would be able to man up and be a good father to them. He could barely take care of himself; how was he going to help with children?

  “Has she decided… that she doesn’t want to continue?” he prompted.

  “She is getting older and we don’t know how many chances she will have to get pregnant. How hard it will be to terminate and try again.”

  “Try again? If she wants to terminate, why would she try again?”

  “It changes from day to day,” Gordon sighed. “Maybe she’s not ready. She could try again in a year or two when she feels more ready, though that will be pushing against her biological clock. Or sometimes she decides that twins will be too much and she should only carry one to term. They can do selective reduction… And other days, she is convinced that there is something wrong with the babies.”

  It wasn’t that surprising that Bridget would be worried about her pregnancy. Many women had anxiety over such a significant change in their lives. It was something so utterly different from anything they had done before. For Bridget, it would mean a big change in the way she lived her life. Being a mother, tied down to two children, instead of being able to go wherever she wanted whenever she wanted to. Things were different for parents, even if she did get a nanny to help.

  “What does she think is wrong?”

  “Well, up until now, it has just been ‘something’—‘What if there is something wrong with the babies?’ ‘Something doesn’t feel right.’ ‘I think something is wrong.’—But I’m not willing to operate on ‘somethings.’ I need answers. Concrete evidence.”

  And he had found something. But what? Why did Gordon need a private investigator?

  “And… you found something?” Zachary ventured.

  Gordon tapped his computer. He took a couple more bites of his grill.

  “She decided to have prenatal DNA testing done. Just to make sure that everything was okay. It’s not just Down Syndrome anymore. They are very sophisticated now. They can do all sorts of testing for genetic problems and predict a lot of developmental issues.”

  Zachary nodded.

  “I went along with it,” Gordon said. “I thought this would help her to move on. She would know that everything was okay, so she would feel better about continuing the pregnancy. I thought it was a good solution. Rule out all of those things that she was afraid of.”

  “But, something came up on the test.” Zachary still didn’t have a clue why Gordon would want him involved. He couldn’t fix genetic issues with his magnifying glass.

  Gordon sighed. “Both babies are at high risk for developing Huntington’s Disease.”

  3

  Zachary had heard of it before, but knew very little about what Huntington’s Disease was. He chewed the bite of sandwich in his mouth slowly.

  “What exactly is Huntington’s?”

  “It’s a neurological problem,” Gordon said in a flat voice. “Like having Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s all at the same time. Dementia, tremors and movements and, eventually, total loss of control and inability to even swallow.” He shook his head grimly. “Not a pleasant thought, both of our little girls ending up with this horrible disease.”

  “No. That sounds horrible. So… Bridget was right. There is something wrong with them.”

  “But the thing is, these girls could live normal lives until they are forty or fifty—even sixty or seventy in some cases. A long, fulfilling life before it eventually strikes. We all have a limited time here on earth. None of us knows how long we will be in this mortal sphere. You or I could drop dead tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, that’s true.”

  “So really, we don’t know anything. We have no idea when they are going to develop Huntington’s. Just that someday, sometime along the line, they will.”

  “So you want to continue with the pregnancy, but she wants to terminate,” Zachary summed up. “But she doesn’t need your permission to terminate. She can go out and do it at any time.”

  “Yes. She’s agreed to hold off a week or two while I look at some of the possibilities. A lot of people are saying that by the time they reach twenty, we could have a cure. Almost guaranteed, in fact. The research looks very good. They could be gene editing by that time, and be able to prevent them from ever getting Huntington’s Disease.”

  “I don’t have much knowledge about medical research.” Zachary shifted uncomfortably. “I could talk to Kenzie and see what she knows. Or you could get a genetic counselor who could help you to work through this stuff. A professional.”

  “I’m willing to believe that we could have a cure in the next few years,” Gordon said, making a movement with his hand to brush the comment away. “Especially where we are going with things like stem cells and gene therapy. We’ve come a very long way in the science, and it won’t be long before they can treat this.”

  Zachary leaned back against his seat. Then what did Gordon want?

  Gordon pushed his plate away again. “The genetics of Huntington’s Disease are such that a child can only get Huntington’s if one of her parents have it.”

  Zachary considered this. His knowledge of genetics was pretty thin, but he remembered some from high school
biology. “But it could be that the parent is just a carrier, right?” he suggested. “Because everybody has two copies of each gene.”

  “In the case of Huntington’s Disease, you can’t just be a carrier. You have to have it to give it to a child. Maybe you haven’t started having symptoms yet, but it’s there, and typically it starts to develop between the ages of forty and fifty.”

  Which meant that Gordon could develop it at any time.

  Things suddenly became more clear. Gordon himself was going to get Huntington’s Disease sometime soon. Or perhaps sometime in the next couple of decades. But he would get it, and he wanted Zachary to track someone down for him. An absent parent. A sibling. An old sweetheart. Maybe a child that he’d never been involved with.

  Zachary pulled out his notebook and laid it on the table. “Okay, so who are you looking for?”

  “Who am I looking for?” Gordon repeated. “Well, I don’t know that, do I?”

  Zachary stared at him, frowning. “What do you mean?”

  “I want to know who the father of the babies is.”

  It was the second shock of the meeting. Zachary stared at him. Who the father of the twins was? Did he think that Bridget had ended up having an affair with Zachary? That the babies might be Zachary’s? Or did he have someone else in mind?

  He swallowed and shook his head. “I’m a little lost. Who the father is? It’s not you?”

  “I just had myself tested for the Huntington’s Disease gene. I don’t have it.”

  “Oh.”

  “I didn’t think that I did. It would have to be in my family in the recent past, and I don’t have any relatives who have had dementia or Parkinson’s or anything else that Huntington’s might have been mistaken for.”

  “Does it have to come from the father?”

  “No. It could come from Bridget. But we have the same problem there. There’s no hint of Huntington’s Disease in her family. No sign at all.”

  Zachary worked through the combinations and options, his brain whirling away.

  “So if it didn’t come from you or Bridget, then it came from somewhere else. Obviously, Bridget is the mother, since she’s the one who is pregnant.”

  Gordon raised his finger, shaking his head. “Remember, she probably didn’t get pregnant naturally. It was frozen eggs. And that means it could have been someone else’s eggs.”

  “True. Right.”

  “The clinic might have mixed something up. A vial mislabeled or misfiled. It might not have been her eggs or my sperm. It might be someone else’s fertilized embryos.”

  Zachary nodded. “But they must be able to test for that. If they’re doing a DNA test for Huntington’s, then they must be able to test for parentage at the same time.”

  Gordon was nodding. “Except that Bridget is against it and the doctors seem to have some sort of ethical dilemma. Or maybe it’s legal; they don’t want to get sued. Bridget says it shouldn’t matter where they got the Huntington’s gene from. We should be making a decision based on the risk factors that we know, not on who the biological parents are.”

  Alarm bells were going off in Zachary’s head. Bridget said it didn’t matter who the parents were? Bridget was the one who had said that she wondered if there was something wrong with the babies and had wanted to terminate before they had even proven it.

  “Do you think she had an affair?”

  Gordon cleared his throat. He poked at the food still on his plate but didn’t eat anything else. He sighed. “What else am I to think? Her reactions and explanations up until now have been… improbable. She had IVF, so the babies should be the implanted embryos. But the other possibility is… the embryos didn’t take, but she became pregnant naturally. By… me or someone else.”

  “She couldn’t get pregnant naturally, could she? After the cancer treatment?”

  “I’ve dug into that a little. She was told she probably wouldn’t be able to. That’s why she froze her eggs in the first place.”

  Zachary nodded. He remembered that part very clearly. How much the doctor had to argue to convince her to at least prepare for the possibility she might change her mind in the future. How she had just glared at the doctor and at Zachary and said that there was no way. But in the end, she had agreed.

  “But I guess it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that she would become sterile. There is still a slim chance that she would have viable eggs left in the other ovary after the treatments. Slim, but not impossible.”

  “Okay. So… you want me to investigate whether she had an affair?”

  “Or whether she still is having one,” Gordon said, his words painfully slow and precise. “I have to wonder… and maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it makes no difference to anything. But I’m a man who likes to have all of the facts before he makes a decision.”

  Zachary nodded.

  He knew that it was not a good idea.

  He should have told Gordon right from the start that he couldn’t meet. That he couldn’t have anything to do with Gordon or Bridget. And now, he needed to say that he couldn’t possibly investigate Bridget. It was a conflict of interest. Or something like that. It wasn’t a good idea for him to be following her around, seeing where she went, who she talked to, who she might be meeting on the sly.

  His heart raced just thinking about it.

  And not the pounding heart he often felt from anxiety and the inherent risks of doing surveillance and possibly being caught.

  This racing heart was from excitement and anticipation. His brain was being flooded with all of those feel-good neurotransmitters. He was going to be able to see her again. To follow her. To watch her covertly. And it was okay, because he wasn’t doing it for himself. He wasn’t doing it for his own kicks, because his OCD brain told him that he needed to follow her and know where she was at all times.

  It would be for Gordon.

  And for the babies.

  4

  Zachary told himself more than once that he was not taking the job for himself and that he could have refused if he’d wanted to. He would show Gordon, if no one else, that he was able to deal with his feelings for Bridget calmly and rationally. He could separate his emotions from the investigation and treat it just like any other surveillance job. He would be professional in every way.

  That’s what he told himself while he was still at the Ostrich Club, and in his car driving home, and throughout the afternoon as he started to put together his plan for the surveillance. It was distracting. He knew from the tightness and heaviness in his gut that he wasn’t really fooling himself. He probably hadn’t fooled Gordon either. Gordon had a way of seeing right through him. But Zachary’s obsession for Bridget was to Gordon’s advantage. That was undoubtedly why he had approached Zachary in the first place. He wanted to get the best surveillance possible on his wandering lover? What better choice than to hire the man who was obsessed with her?

  Of course, there had been one more bump to get over in his conversation with Gordon.

  “This is where thing get tricky,” Gordon said, fidgeting with his fork. It wasn’t like him to be nervous. Or at any rate, not to show it.

  Zachary raised his brows and waited for Gordon to work out what he wanted to say. If it was difficult, Zachary wouldn’t help matters by being impatient or pestering him about it.

  “I suppose being direct is the only viable option.” Gordon cleared his throat. “You haven’t seen Bridget recently, have you?”

  Zachary thought back. “The last time I saw her was at the gas station,” he said. “We were both filling up at the same time. That was before I saw you at the hospital.”

  “I don’t mean running into her around town. That’s bound to happen from time to time, even if she thinks she can tell you to stay away from her favorite haunts. What I mean is… the two of you have not had any time with just the two of you…”

  Zachary shook his head. “No. Why would we—” It suddenly hit him what Gordon was asking, and he let out a laugh of disbelief. �
�Am I having an affair with Bridget? Is that what you’re asking?”

  Gordon gave an uncomfortable nod. “You and she do have a history. I’m aware, of course, that you still have feelings for her.”

  “But she doesn’t for me. She’s made it pretty clear that she doesn’t want anything to do with me.”

  “Yes. But what a person says, and what they feel, and the way they act do not always line up. I have often thought that she is too emotional about you. That she protests too much.”

  Zachary tried to laugh again, but it stuck in his throat. That was what Kenzie said too. That if Bridget really didn’t have any feelings for Zachary, she wouldn’t care what he did. She wouldn’t care if they happened to run into each other somewhere. The fact that she flipped out any time she saw him meant that she still had feelings.

  Unless, of course, Bridget wanted something from him, and then she would show up at his apartment and pretend to be sympathetic and friendly.

  None of that meant that she still had feelings for him.

  “I am not having an affair with her,” Zachary told Gordon firmly. He tried to keep his voice completely calm and level and to look Gordon in the eye. To give him all of the nonverbal indicators that he was telling the truth. “I haven’t been with Bridget since we broke up. Not once.”

  “So you are one hundred percent sure that the babies are not yours.”

  “Yes. One hundred percent. It’s been more than two years.” Zachary shook his head. “When she found out that she had cancer… I was out the door. That was it. She didn’t have time or energy for me in her life anymore. Things had been rocky before that, but we were trying to make it work. Once she knew she was sick, it was a whole different story. She needed to remove everything toxic from her life.”

  Gordon winced. “Understood,” he agreed with a quick nod. “I just figured… you were the first one who came to mind when I thought about who she might be… emotionally involved with. The two of you have always had that dynamic. That tension.”