"So you think he'll use it as a weapon," I said.
"I think he could."
"He said research."
"People say many things."
"Then we put conditions in the contract."
She stopped in the middle of the hall. "No contract can control the world."
"We can. We make the antidote."
"You keep saying that."
"Because it's true."
"We don't have one."
"Not yet."
"And if you're wrong?"
"I'm not."
"You don't know that."
"I know our data."
"Do you?" she said. "Data doesn't care what you want, Daniel."
We were both breathing hard. Neither of us moved.
"And it won't care about the contract," she went on. "It won't care that we meant to spend the money well, or that you're brilliant, or that I'm your mother. Once it leaves our hands, we don't get to decide what it becomes."
"I said I know."
"No." Her voice was quiet. "You don't."
She walked past me into the little room at the back of the house where she kept her papers, old models and charts and copies of work that no longer mattered to anyone but us. She opened a drawer. Inside lay the first paper we had ever written together, her name and mine side by side. She touched it.
"You remember this?"
"Yes."
"You were twenty-three."
"Twenty-four."
"Twenty-three."
"Twenty-four."
She smiled in spite of herself. "Still arguing."
"Because I'm right."
She handed me the paper. At the bottom, under both our signatures, she had written a single line in pen, and I remembered it the moment I saw it: No result is worth forgetting the person at the other end of it.
"You wrote that."
"I did."
"I believe it."
"Then act like it."
I folded the paper. "We're talking about a research tool."
"We're talking about something capable of becoming a catastrophe."
"Only if it's mishandled."
"And who decides whether it's mishandled?"
"We do."
She looked at me for a long moment. "That," she said, "is what every person says before someone else gets hurt."
"Then tell me what you think happens." I could hear my voice climbing. "You keep saying it as if it's already written."
"Because I can see it." She did not raise hers. "If you sell it and one person dies, you will never know whether that was the last. If ten die, you'll wonder whether it was twenty. If a hundred die, you'll count the ones you know by name."
"That's not going to happen."
"If thousands die, Daniel, there will be no number large enough to make you understand what you did."
"It won't get that far."
"You will look at every sick person and wonder if your money bought them a bed."
"Mom. Don't."
"Every child whose parents don't come home."
"I said don't." My voice came out smaller than I meant it to.
"You'll hear the number on the news. And every time, you'll know you helped put it into the world."
I brought my hand down on the desk, and the lamp jumped. "Enough!"
The house went silent. She did not move. She looked at my hand, and then at me, and I was breathing as if I had been running.
"Vale told me the two of you had spoken," she said at last, very evenly. "Twice. I waited for you to tell me yourself."
It took me a moment. "Because you'd have said no."
"Yes."
"That's why."
"I know why."
"You want to talk about what I keep from you?" The words came up out of somewhere I had not known was open. "I asked about my father once. I saw your face, and I never asked again. Do you know how many years I have spent making sure you never had to look like that again? I've been managing you my whole life, Mom."
She closed her eyes. For a few seconds there was only the rain on the roof.
"I know you have," she said. "I let you. That was wrong of me."
It was the last thing I wanted her to say. I had wanted her to fight. I turned and walked out of the room, and she let me go.