“Please, Catherine. I can explain.”
Tears filled my eyes. I lifted my glasses and wiped under my lids. “So, was this all just some kind of joke or dare for your buddies? See if you can get the stupid assistant to sleep with you? Extra points if she’s dumb enough to believe you’re your own brother?”
“No! Absolutely not. It was nothing like that, I swear.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “I don’t believe you.”
Henry paced from one end of my small living room to the other. “It’s complicated.”
I threw my arms up in the air. “So you’re calling me stupid again! Get out! Just get out!”
Henry grabbed my upper arms. I tried to shrug him off, but he held firm.
“No. I’m not walking away from this. From you. You may not believe me, Catherine, but you mean something to me, and it is tearing me up inside that I’ve hurt you. Just please, please give me a chance to explain. That’s all I ask.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Well, I’m waiting.”
“I can’t do it here.”
I shook my head. “Nope. Wrong answer. Get out.”
“Just come to the lab. One more time. After that you never have to see my face again. I’ll go to the university and make sure they get you a great job in another lab, no questions asked. I’ll even leave the university, so you never have to lay eyes on me again. Please, baby. Just come to the lab and hear me out. That’s all I’m asking.”
I finally shrugged him off. “Fine. But don’t call me baby. I’m not your baby.”
He raised his palms up in a supplicating gesture. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Please, just come back to the lab with me.”
I shoved my feet into my Doc Martens and grabbed a jacket and my purse. “This doesn’t mean that I forgive you.”
Henry bobbed his head. “I understand.”
Henry flagged down a black cab and we rode to the lab in silence. It was a Saturday, so the university lab building was mostly deserted. We headed into the building and down the two flights of stairs to his basement lab.
Henry crossed to his desk and picked up the leather-bound journal I recognized as his personal research notes. Usually, the formal notes were typed into a program so the university could keep track of funding, progress, and budgets but it wasn’t unusual for a research scientist to keep their own more informal notes.
Henry handed me the book.
I met his gaze as I took it. We were both aware that the day before yesterday he’d practically bitten my head off when I even tried to touch his book.
He took a deep breath. “I’ve been working on a top-secret formula called Bl88dX for about two years now. Animal trials have been complete failures, so my research wasn’t advancing quickly enough for human trials. I was going to lose my funding. So, a few days ago, I took the formula myself.”
My eyes widened. I was so shocked I started to sit down even though there wasn’t a chair near me. Henry leapt forward and steadied me before gently guiding me to a chair.
I blinked several times. “Let me get this straight. You did an unauthorized human trial… on yourself?”
Such a thing would not only get him fired, it could get him banned from the entire scientific community.
Henry nodded.
“Are you crazy? You risked destroying your career. Losing your funding for real. Holy shit, even if the trial had been successful, no reputable university or the military would have accepted the results. What were you thinking?”
“I was desperate! I thought the formula worked and the only reason why the animal trials were failing was because the formula was meant to work on the human brain.”
I stared at the journal on my lap. I opened it and flipped through the pages. Most were typed out and stapled to the journal page. I smiled inwardly. Leave it to Henry to be persnickety about even his personal journal. Then I came to a handwritten entry deeply scrawled in thick black ink.
Henry pointed to the message. “That is when Hyde appeared.”
My eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, appeared?”