She rolled her eyes. “Don’t act like it’s such a big deal. You’re obviously fine.”

How on earth did she think I was fine? I’d never been anything but fine. While I wasn’t particularly eager to experience the volatile, irrational emotions of my peers, I at least wanted to know what the fuck was wrong with me. What the hell made me so different?

My parents’ casual dismissal of a potential problem disturbed me most of all. Whatever my issues were, I at least knew how to feel anger. And I was exceptionally angry at the moment.

I hadn’t finished deciding whether or not to express my rage when the phone rang, making the decision for me. The housekeeper had the day off, so Mother got up to get it. By the tone of her “hello,” I knew it must be one of her friends.

I tuned her out, opening my laptop instead to do some internet searching. I’d just typed in “blunted affect” when my mother gasped. I looked across the room to her. She was shaking her head, her hand raised to clutch her chest. For a good second, I wondered if she was having a heart attack.

Then her eyes met mine. “Okay. Okay,” she kept saying into the receiver. “We’ll be there. We’re coming. See you soon.”

She hung up, and I saw that all the color had left her face. “Hudson. Hudson. Oh, no.”

My forehead creased. Was it Dad? He’d taken my siblings ice-skating at Rockefeller Center earlier. Or Mirabelle? Or Chandler?

Mother rushed toward me, and I stood to catch her. She was crying already as she buried her face in my shoulder. “It’s the baby,” she said into my sweatshirt. “Celia’s losing the baby. She’s at the hospital. We have to go.”

I never pushed return in the search field. The results for blunted affect never made it to my script. I didn’t need the internet to tell me whether or not I could feel. At that moment, all I felt was numb.

* * *

I watched the drip of the IV in a daze, the measured beeps of the heart monitor the only sound in the quiet, darkened room. Celia was sleeping. She had been for several hours. I hadn’t spoken to her or seen her awake since I’d arrived.

When my mother and I had gotten to the hospital, Celia had been in labor. The baby, we were told, was dead already.

After, she hadn’t wanted to see anyone. Madge and Warren gave us what little information they’d had. They’d gone to the ER when Celia’s water had broken. There, an ultrasound had failed to find the fetus’s heartbeat. The doctors guessed it had passed sometime two weeks before. Celia was admitted to the obstetrics ward. Labor continued naturally, and a few hours later, she’d delivered. It had been a boy.

I spent the evening comforting my mother in the waiting room. Eventually, my father arrived and took her home, where I guessed she’d mourn in the way she knew best—with a bottle of vodka. Though Celia still refused to see me, I stayed. Around midnight, the Werners said goodbye, promising they’d return first thing in the morning. That’s when I snuck in her room. I spent the night awake in an armchair by her bed. I had no reason to be there. I had no reason to go.

“Why are you here?” Celia’s voice drew me from my stupor.

I wiped my mouth and cleared my throat before trying to speak. “You’re awake.”

“I am.” She pushed a button, and the bed tilted her into a sitting position. “And you don’t need to be here. The façade is over. You can go.” Her tone was straight, empty of expression.

“I’m not leaving.”

“Why?”

I answered honestly. “I don’t know.”

She leaned her head back into the pillow, accepting my answer. She didn’t ask me to leave again, and something told me it was because she really didn’t want me to go.

Though I knew that conversation wasn’t necessary, I asked all the same, “How do you feel?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “Numb.”

That was an emotion I knew well. “That’s natural.”

“Is it?”

Who the fuck knew what natural was? Certainly not me. “I don’t really know, Celia. I assume it is.” She stared at me with blank eyes. So I said more. “I imagine it’s some sort of defense mechanism to the trauma. Do they know what happened?”

She started to shake her head and stopped. “One of the doctors told me—in private, when my parents weren’t in the room—that there appeared to be developmental issues. I asked if it could have been because….because I’d partied early on. I, uh, drank a lot. And there was drug use. Before I knew I was pregnant, of course. He said that he couldn’t be sure, but it was probably a contributing factor.”

Her voice was raw with the honesty—or perhaps it was the fact that she’d just awoken and the day before had been more than rough. Either way, I sensed I was the only person who would hear this truth.

And I had nothing to offer her in terms of comfort. I didn’t even try. I wondered, though, in the quiet that followed, if she blamed me. It seemed a reasonable reaction from what I’d learned about human behavior. She’d lost her child because of drug and alcohol use. She’d used because she’d been broken. She’d been broken by me. It was fair to say, then, that she’d lost her child because of me.

She wouldn’t have even been pregnant if not for me. It was easy to say her actions were her responsibility, but I had manipulated her for the exact reason of studying how she’d react. I did have culpability.

I didn’t feel guilty or even regretful, necessarily. I simply wondered if she blamed me. Even here in this inappropriate moment, I searched to understand the nuances of human psychology.

Celia broke the silence. “I’m sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?” Coming after my internal dialogue, her apology was particularly out of place.

She blinked several times, and I realized she was crying. “You aren’t really the father, but I feel like I need to say this to someone. So I’m telling you I’m sorry. I’m sorry I killed our baby.”

Her tears flowed in gentle streams that she wiped at with the tips of her fingers. She was silent and her body still as she grieved. I watched her, taking it in. Not completely heartless, I did notice a certain melancholy wrap around me. It was refreshing almost, to feel something other than even. Though, it appeared to be much less comfortable of an emotion for Celia. That was unfortunate.

When the crying let up, she threw a glance at me. “It was fun for a moment, wasn’t it? Pretending it was ours.”

I tilted my head as I contemplated that. Our scheme had been easy to fall into. People had been ready to believe, and that had inspired a kind of secret delight. Celia had been in California for the majority of our ruse, but in the days before she’d left, I’d recognized her own euphoria. She’d tried to hide it behind the pretense of embarrassment and guilt, but I could read her too well.

“I feel like I understand you better now, Hudson.” She waited until I’d met her eyes with a questioning brow raise. “Why you play those games. Why you played that game with me.”

My heart stilled for a beat. I had to have misunderstood her allusion. I clarified. “What game?”

She let out an exasperated sigh, throwing her head back onto her pillow. “Let’s not do that right now, Hudson. Please? Be honest with me for a minute.”

Maybe it was the circumstances surrounding us or the lingering melancholy. Or perhaps the darkness of the room. Or the lack of sleep. Or finally a chance to speak with someone who was willing to hear. More likely it was the combination of all of the above that allowed me to step onto sacred ground and bare my secrets.

In a steady low voice, I let down the first wall. “They aren’t games.”

“What are they then?” She matched the tone and timbre of my voice, as though she understood as well as I did that this moment was unusual. That this conversation was unique.

“They’re experiments.” I trained my eyes on the steady blip of her heart monitor. “I don’t…understand…people.” Blip. Blip. “What makes them feel. I experiment to understand.” Blip.

“You don’t feel things?” Blip. Her heart rate didn’t alter.

Blip. “I don’t think I do. Not the way most people do.” Blip.

“That explains a lot.”

I met her stare. “Does it?”

“Yeah. It does.” She wasn’t accusatory. Simply matter-of-fact. We were alike, in a way. She understood things about people. She understood things about me, at the very least. “You’ve done it with more than just me then?”

I nodded once slowly.

“Have you learned anything?”

“I’ve learned a lot.”

“But you still don’t feel things?” She was curious but accepting.

“I don’t.” I gripped the arms of the chair and let them go again. “I don’t think that’s something that will ever change. It’s not why I do it. If anything, the more I experiment, the less I feel. Except with you. You…I don’t know.” It wasn’t that I didn’t want to share. I just didn’t have the words. “You’re too much like family, I think. So I have…I did feel…something.”

“You don’t know what, though?”

“No.” I’d tried to figure it out so many times. “Obligation, maybe. Responsibility.”

She fiddled with the edge of her bedsheet but kept her focus on me. “But with the others, you didn’t feel anything?”

“No.”

She let go of the sheet, turned and propped her head up on one hand. “Do you ever feel anything else?”

God, we were actually doing this, then? Examining all the pieces, letting all the walls down. Might as well get comfortable. I crossed an ankle over my jean-clad knee. “Not really. Anger sometimes. Disgust.”

“You’re never happy?”

“I’m often content.” I didn’t mention that the only excitement I felt revolved around the manipulation of others. I was stripping myself in front of her, but I didn’t need to be vulgar.

“What about sorrow?”

“It’s more like disappointment.” I cleared my throat. This was the closest to sympathy she’d get from me. “Right now, I’m disappointed for you.”

Though, there had been a moment—the moment that I’d learned Celia’s baby was dead—and the disappointment had been something else. Something more intense, more intolerable. It seemed to start in the center of me, the sensation so strong it sounded in my ears. Soon it reverberated in my bones, in my skin, until every part of me had…ached.

But all it took was a straightening of my spine and a decision to not feel it anymore. And with a whoosh, it was silent. Gone. I was hardened.

It had been a unique incident. One I’d never experienced. Perhaps it warranted a relabeling for Celia’s benefit. “Very disappointed for you.”

She bit her lip as if she were fighting a fresh set of tears. “What about guilt? Or compassion? Or love?”

I shook my head.

“You don’t love your mother? Or Mirabelle?”

“That’s more complicated.” It was difficult to explain my lack of emotion to someone else when I barely understood it myself. “I have a fondness for them. I feel an affinity toward them. But that’s all.”

She took in a ragged breath, and I could only assume this revelation disturbed her.

“Don’t get me wrong,” I added, “they do mean something to me. But it hardly measures the depths that I believe others feel for people they care for.”

“Does that bother you?”

“It intrigues me. Bother me? Not really.” I was grateful for the semi-dark room. It made the honest conversation less intense. “It actually makes me strong, I think. No one has the power to hurt me.”

This idea had itched at me for a while, but had never fully formed. Now that I’d said it out loud, I sat back in the chair and soaked in the revelation. This incident had actually been the best test of the notion. This had almost hurt me. Not quite, but almost. And watching the Werners and my mother and Celia bear the pain like a terrible fever with no relief was exhausting in itself. If I’d ever thought my impassivity was a curse, I didn’t now. It was my blessing.

Accepting this didn’t change anything—didn’t change me—but perhaps it propelled my interest in studying the human psyche. It gave me a mission. Because in learning why others behaved the way they did, I discovered more of my own strength.

“Hudson.” Celia’s small voice drew me from my reverie. “Teach me, Hudson.”

I raised a questioning brow.

“Experiment with me.”

“What? Why would you want me to…?” I didn’t know how to react to the insane request. “I’m not experimenting on people I know anymore.”