THE LABORATORY OF REGRET

Three Months Earlier

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology did not look like the birthplace of a monster. Its neoclassical buildings sprawled across Cambridge in reassuring brick and white columns, sheltering the greatest scientific minds of a generation. Students hurried between lectures, clutching coffee and textbooks, dreaming of changing the world.

Adrian Vale had changed the world once. He'd done it with a paper published in Nature at twenty-six, establishing the neurological basis for empathetic response. He'd done it again at thirty-one, developing a non-invasive technique for mapping emotional processing in the prefrontal cortex. By thirty-five, he'd held the Elliot Chair in Neuroscience, directed the Institute's Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, and been shortlisted for a Nobel Prize that would eventually go to someone who'd studied fruit flies.

Now, at forty-two, Adrian sat in his office and stared at a letter that had destroyed what little remained of his life.

Dear Dr. Vale,

We regret to inform you that your sister, Eleanor Vale, passed away on March 15th at Baylor Medical Center in Houston, Texas. Despite our best efforts, complications from diabetic ketoacidosis proved irreversible. We understand Ms. Vale was uninsured at the time of her admission. Please contact our billing department to discuss arrangements...

The letter went on. Four more paragraphs about payment plans and financial assistance programs and the hospital's commitment to compassionate care. Adrian had read it seventeen times. He knew because he'd counted.

Eleanor had been thirty-six years old. She had been a kindergarten teacher who loved jazz and kept a garden of orchids that she talked to because she believed plants responded to kindness. She had been diabetic since childhood, managing it with the same careful attention she brought to everything. She had been uninsured because she'd lost her job when the charter school corporation she worked for folded, and COBRA payments were nine hundred dollars a month she didn't have, and the insulin she needed to survive cost three hundred and forty dollars per vial, and she was rationing it, stretching one vial into two, then three, then four, until her body began to consume itself from the inside out.