DARKEST FEAR by Harlan Coben Read Free Book Online

it’s a hell of a thing to lie about it.”
    “But Emily is good at lying, Myron. She’s always lied to you. She lied to you in college. She lied to you when Greg disappeared. She lied in court about Greg’s behavior with the children. She betrayed Greg the night before their wedding by sleeping with you. And, if you will, if she is telling the truth now, she lied to you for the better part of thirteen years.”
    Myron thought about it. “I think she’s telling the truth about this.”
    “You
think
, Myron.”
    “I’m going to take a blood test.”
    Win shrugged. “If you must.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “I’ll let the statement speak for itself.”
    Myron made a face. “Didn’t you just say I should find out for sure?”
    “Not at all,” Win said. “I was merely pointing out the obvious. I didn’t say it made a difference.”
    Myron thought about it. “You’re confusing me.”
    “Simply put,” Win said, “so what if you are the boy’s biological father? What difference does it make?”
    “Come on, Win. Not even you can be that cold.”
    “Quite the opposite. As strange as this might sound, I am using my heart on this one.”
    “How do you figure?”
    Win swirled the liquid again, studied the amber, took a sip. It colored his cheeks a bit. “Again I’ll put it simply: No matter what a blood test might indicate, you are not Jeremy Downing’s father. Greg is. You may be a sperm donor. You may be an accident of lust and biology. You may have provided a simple microscopic cellstructure that combined with one slightly more complex. But you are not this boy’s father.”
    “It’s not that simple, Win.”
    “It is that simple, my friend. The fact that you insipidly choose to confuse the issue does not change the fact. I’ll demonstrate, if you’d like.”
    “I’m listening.”
    “You love your father, correct?”
    “You know the answer to that.”
    “I do,” Win said. “But what makes him your father? The fact that he once grunted on top of Mommy after a few drinks—or the way he has cared for you and loved you for the past thirty-five years?”
    Myron looked down at the can of Yoo-Hoo.
    “You owe this boy nothing,” Win continued, “and equally important, he owes you nothing. We will try to save his life, if that is what you wish, but that should be where it ends.”
    Myron thought about it. The only thing scarier than Win irrational was when Win made sense. “Maybe you’re right.”
    “But you still don’t think it’s that simple.”
    “I don’t know.”
    On the television, Archie approached the pulpit, a yarmulke on his head. “It’s a start,” Win said.

6
    M yron mixed childlike Froot Loops and very adult All-Bran into a bowl and poured on skim milk. For those not reading the Cliffs Notes, this act denotes that there is still a great deal of boy in the man. Heavy symbolism. How poignant.
    The Number 1 train took Myron to a platform on 168th Street so far below ground that commuters had to take a urine-encapsulated elevator to reach the surface. The elevator was big and dark and shaky and brought on images of a PBS documentary on coal mining.
    Located in Washington Heights, a quick stone’s toss from Harlem and directly across Broadway from the Audubon Ballroom where Malcolm X was gunned down, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center’s famed pediatric building was called Babies and Children’s Hospital. It used to be called just Babies Hospital, but a committee of learned medical experts was formed and after hours of intense study, they decided to change thename from Babies Hospital to Babies and Children’s Hospital. Moral of the story: Committees are really, really important.
    But the name, while not exactly Madison Avenue, does adequately reflect the reality of the situation—the hospital is strictly pediatric and deliveries, a well-worn twelve-floor edifice with eleven of them devoted to sick children. There was something very wrong with that, but probably