Second Glance by Jodi Picoult Read Free Book Online Page A

the veil was lifted, and old souls could journey home to visit people they’d left behind.
    When I die, you have to be there .
    But he hadn’t been. Yet now, he couldn’t seem to leave.
    Meredith Oliver’s office at Generra Institute had a Washington, D.C., zipcode, and if you looked closely from the window, you could see the Jefferson Memorial. She found it fairly ironic, since most of the scientists at her place of business flouted the very concept of all men being created equal—in their opinion, only the strongest survived.
    Sitting across from her, nervously wringing each other’s hands, were Mr. and Mrs. De la Corria. “Good news,” Meredith said with a smile. In the decade she’d been doing preimplantation genetic diagnosis, she’d learned that the only thing more stressful for a couple than in vitro fertilization was waiting for the results of the tests that led up to it. “There are three viable embryos.”
    Carlos De la Corria was a hemophiliac. Terrified to pass the disease on through his offspring, he and his wife had opted for assisted reproduction, in which embryos were created from their own sperm and eggs and then genetically screened by Meredith. Before the embryo was put into the mother’s uterus, she would know that her baby did not possess the gene for hemophilia.
    “How many are boys?” asked Carlos.
    “Two.” Meredith looked him in the eye. The gene for hemophilia was carried on the X chromosome. That meant a male child born to the De la Corrias would not be able to pass on his father’s illness. In effect, if they had only boys, they’d stamp out hemophilia in future generations of their family.
    Carlos lifted his wife from the chair and whirled her around Meredith’s small office. All those ethicists who were terrified of what might come of gene modification—well, they need only witness a moment like this. Meredith kept two pictures on her desk—one of Lucy, and another of her first patient, a beaming woman with cystic fibrosis holding her son, who—thanks to Meredith—had been born without the disease.
    Mrs. De la Corria sank down in her chair again, still breathless. “The girl?” she asked softly.
    “The third embryo tested is, in fact, a carrier. I’m sorry,” Meredith replied.
    Carlos squeezed his wife’s hand. “Well, then,” he said optimistically. “It looks like we’ll be having twin boys.”
    There were plenty of obstacles still to overcome, and there was every chance that the embryos wouldn’t succeed—but Meredith had done her part of the job. From here, other doctors at Generra took over with the implantation. Meredith accepted the De la Corrias’ gratitude and then scanned her appointment sheet. Two more consultations, and then she had the afternoon to work in her lab.
    She slipped on her reading glasses—she kept them in a pocket, too vain for overt display—and pulled the pen that anchored her curls into some semblance of a knot. Her honey-gold hair tumbled around her shoulders in a tangle, the mess it always was, as if it were God’s joke to give Meredith Oliver, the control freak, hair that had seemed to have a mind of its own. She scrubbed her hands down her face, rubbed bloodshot brown eyes. “Tonight,” she told herself out loud, “I will not let myself work. I will go home, and take a hot bath, and read Lucy something other than an article from the Journal of Theriogenology .”
    She wondered if saying it, instead of just thinking it, made it any more likely to happen.
    “Dr. Oliver?” A knock on the door, followed by her secretary. “The De la Corrias signed this release.”
    Without looking, Meredith knew what it was—permission for Generra to discard their third, female embryo. “They should wait until after implantation. There’s a chance that the in vitro won’t take, and then . . .”
    Her voice drifted off. And then, it would make no difference. The De la Corrias would rather be childless than utilize this damaged embryo. The