“You don’t need the scissors,” a voice whispered from the bed.
It was Leo’s voice. The exact pitch, the slight lisp he had at seven, now seamlessly matured to ten. I froze in the doorway, the cold metal of the shears biting into my palm. The moonlight filtering through the blinds caught his face—his perfectly freckled nose, the familiar curve of his jaw—but his eyes were entirely devoid of the warmth my little boy used to have.
“Leo? What are you doing awake, sweetie?” I managed to stammer, my heart pounding a frantic rhythm against my ribs.
He didn’t lie back down. Instead, he patted the edge of the mattress. “Come sit.” When I hesitated, he tilted his head, his expression unnervingly calm. “The nurse. Sarah, right? She shouldn’t have said anything to you. They monitor the clinic’s cameras.”
My breath hitched. “Who are you?”
“I am Leo,” he said simply. “I have his fingerprints, his dental records, and his memories of the backyard treehouse. But I am also the boy from the Miller family in Ohio, and the boy from the Chen family in Seattle.”
He reached up, plucked a single strand of hair from his own scalp, and held it out to me. “Take it. Run the private test. The DNA will match perfectly. That’s the genius of it. They grew me from the blood sample you gave the detectives three years ago when you reported the original Leo missing.”
My mind fractured trying to process the impossibility of his words. Grew him? “Where is my real son?” I choked out, tears finally spilling hot down my cheeks.
Before he could answer, a blinding white spotlight swept across the bedroom window, throwing stark shadows against the wall. The distinctive, heavy crunch of gravel echoed from the driveway, followed by the sharp crackle of a police radio.
The boy slid out of bed. He was fully dressed under his covers, wearing dark clothes and sturdy shoes.
“They found out Sarah warned you,” the boy said, his tone urgent but entirely void of panic. “If they find you in here holding those scissors, doubting their narrative, they will take me back to the facility. And they will make sure you disappear, just like the real Leo did.”
I looked at the shears in my hand, then at the boy standing before me—a creature who was simultaneously my ultimate salvation and my deepest nightmare.
“There’s a storm drain behind the neighbor’s fence that leads out of the subdivision,” he said, stepping forward and slipping his hand into mine. His skin felt warm. It felt exactly like my son’s hand. “If we leave right now, I can show you where the original children are kept.”
A heavy fist pounded on the front door downstairs.
“Police! Open up!” a deep voice boomed.
I gripped the boy’s hand tight, turned my back on the life I knew, and ran toward the window.
