Page 128 of Hushed

“Weaponized concern,” Bastien mutters serenely. He is still smiling at the room. “Do I look like I’ve lost weight?”

“No. You look great.”

“Mm. He’s just told half this room I’m falling apart, so I wanted to check.” He drinks. “Wasn’t it kind of him to be so very concerned?”

I grunt, because every word out of that man’s mouth was dripping concern. If Bastien takes offense at being asked after his health, in front of the people with the money, then Bastien is exactly as unwell as Lincoln Preston has just suggested.

“Hi. Are you Sébastien Saint-Jacques?” a woman asks us. She is short and Black, with natural hair and a warm open face. She’s wearing a vintage pink dress with flowers on it and a little gold cross at her throat. She doesn’t look old enough to rent a car.

“Teresha McCullough. I’m a fan. I read your findings in the Journal and thought, If folks could get their heads out of their puritanical asses we could do some real good for those men.”

“Levi Knight. Husband.” I shake her hand, glad to meet someone who’s not an asshole at this thing. “What do you research?”

“Intergenerational and epigenetic trauma. African-American households mostly.” She says it like she’s giving somebody her address.

“That’s wonderful.” Bastien lights up for the first time all night. He drops his voice to a low, confidential tone. “You must be catching hell for it.”

“You know how it is. Epigenetics sticks in a lot of craws.”

“I’ll bet.” I put my hand up. “Okay, I give up. What is it?”

She laughs. “Trauma travels down a family and the fight’s over how. Some of it you learn, because you watch your mother flinch at a raised voice and you learn to flinch. Nobody argues that part. But there’s decent evidence some of it runs underneath the learning, that a body which lived through a thing hands down a nervous system already braced for it.”

“Braced how?”

“Take fear of large dogs. It runs high in Black communities, and the conventional answer is culture that gets transmitted, which is valid. But then you look at the mouse work, and you’ve got animals exposed to a harsh thing producing offspring who avoid it generations down, with no way on earth to have been told.”

“But transgenerational inheritance doesn’t translate cleanly to humans,” Bastien says.

“He’s right. We don’t pass down memories. What I’m looking at is narrower and I think it’s worse. Inside one lifetime, early enough, the stress system gets set to a different baseline and it does not reset. Certain stress genes get either locked open, or locked shut.”

“How early?” I ask.

“Before ten, mostly. That’s where the data clusters.”

“And if it happened to you. Can you tell? From the outside?”

She tips her head. “Sometimes. Not the way people think. Everybody expects the ones who fall apart, and there are plenty. But a lot of them come out the other way — charming, useful, very good in a crisis, first to arrive when somebody needs something.” She shrugs. “Cheapest insurance there is. If they need you, they don’t leave.”

I feel Bastien’s shoe pressing very slightly against mine, as if he’s willing me to leave it alone.

“Does it hold?” I ask. “Long term?”

“That’s the part nobody funds,” she says. “What’s sad is that this hypervigilance requires an enormous amount of energy. I mostly study African-American families. A lot of the problems that we attribute to simplistic reasons are running on a deep, subcellular loop. People want it to be something passed down, because that’s a tidy story. It isn’t. Every one of us has the same genes. What differs is which ones got switched on, and when, and by what. It looks like inheritance because the conditions are inherited. Same neighborhood, same year, same thing happening to the next kid.” She glances over her shoulder at Lincoln Preston. “I don’t disagree that something’s wrong. I disagree about where to point.”

“Did you read Dr. Preston’s proposal?” I ask, glad to turn the conversation away from this landmine before Bastien is reminded what a bad bet I am.

She takes a deep breath. Her smile looks like somebody’s painted it on. “Oh, that’s going to be the topic for another day.” She looks past us and lifts a hand at somebody. “That’s my table waving. It’s nice to meet you, Levi. Good luck tonight, Dr. Saint-Jacques.”

“Honey?” Bastien asks, turning to me.

It’s too late. He’s put it together. I should never have asked. Maybe then he wouldn’t notice it in me. I stand in front of him, breathing deeply. “I’m broken.” I have to swallow. “I’m permanently broken.”

“No, you’re not. Please believe me. Epigenetic reversal is either Chapter Six or Seven in my book. EMDR does it. MDMA does it. Ayahuasca reprograms the SIGMAR1 receptor. It controls neuroplasticity and overrides hypervigilance. There are answers, and I am one of the people on the cutting edge of this research. They work.”

“Sometimes. For some people. What if that doesn’t work on me?”

“You are perfect to me, Levi. I mean it.”