Still, my gut refused to quiet down.
In my fourteen years working pediatric subspecialties, I had learned that when lab panels come back clean but a child is deteriorating, the problem is rarely an undiscovered genetic anomaly. The human body is remarkably resilient, but young nervous systems are delicate bio-sensors. They don’t lie. If two unrelated genomes—fraternal twins sharing only fifty percent of their DNA—begin manifesting identical mitochondrial failures at the exact same developmental window, you don’t look for an inherited typo in their DNA. You look for what they are breathing, touching, or ingesting.
I went back down the staircase. Julian was in the kitchen, leaning over a mug of black coffee that looked hours cold. Clara had managed to get Leo into his ground-floor playpen and was resting her head on the kitchen table, her hand loosely draped over her phone, waiting for another lab callback that would inevitably say nothing.
