The Man Who Sold His Son (Lanarkshire Strays) by Mark Wilson

ignored it. Placing a hand gently on his forearm, she said, “Despite how you may have come to be here, I’m glad that you are here, Alex. You’ll be helping to make a hugely significant improvement to hundreds of millions of people’s lives. Focus on that.”
    Alex gave her a tight smile and disappeared through the gate.

14
     
    “Those durty basturts,” Tom yelled for around the eighteenth time since Sarah had begun explaining to him what had brought Thomas and her to New York. Noticing Sarah wince at his language, Tom sighed and sat back on the sofa beside her.
    “Och, I’m sorry, hen. I’m starting tae sound like my Uncle Alec in my old age.” Despite the tension they both smiled at the memory of Uncle Alec.
    Tom rose from sitting once more, the slight stiffness in his movement betraying subtly his advanced age. Sarah watched as he lifted a framed photo of Uncle Alec from the mantel.
    “You remember my Uncle Alec?”
    Sarah nodded. He’d been an old man on the single occasion she’d met him, but Alec had simply been the funniest person she’d ever met. He was a lovely person and swore with such vigour and frequency that kids loved him for his irreverence.
    Tom looked wistfully at his photograph. “Christ knows what Alec would have to say about this.”
    “Probably a long string of very colourful suggestions,” Sarah laughed.
    Tom nodded and replaced the photo, still staring at his uncle’s face.
    “Aye. He wouldn’t have been short of advice, that’s for sure,” he replied.
    Sarah walked over to where Tom stood. Scanning the mantel she found only photos, no Holo-Images. It was comforting. Photographs felt more real somehow, more personal. The mantel was filled with images Tom had taken during his career as a photo-journalist. Also there, pushed into the back of the display, were images showing his success as a novelist. Sarah reached out to lift one of the older-looking frames.
    “This is your wife?”
    She caught a flash of pain flitting across the old man’s eyes.
    “Aye. That’s my Cathy,” he said quietly, taking the photograph from her and placing it gently back on the mantel. “Twenty-eight years old.”
    The image showed a young girl, with very dark hair and laser-green eyes, with two girls on her knees. The twins looked around four years old and were sticking their tongues out at the camera. Cathy had an arm around each of them and was laughing.
    Tom reached out and touched her face. “She was dead a week after I took that photo,” he said softly.
    “How did you manage with two four-year-olds?”
    More than fifty years had passed since Cathy had died, but for Tom it might as well have been yesterday.
    “I just had to, Sarah. That’s what my girls needed.”
    Sarah, silently, slipped her hand into his. He gave it a gentle squeeze in appreciation. “You’d have liked her.” Tom smiled at the thought, and then turned to Sarah. “She’d have loved you and Thomas. And of course Alex.”
    Sarah’s resilience finally broke at mention of his name. She wrapped her arms around Tom and cried against his chest. Tom rubbed her back gently as she wept and gave her time to get it all out.
    Finally she pulled away to look up at him. “What are we going to do, Tom?”
     
    Since putting an over-excited Thomas to bed hours earlier, they’d been talking the evening and the early hours away – Sarah explaining what had happened, Tom swearing loudly. Neither had come up with any ideas beyond get him back .
    They had no clue as to where Alex was at present, outwith that he was perhaps in China. Alex had seemed certain that he was boarding a flight to China. They’d done some research and hadn’t found any company of Ennis that screamed this is where Alex would be at them. He had so many facilities in that vast country and all of them were tied to the field of reproductive genetics in one way or another. It’d take them decades to check each of them. Even with a fortune in the bank, it