Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict by Thomas T. Thomas Page A

speaking,” she said. “I didn’t really mean it.”
    But she did, of course. Every word. She just shouldn’t have said it aloud.
    “And now it’s come true,” John said. “Now my own son is dead.”
    “Do the police have any, well, leads?” Brandon asked.
    Callie had read the newsfeed from the Houston Chronicle, as forwarded by Richard’s widow, Julia. “They say the killer used .22 caliber rounds, probably from a pistol, at close range. They were hollow points—”
    “Ouch,” Brandon said.
    “You know about this?” she asked.
    “With the right load, it’s a devastating round. Cuts you up inside.”
    “Well,” she went on, “he was shot once in the groin and once in the head.”
    “Execution style,” Brandon said. “First put you down, then finish you off.”
    “Could we please not talk about this?” John said.
    “Sorry!” Callie and Brandon echoed at the same time.
    “We have to go down for the funeral, of course,” her father said. “Comfort Julia, as well as Jeff and Jacquie.”
    “I’ll go with you, Grandpa,” Brandon said.
    “I appreciate that,” John replied. “Callie?”
    She stared at her father. She could keep a straight face in a meeting like this. But … spend a week with her sister-in-law, her niece and nephew? Recalling all the good times, remembering and idolizing her brother? And never once let her bitterness come through? Never once say what she was thinking? That was not possible.
    “Someone has to stay here and run the company,” she said. “You two go and give them my regrets. … And my condolences.”
    * * *
    The chest pains had started when John Praxis was in Houston for his son’s funeral. At first he felt a twinge, or more like a deep, internal twang, while he was sitting with the family after the ceremony. He was trying to assure them that, although Richard might be gone, and they all had not seen each other in a long time because of war and distance, Julia and the children—grown now, young adults almost Brandon’s age—were definitely still his family. They could call on him for any service, anything they needed. He and Callie and Brandon were there to help.
    At the time, he thought the pains were a reaction to something he had eaten—heartburn or some variant of acid reflux. When they persisted for more than a night and a day, he considered briefly that the intermittent spasms and the continuing ache might be some aspect of his grief, manifesting itself psychosomatically. But after the agony he had felt on the golf course all those years ago—what? thirteen years? fifteen now?—he couldn’t fool himself. The pain was real. Something had gone wrong with his heart again.
    When he and Brandon returned to San Francisco, he made an appointment with his internist, Virginia Mills. After taking the routine diagnostics of blood pressure, pulse, and blood oxygen, she listened to his chest and asked about his symptoms.
    “Burning … aching,” he replied. “Kind of a heaviness.”
    “Any soreness in your arms or neck?” she suggested.
    “Sometimes, but mostly centered in the chest area.”
    “Your chart shows you’ve had a heart implant …”
    “I was one of the first,” he told her proudly. “Done right here in San Francisco. Within a year I was running marathons. I felt like I had the heart of a year-old baby.”
    The doctor’s eyebrows came together. “Well, not exactly.”
    “Are you telling me I didn’t get a new heart?”
    “Oh, no. I’m sure you got a freshly grown organ. But with those early treatments, the doctors focused more on the basics of technique—culturing the stem cells, giving them the right chemical growth signals, constructing and loading the armature—and so they missed some of the subtleties. Any cell that came out of your body then had the exact chronological age of your body, which was what? Mid-sixties?”
    “Sixty-four.”
    “We’ve since learned to reset the chronological age of extracted stem cells by