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  I cleared my throat. “Everything has happened pretty much just like my father said. Oh, except in his version, you and my sister are supposed to be together.” It wasn’t funny. I crossed my arms on the ledge of the lookout and buried my face, not wanting John to see how helpless I suddenly felt.

  After a long silence, John gently smoothed my hair back from my temple, tucking it behind my ear, trying to get me to look at him. “If you’re sure he’s right, why did you hear my thoughts, and why did I fall in love with you and not your sister? She was right there that day I met you.”

  I looked up at him, feeling slightly better.

  “So I’m the future of your species, but I’m here. With you.”

  “Don’t even joke about it. You are not the future of the species.”

  “I still can’t see it—that they would want to pluck me out of obscurity. I’m no one.” A group of four men appeared, hauling two Yeti coolers. I straightened. John said hello to the group and then pulled on my sleeve so I would follow him out of the now-crowded pavilion.

  John started up a narrow wooded path that led away from the lookout, and I walked behind him, worried about everything. We found a small, sun-dappled clearing with a lone bench. I sat and John stopped to stand in front of me.

  I started with the easier part to talk about. “I have a way I think we can keep you safe.”

  “How?”

  “You have to immediately try to stop using your new abilities.” When he looked like he was going to argue, I preempted him. “Even I don’t have complete control over mine. God forbid you do any of this in public, which you already have. When you do these things, you build a different energy. If any Puri passed you on the street, they would know.”

  He began to walk around the small clearing. “It’s not like I have control over this. I don’t think I can stop.”

  “I think you can if we’re apart.”

  He snapped his gaze back to me.

  “People in our group are stronger together, almost like we feed off of one another. I believe I’m having an effect on you, that I bring this out in you.”

  “But this is all just pure speculation.”

  “It’s somewhat informed. It has precedent. True, Novak may never come back. Your abilities might not be dependent on me at all. But I’m not going to risk it. We need to separate until September. Just for the summer, until Novak is gone.”

  “Why can’t we stay and fight it? He’s a wanted man.”

  “No, staying apart, hiding even, is the only way,” I said, immoveable. Then, I added, “You need to trust me.”

  John knew me well enough to know he wouldn’t convince me otherwise. “What would you do? Stay in Austin?”

  I concentrated on the ground, crushing acorns beneath the tip of my shoe. Reluctantly, I said, “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll move early. Get out of Austin finally. I’ve got to get a grip on my own abilities. For me to go to college, I have to stop using them. I don’t think I can have you and them.”

  “You will be in California at the end of summer, right?” For just a split second, I saw the mistrust he had when it came to me.

  “Of course. Once the danger is gone, we’ll be together. I promise.” As soon as I said it, I thought of my sister and promises I’d made in the past and hadn’t kept.

  I waited for John to look at me. I stared into his beautiful eyes, knowing this was one of the last times we would be this close for a good, long while. I made another promise I knew I would give every ounce of myself to keep. “I’m not going to let him find you.”

  We both watched as a small red fox suddenly danced out into the clearing, crossing in front of us, before swiftly disappearing back into the woods.

  I waited in my car across the street from John’s house. He didn’t look back when he closed the front door behind him. I rested my head against the car window, alone for the first time since that morning.

  We’d taken our sweet time getting back to Austin after the conversation in Waco. John had insisted on driving, as if he were trying to gain control over at least one small thing in his life. I’d been worried he might be in shock because he was so quiet on the drive and he drove the speed limit for once.

  “I’m sorry,” I’d said at one point.

  “Why are you sorry? This isn’t your fault.”

  The grey freeway blurred by and the air conditioner blasted.

  “I could have stayed away from you,” I said.

  “Yeah, that didn’t seem to work.” He half-laughed. “By the way, you can’t blame me for fantasizing about you in class. I guess those were just visions of the future. Not my fault.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I own that bra. Wasn’t it really lacy?” I teased, wanting to make him blush. I was so happy he was talking to me and even kind of joking.

  John smiled, just slightly. “Well, it doesn’t sound like you stopped reading my mind at those moments. I thought you were supposed to be wary of outsiders?”

  “I should have known right then that I would end up doing every single one of those things with you.” I ran my fingers through his hair. He briefly leaned into my hand.

  “Thank God you can’t read my mind anymore.”

  “Don’t be embarrassed. Ever. Okay?”

  I’d wanted to keep looking at him the whole trip, seeing him in a bit of a brand-new light. When I thought about the things he might be capable of, I felt my attraction to him grow, if that was even possible. I told myself to stop it. John was John. We didn’t need anything more in common than what we already had.

  I watched the dark house for a few minutes before I opened my car door. As I exited to move to the driver’s side, I saw a black Tahoe drive by. I had a glimpse of a bearded man at the wheel.

  Maybe it wasn’t the same Tahoe I’d seen earlier in the day. There were a million of them on the road. Maybe it wasn’t the same bearded man who’d tried to take the picture of John in the restaurant cellar.

  I was about to do something I shouldn’t. Agent Kelly always gave me his card when I saw him. Sure enough, I found two at the bottom of my bag.

  I dialed his number, my first contact with him without the aid of my lawyer.

  “Agent Kelly,” he answered on the fourth ring, out of breath as if he’d been working out.

  I cleared my throat. “This is Julia Jaynes.”

  There was dead silence on the other end.

  “Yes,” he said.

  I had the thought that I’d just experienced the most surprise Rafa would ever show.

  The concierge gestured for Agent Kelly to proceed into the meeting room I’d arranged at the W. It was a Sunday night and Rafa looked like he’d dressed in a hurry.

  “Hello,” he said formally. He didn’t try to shake my hand.

  I didn’t give Rafa the chance to sit down.

  “Here’s the phone,” I said, handing him the cell phone Angus had given me that night in the parking garage. I’d wiped it down to get rid of Angus’s fingerprints.

  “It’s probably just paparazzi,” he said. Still, he’d come to meet me.

  “I know. But there’s something about it that feels more like surveillance. I’m sorry if I’m wasting your time and it’s your people who are following me. If not though, I thought you’d want to know,” I said, hinting that it could be Novak.

  “You said this man dropped the phone?”

  “Yes,” I lied. “I took it because he was using it to take pictures of me. It doesn’t seem like the kind of camera a professional would use.”

  Rafa took the phone from me and put it in a baggie, treating it like evidence.

  I stood up to leave.

  “Thank you for reaching out,” Agent Kelly said. “I’m sorry you felt threatened by this person.”

  I wanted to roll my eyes. He had to know I’d felt threatened fo
r months by everyone and everything. Him especially. I wasn’t sure why my knee-jerk reaction had been to call him. He’d just suddenly seemed like a tool I could use to keep this photographer away from John. At the end of the day, I was most likely just paranoid about the Tahoe.

  “Anything else?” he asked, pressing me.

  “Nothing,” I said, eager to get upstairs and finally crash.

  “I may want to talk more about this if it leads to anything.” He held up the baggie.

  “Fine.” I wasn’t about to tell him I was leaving for California. The FBI had never told me I couldn’t leave the state. He would probably be alerted as soon as I boarded a plane anyway.

  We stood across from each other, eyeing one another. I didn’t feel like a young girl around Rafa and he had never treated me that way. I felt like his equal and his adversary. A small part of me appreciated it, as if it were the proper respect anyone under investigation was due versus being treated like either a criminal or a celebrity who was famous for nothing except being famous. But I knew it was also dangerous that he took me seriously.

  “Okay, then,” I said.

  “Would you like me to walk you to your door?”

  “No. No, thank you.”

  “Are you alright?” That wasn’t a very Rafa-like question. His questions were usually black and white. I sensed it was a Sunday-night question, an away-from-official-business question.

  “Yes,” I nodded.

  “I can tell that’s not true.”

  I said nothing more and left the room.

  AUGUST, two months later

  JOHN

  What you told me about myself didn’t seem possible, but when I listened to you talk, you had this way of making complete sense. You had me convinced that our separation was the logical next move.

  But I had this problem. Any time we were apart, things we’d discussed, experiences we’d had, it all felt like I’d made it up. Most of all, you didn’t feel real.

  When you showed up at the graduation party, it was almost shocking to see my two worlds collide. Shocking in a great way. There’d become such a clean divide between the land of Julia and the Fords.

  So when we said good-bye for the summer, I already didn’t trust that you’d come back. You’d disappeared before. I tried to play it cool like I trusted this separation was temporary but I was freaking out. I was ready to ask you to run away with me, marry me in Vegas…

  JUNE

  Chapter Nine

  Standing in the narrow driveway, John positioned a large bag full of extra rackets into the packed trunk and then closed the back door.

  “I guess this is it,” he said, walking around the car, talking to his dad outside his home. From the doorway inside the Ford house, I watched Spirit, who was off his leash, follow John everywhere he went. There were sounds of children playing on the playground across the street and the faraway heaving of garbage trucks.

  “You going to be okay?” Taro asked.

  “Yeah,” John said. “I’m fine. This won’t affect the way I play if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I’m asking about you. Not your game.”

  “I’m fine. It’s not like we’re breaking up.”

  I backed away from the front door.

  “Hey, I think we need to say good-bye,” Kathleen said to me, entering the living room. “We’ve got to get out of here if we’re going to get to the hotel in Lubbock at a decent hour.”

  “Okay.” I lingered, not following Kathleen out the door to say good-bye in the driveway. It took her a second, and then, to her credit, she understood. “Want me to send him in?”

  “Thanks, that would be great.”

  “Bye, Julia,” Kathleen said. I smiled and she smiled back. And that was it. I didn’t like that Kathleen might be thinking that she was saying good-bye to me for good. But there was nothing tying me to her son now. I was giving up my apartment in Austin today, and on the horizon there was only a Stanford interview with no promises attached.

  I surveyed John’s house. He was coming back for a few days here and there before heading off to his first semester at Stanford, but today was the beginning of Austin no longer being his home. It was where we’d met. I’d thought of this year as hard and our future on the West Coast as holding all the promise, but some of the sweetest times in my life had taken place in this house.

  “You ready?”

  I swung around to face John. His eyes were dead of emotion, which was why his parents were worried. Without my abilities, I couldn’t stop feeling everything while John acted like he felt nothing at all.

  “It’s two months,” I said. “That’s it.”

  “This feels wrong.” John looked at his feet before raising his eyes to meet mine. We had wasted the last five days arguing over the phone.

  “I know,” I conceded. John was pissed we hadn’t seen each other since I dropped him off post-Dallas. I’d agreed to this brief good-bye, surrounded by his family.

  The front door blew wide open, and immediately, heat rolled into the air-conditioned room. We looked at each other, not touching.

  “You’re acting like you have to handle this alone.”

  “Can we not?” I could see John already wasn’t feeling great physically. “Don’t let this get in the way of playing, okay? You got where you are because of years of working hard, not because of how you briefly changed.”

  “Don’t worry. I know how to focus even when I don’t care.”

  “Start caring. You told me how important this summer is.”

  “Promise me you won’t keep any more secrets,” John said, as if this were a new requirement.

  “The same goes for you.”

  We were quiet for a moment.

  “I have something for you,” John said, attempting to be nonchalant.

  “Really?” I was excited. John never gave me anything. I knew it was because I already had everything and he was worried I wouldn’t like something he bought. But I would absolutely love any present that came from John.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a gold bangle.

  I took it from him and slipped it right on my wrist. By its weight, I could tell it was solid gold. I glanced at John and realized he was uncomfortable. “I love it. I’m not taking it off.”

  “It’s my grandmother’s. She gave it to me to give to you,” he said, brushing it off.

  My heart was splitting in two.

  “I love it,” I said again. It was now my favorite possession. I smiled. I found John’s nervous apathy adorable. To make him more nervous, I played with the bracelet and remained silent, looking up at him expectantly. He didn’t disappoint.

  “You know this kiss needs to last us for two months?” he said.

  Each of us waited for the other to initiate our last kiss. I often waited for him to make the first move, like I always wanted confirmation that he was still sure about us. Today, I closed the distance. John touched his lips to mine and slid both his hands through my hair, holding me still. The kiss deepened. He was kissing me like he didn’t think he’d ever see me again. I stepped back, breathless, startled that one kiss had somehow been more intimate than any act we’d shared.

  “Have faith in us,” I said.

  “Have faith in yourself,” he said right back, looking me straight in the eye. It seemed to come from a place of warning. Like he knew something I didn’t.

  At that moment, a cloud passed in front of the sun. Just for a second, the room was cast in shade.

  “See you in California?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Definitely.”

  For the last time, I punched in the code and let myself into my apartment, ready to close the door and finally let loose after holding it together in front of John. Abruptly, I was blinded by intense light and felt a sudden surge throughout my whole body.

 
Angus stood in front of the large living room windows, shades fully up.

  I put my hand over my heart, which felt like it was beating out of my chest.

  “What’s wrong with you? You didn’t know I was here?”

  “God.” I took a deep breath. “No, I didn’t.” My senses were dulling. I didn’t like not knowing what was coming next. It was hard to believe that was how most people lived. Like sitting ducks.

  “Are you crying?” Angus asked in disbelief.

  I didn’t bother answering.

  “We agreed to take a break.” There was silence and I knew just from our proximity, Angus had no choice but to feel the pain I couldn’t manage to bury.

  “What do they say about the first cut being the deepest?” Angus began to sing.

  “Shut up.”

  He stopped and laughed softly. “So, what does he know?”

  “Everything. Except about you being back.”

  The apartment was in disarray. The pristine furniture provided by the hotel was surrounded by empty boxes, exposed cords and a dirty floor with some spare change and dust. The movers had packed everything of mine up and put it in storage.

  Angus gripped a piece of paper in his hand. “Did you see this?”

  I walked over to him and grabbed his hand, pulling him away from the windows and into my bedroom. “The FBI watches me. And paparazzi.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  “What do you mean you’re not worried? You’re crazy. And what about me? I’m harboring a fugitive.”

  “I can feel them coming. I’ve become good at hiding. What’s your plan?”

  “San Francisco. I fly out tomorrow morning.”

  “Cancel it. We’re driving.”

  “No way.”

  “I have a fake ID. I rented a car. Come on, you need me, Julia.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. I know when the FBI is around. I’ll know if Novak comes back. I can protect you. I’ll even help you find your mother. Look. Did you see this?” Angus thrust the paper at me.