She scoffs. “Come on, C. We’ve been over this.”
“I get why you’re saying that he is,” I tell her. “I understand, really, I do. I don’t know if it’s the best thing to do to Pierce, but I get it. You’re protecting your baby. The way my mom tried to protect Jeffrey and me by letting us think my dad was of the regular deadbeat variety.”
She looks into her lap. She’s determined not to admit it. Not to anybody. She made a promise to herself, a commitment to the idea of Pierce as the baby daddy, and she’s not going to break that for anybody. Not even for me. It’s safer that way.
“Okay, fine, be that way,” I say.
I’ll have to let her figure it out herself. But there’s nothing wrong with me helping.
I turn on the radio, and we listen without talking for a while, both of us deep in thought. I come up with a new approach. “Hey, you remember how I kept seeing that bird around campus, and it turned out to be Samjeeza?”
“Yes,” she says lightly, relieved because she thinks I’m changing the subject. “What happened with him, anyway? Is he still stalking you?”
“I threw a rock at him a few weeks ago, and I haven’t seen him since.”
“You threw a rock at a Black Wing?” she says, impressed. “Whoa, C.”
“I was mad. It was probably a mistake. He knows I’m a Triplare, and maybe I pissed him off enough that he’ll decide to tell Asael about me.”
Angela freezes. “Asael. Who’s that?”
“The big bad Watcher, apparently. He collects the Triplare. Apparently there are only seven of us at any given time, and he wants to own the entire boxed set,” I rattle off like it’s common knowledge.
“Seven of you …,” she repeats.
She’s finally getting it. “My dad said that there are never more than seven Triplare to walk the earth at any given time, and Asael wants them all. Christian said something about that once, too—seven Triplare, something Walter told him.” I look over at her. “What is it with the number seven, right? But like you said, it’s God’s number.”
“The seventh,” she whispers. She gazes down at her stomach. “The seventh is ours.”
“Now we’re on the same page,” I tell her, and speed up.
When I get back to Stanford, the first thing I do is try to find my brother. What Samjeeza said about Jeffrey—where’s your brother, Clara?—bugs me, and I don’t want to wait for him to call me to hang out. Part of me just wants to see him. Plus he should know about the seven-Triplare thing. So I take matters into my own hands and start Googling pizza places in or around Mountain View—let’s call it a hunch that Jeffrey’s hanging out in or near our old hometown. After all, that first time he showed up at my dorm room he said he thought he’d seen me, and that was the day I took Christian to Mountain View before we went to Buzzards Roost.
It turns out that there are three pizza joints in Mountain View, and Jeffrey works at the third one I check—right next to the train station, on Castro Street.
He’s not thrilled to see me when I come barging into his life. “What are you doing here?” he asks when I appear at the counter and sweetly ask for a Diet Coke.
“Hey, can’t a girl miss her brother?” I ask. “I need to talk to you. Do you have a minute?”