“I’ll call you,” he says when we finally pull to a stop at my house at a little past seven a.m. It sounds awkward and strange, like the bad end of an even worse first date. He knows it, too. But it’s a thing to say, much better than the truth: see you at Cassie’s funeral. Neither of us wants to think about that.
“Thank you,” I say to Jasper as the police officer opens the back door to let me out. And that sounds just as weird. But it is the truth, too. If it weren’t for Jasper, I would have stayed there in that cabin with Cassie. Would have let it engulf me in flames.
“Thank God you’re okay,” my dad says, grabbing me up on the front porch and dragging me inside. Hugging me just as hard as I’ve been needing him to ever since my mom’s accident. I had expected to feel more angry when I saw him. To be furious about what he kept from me. But in this moment none of that matters as much as the fact that he’s okay. That I didn’t lose him, too.
I try to speak, but instead I start to cry, huge wet sobs. I didn’t even know I was holding them in. I can feel Gideon staring at me, leaning against the door to the kitchen. He looks worried when I finally pull back from my dad, wiping at my face.
“What happened?” he asks, and there’s this little edge to his voice, like maybe I’m the person to blame for Cassie not coming home.
“Hey, Gideon,” my dad says. “Let’s take it easy with the questions, okay? Let’s give Wylie a chance to get her bearings.”
“I did everything I could,” I say to my dad as Gideon disappears into the living room. I say it even though it feels like a lie. Maybe especially because it does.
“I know you did, sweetheart.” My dad wraps an arm around me again, and it feels so natural and right. “Everyone knows that.”
It isn’t until much later, after I’ve washed my face and changed my clothes and tried again and again to scrub that awful smell of smoke and death out of my hair, after my dad has made me toast and tea and had me drink two glasses of water, that I finally begin to tell him everything. Or what I know, which is perhaps—no, surely—much, much less than everything.
“I shouldn’t have—” He shakes his head, looks pained. For a second, I’m afraid I’m finally going to see him cry. “You had a right to know about your test results. It was wrong to keep them from you. I see that now. But please know I wanted to protect you. Whatever happens, I just—I wanted you to have a choice.”
“A choice about what?”
“Who knows where all of this will lead? But you’ve seen the reaction so far—Quentin and that Collective. And there is so much more that people don’t know. I can’t control what will happen once it is out of my hands.”
“It already is out of your hands. Quentin—Dr. Caton, whatever his name is, he knew everything. I think he’s the one who hacked into your computer system.”
My dad shakes his head. “He didn’t know everything. I realized some of the data had been compromised, and that my personal email had been, too. What I didn’t realize was that my cell phone had been hacked as well, probably using some kind of improvised IMSI device to listen in on my actual calls, too. And I certainly didn’t realize that they were sending you all those texts after we spoke at the gas station, manipulating what I had said and using it against you in an even worse way. They must have blocked my subsequent texts and calls to you somehow by accessing either your phone or the central servers, because on my end they all seemed to be going through. Because I never stopped trying to find you.” He shakes his head. “In any case, I’ve done additional research since my study that Dr. Caton certainly doesn’t know about. That’s all I’ve been doing since then, actually, looking exclusively at the Outliers.”
“And?” I ask. “Because you seem worried, Dad, you honestly do. And worried, as you know, is not actually the best for me.”
“I’m not worried, but I am concerned. And I want to be honest with you now—as honest as I possibly can be.”
“Okay, but if this is you trying to calm me down—it’s not working.”
“Well, as you know, there were only the three Outliers that were among the first group of participants—actually two and then you. Of course, you weren’t a part of the actual study. And I suspected right away that it was likely the phenomenon was somehow tied to age. You were all younger than the other participants.”
“Yeah, Dr. Simons—or whoever he was—said it was all an age thing and those three—or two, and me, I guess—were all under eighteen.”
“Well, that’s not exactly true. Eighteen wouldn’t be some bright-line cutoff in any case—changes with age are fluid and individual specific. Perhaps it’s something related to brain structure or connectivity. Both are so dynamic in the teenage years. And it could be that whatever aspect of the brain is enabling this nonvisual, nonauditory emotional perception disappears in adulthood because it has been allowed to lie fallow.”