tongue. “You’ve been lying. You told me you filed a report. That you had no idea who took me. How was I—”
“Uh-uh,” Ted says. “I never said I had no idea who took you. I said I wanted you to figure out who did.”
I stare at him. Unable to blink. “You wanted me to figure out it was you,” I say, “because it was… an Experiment.”
“Of course it was!” Ted beams at me.
Seconds pass, but his grin lingers. As if he’s waiting for me, too, to break into a smile.
“How…” I start. “How could you do that to me?”
Ted waves off the question. “Oh, it had nothing to do with you. Not at first, anyway. You came into it later, yes, but initially it was all about—”
“Astrid.”
As I speak her name, I’m tugged toward another thought, one that’s unraveling so quickly it’s almost a blur. But then I hear him finish his sentence—“Brennan”—and I lose the thread completely.
“Brennan?” I ask. “You and Brennan… did it together? The kidnapping? The—”
“What? No, of course not.”
“Then what are you saying?”
Ted throws his hands into the air. “You should have seen how smug he was!”
I wait for more, but he offers me nothing. “When?”
“That time he stayed with us. Those two insufferable weeks. It was right on the heels of his latest book deal, this time for some drivel about child abductions. And as he’s standing there, going on and on about his ungodly contract, this abomination he’s going to unleash onto the world, he has the audacity to criticize my work.”
Ted scratches his neck so hard I almost check his nails for blood.
“It was right here in this room,” he continues. “The unbelievable nerve of that man. He grabs a stack of notes off my desk, does this dramatic pause like he’s gunning for an Oscar, and then he looks me right in the eyes and says, ‘Ted, these games were fun when we were just kids in grad school, but if you ever want to be taken seriously, you’re going to have to do some real work.’ ”
Ted waits for me to react, but my face is stone.
“Can you believe that? He’s the one playing Connect the Dots with his research and he says I’m in the kiddie pool?” He shakes his head. “ ‘I’m saying this as a friend,’ he told me. That’s how he framed it. And that was it. That’s when I got the idea.”
He shoots forward in his chair. “It didn’t actually start as an Experiment, see. It started as a way to take Brennan down. To shatter that fraudulent foundation of his supposed success and watch him flail around in the rubble.”
I stare at him. At this stranger who’s as alien to me as he was when he was wearing the mask. “You’re not making any sense,” I say.
Ted chuffs out a breath. “He was writing a book about child abductions. So I staged one. I decided to take someone from Foster, where he was doing an event, so the police would connect it back to him once I planted some evidence.”
My throat feels dry as cement. It scrapes as I speak. “You staged a… You mean you planned to frame Brennan?”
“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”
“But why?”
As Ted exhales, there’s something besides impatience in the sound. Something fragile. Like the air is disappearing before it even leaves his mouth.
“I’m ashamed to admit this,” he says, “but until that ‘real work’ comment, I’d actually held out hope that everything he’d done after grad school—all the diluted case studies and frivolous experiments—was just a way to gain a platform. And that once he had that, he’d introduce the world to me and my ideas, and then we’d resume our work—the real real work—together.”
Ted leans back. Crosses his arms. “But then he said that to me. And I knew it was over.” His eyes bore into mine. “Even now, I can’t help but think back to the man Brennan used to be. You have no idea, that kind of betrayal, having someone abandon you in pursuit of their own glory.”
My eyes water. My throat swells.
“And okay, I’ll admit,” Ted adds, “I didn’t have it completely planned out. I was in a rage, I wasn’t thinking clearly, I only wanted to see Brennan lose his sham of an empire. I wasn’t sure how I was going to pin it on him, or what evidence I was going to use exactly, because I had to move quickly. His event was