Forget Tomorrow - Pintip Dunn Page 0,89

say Jessa and I have the same father?”

My mother touches my face. “She looks just like you. I thought you’d guessed. I thought that’s why you pestered me so much about your father coming home.”

I push her hand away. No. I’m not letting her off that easy. “You lied to me. You told me Jessa had a different father, and I believed you.”

She winces, as if I’m throwing pebbles at her instead of accusations. “I had to tell you something. You wouldn’t stop asking questions. You wouldn’t drop the subject. What was I supposed to do?”

“Tell me the truth!” I dig my fingernails into my palms. “Do you know how much I wanted my father? I thought if I was good enough, if I behaved perfectly and followed all the rules at school, he would come back to us. But he didn’t.” I open my palms. Little crescents decorate my skin like a henna tattoo. “Now you tell me he was here after all. Didn’t he want to see me, at least once? Didn’t he care how I turned out?”

“Oh, dear heart,” my mother says. “Your father loved you so much. He would be so proud to see how you’ve grown up.”

“So why didn’t he come see me?”

“He couldn’t.” My mother lowers her hand as if to pick up her mug, but I’ve already thrown it into the sink. “You know your father was a scientist. In particular, he studied the displacement of physical bodies in space.”

I make a face. I’ve always known my father’s profession, and it’s never bothered me. But that was before I was locked in Limbo. Before Bellows treated my brain like his own personal experiment.

“Callie, he was a lab rat himself,” my mother says, as if she can hear what I’m thinking. “That’s what I meant about FuMA taking Jessa. They’re so desperate to find the Key they’ve started detaining the offspring of every person with known psychic ability.”

Bellows’s words about my father echo in my mind. The information is classified. If your mother didn’t tell you, I cannot divulge it.

Nausea rocks my stomach. I thought the scientist was lying. I thought he was just trying to upset me.

“What was Dad’s psychic ability?” My voice is low, like it’s trying to hug the floor. “Could he send memories, like Jessa?”

“No. He could teleport his body from one place to another. He thought by studying himself, he could figure out how to move his body into a different time altogether.”

“You mean time travel.”

“Yes.” My mother jostles my mug, and tea splashes onto the table. She pushes her fingers through the liquid. “When the first future memories arrived, the scientific community was beside itself. They felt it proved that time travel was possible. What are future memories, after all, but memories sent back in time? Your father became obsessed with the idea. He felt his psychic ability made him uniquely qualified to study this field. He was convinced he would pioneer a new frontier of science.”

She takes a shuddering breath. “So he decided to send his body to another time. I begged him not to go. The scientific knowledge wasn’t there. We couldn’t ensure he would come back safely. But he said the price of knowledge is risk.”

The pain around her mouth is so deep I shiver. This is Mom. She’s not supposed to look so lost, so helpless. She’s supposed to hold our family together. Except we’re not a family anymore. We’ve been ripped apart, flung to different corners of the world. There’s nothing left for her to hold.

“I’m sure you can guess what happened,” she says. “He sent himself to a different time, and he never came back.”

“But he must have come back, at least once. Because of Jessa.”

My mother shakes her head. “No. I never saw him again after that day.”

“But then how…?”

She sighs, intertwining her fingers together. I think she’s going to brush me off again, like she has so many times before. But she doesn’t. “You know how I always said I never got a future memory?”

I nod.

“Well, I lied. I did receive one, but it wasn’t good. FuMA had no way of tracking the memories back then, so no one even knew I’d gotten one. I thought I had a shot at changing it. I distanced myself from friends, stopped associating with the Underground. All in hopes of altering my future.”

My heart begins to pound. “Did it work?”

“Yes. In a fashion. That person I knew who changed her future? I was