tell me that I’m not losing my mind. But everything is wrong.
“Tenner, take a seat,” Barclay says.
I can’t sit down and discuss anything with Barclay. I can’t even look at him because I know he’s lied to me. Again. I know he’s kept this from me, that he brought me here, made me go through hell to break Elijah out, and he knew that Ben had done this. He knew that if we made it this far, I would find out. And he made me find out this way.
I can’t believe I trusted him, that I didn’t see this coming, that I sat on the couch in his mother’s house and listened to him tell me stories about his life and I thought we were friends.
The rage from that idea boils somewhere deep inside me. It burns deep in my chest, because I can’t believe he’s put me in this position—and worse, I can’t believe I was this stupid. I clench my hands into fists to keep them from shaking, and I wrap that anger around myself, because I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want to come through a portal and chase after bad guys. I didn’t want to watch Ben walk out of my life, or find out the best friend I have left was abducted. But I have to do something about it.
“Tenner—”
I turn back to the table, reach out, and slap Barclay across the face. Hard.
A few people at nearby tables gasp. The force blows his face to the side, and Barclay’s skin is already red by the time I pull my hand back. It stings as I sit back down.
He sits paralyzed for a moment, his head to the side, mouth slightly ajar. Whether he’s shocked, ashamed, or actually hurt, I don’t care. He deserved that, and if he didn’t know it before, he knows it now.
I take a deep breath, swallow back the flood of emotions. “You said we’d keep each other in the loop. You promised me that I would know everything I needed to.”
“You didn’t need to know this,” he says as he turns back to face me. “You needed to stay focused.”
“You don’t get to be the judge of what I need,” I say. “Anything that concerns Ben or me or my family, that’s stuff I need to know. Got it?”
Barclay doesn’t answer. He just rubs his jaw.
If he thinks he’s going to get away with not answering, he’s wrong. “I’ve had a pretty rough night. In fact, ever since you started following me around, things have gone to shit. Before I go any further, I want to know everything that both of you know.”
Elijah shrugs. “No fucking problem here.”
Barclay hesitates. He looks up at me with those big, stupid blue eyes, and I try to ignore the way something in my chest twists at the hurt I see in them. He has no right to feel hurt right now. “I don’t have all the answers,” he says. “I’ve got some suspicions, sure, but I need them confirmed by either Elijah or Ben or maybe someone else. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
It’s a shitty apology—if it even is one. But it doesn’t matter.
Because he’s right about one thing. We have a source at this table, someone who can give us concrete information about what the hell has been going on.
I look at Elijah.
He must know what I’m thinking because he says, “What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
He nods, raises his mug to his lips, drains the last of his tea, and puts the cup back down. Then he tells us everything that’s happened in the last few months. Everything that’s happened since he and Ben portaled back to their world and left me in the canyons behind Park Village with Alex’s body.
And it’s worse than I could have imagined.
03:00:47:36
When Ben, Elijah, and Reid tumbled through the portal and ended up in my world, they were ten years old. They spent every free moment afterward trying to find a way to get back to their world, back to their families. Back to where they belonged.
But when they finally did, seven years had gone by.
And seven years in the wake of a national tragedy, it turns out, is a long time.
They expected to walk back into their world, back into their families, back into the lives they left behind. Only, the world they left behind wasn’t there anymore. In its place was a world much different.