“I’m not going to let this go, Dad.”
“You have to, Adeline.”
“I can’t.”
“If you don’t, it will eat you up. That’s what scares me the most. It scares me more than Absolom. My fear is that when I’m gone, you’ll obsess over what happened. That you won’t move on with your life. I don’t want this to take your life too.”
“Scares you enough to confess?”
Sam clenched his jaw.
“I’m not dumb, Dad. I know that I’m the only reason you would do it. Me and Ryan. How do you think that makes me feel?”
Sam exhaled. “I’m begging you, Adeline. Move on. It’ll destroy you if you don’t.”
“No, Dad. It will give me strength.”
“Maybe at first. But when you stop making progress, that fire will turn to frustration and then bitterness and then it will rot you from the inside out. You’ll be a shell of who you were meant to be—all because of hate and resentment about what happened. If you don’t get free from it, it will take everything from you.”
“Well, good news: I don’t have anything left to take. Not after they beam you to the dinosaur age. We lost Mom. Now you.”
“Wrong. You have Ryan. And you have to let it go for his sake. You are all he has left. Don’t desert him, not for some quest of vengeance for me.”
Sam waited, hoping Adeline would see reason. When she said nothing, he pressed on. “This is my fate, Adeline. You have to accept it.”
“I don’t accept it. I never will.”
“These are the last hours we have together. I don’t want to spend them arguing with you. I want to spend them doing what I should have done more of: listening. I want you to tell me all your plans for the future.”
“I don’t have plans, Dad. I have a plan. One plan. Do you want to hear it?”
Sam exhaled, knowing where this was going.
“I’m going to figure out who killed Nora. I’m going to get them convicted. Then I’m going to get you back, Dad. You can either help me or desert me, but it won’t change anything. I’m going to finish this, if it takes the rest of my life.”
“Can we make a deal?”
Adeline squinted at him, then nodded once.
“Two years.”
She cocked her head. “For what?”
“I’ll tell you what I know on one condition.”
“Which is?”
“Starting today, you can spend two years of your life trying to right this wrong. Not a second or a minute or an hour more.”
Adeline fixed his gaze. “Sure.”
“I know that look. I’m serious, Adeline. Two years. No more.”
“I don’t like this deal.”
“It’s the only one you’re going to get. Because I made a deal too—a promise to your mother that I would do my very best to take care of you.”
“After you go through the machine, you can’t stop me from spending fifty years on this.”
“True. But you’ll have to live with knowing you broke the last promise you made to me.” Sam stared at her. “Promise me. Like I promised her.”
“Dad—”
“Two years. No more.”
The silence seemed to bend time more than Absolom. Finally, Adeline breathed a single-word response. “Fine.”
“Good.”
“Do you know who killed Nora?”
“Only a general idea at this point.”
“Who?”
“There’s something you should know first, Adeline.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to tell you a secret. Two, actually. They are very big secrets, things only six people in the entire world know.” Sam caught himself. “Only five people now. I think these secrets are the key to figuring out who killed Nora. And to clearing my name.”
Sam looked at his daughter and mentally prepared himself to tell her the secret he had harbored for so many years. Unexpectedly, he felt a strange sense of relief at knowing it was about to happen, like a long-awaited release was finally at hand, a confession to one of the two people he cared about most.
“We’re frauds.”
Adeline cocked her head. “Who?”
“The Absolom Six. We’re frauds.”
“Dad, I don’t understand.”
“We never meant for Absolom to be crime deterrent.”
“That’s your secret?”
“No. The real secret is stranger than that. The truth is, we never even intended to create a time machine at all.”