Free Xvi by Julia Karr Page B

unpacking. “Put these over there.”
    I arranged things under Gran’s direction and the knot in my stomach loosened a bit. I didn’t trust Ed, but with Gran and Pops as Dee’s legal guardians, he wouldn’t be able to take her away. At least not without a fight.
    But still, I was 99 percent sure that it had been Ed at the hospital. Which made me think he knew what had happened to Ginnie before it hit the news. I wondered if I would ever know what really happened to her. Anger surged through me. I wanted whoever killed her caught.
    Gran’s PAV beeped. “Oh, that’s Harriet. I’d better make sure she’s all right. She’s not been well since they took Johnny away. You tell your sister it’s time for you both to get ready for bed.”

    Lying on my new bed, an inflato-mat Gran had borrowed from Harriet, I stared out the window. Dee was across the room, asleep on Pops’s old army cot. The rhythm of her breathing was occasionally interrupted by a catch—she’d been crying herself to sleep every night, still. The only crying I’d done was after the B.O.S.S. agents left. Since then, I’d willed every tear to stay inside me. Dee needed me to be strong. And so I was.
    Squeezed between the buildings across the way, the night sky provided a backdrop for a pale quarter moon. I wondered if somewhere in Chicago my father, Alan Oberon, was looking at that same moon.
    All these years he’d been alive, but he’d never tried to see me or contact me. How could he do that? Even harder to comprehend was the reality that Ginnie had known the truth, but let me believe a lie. She always said that he had been her one true love. I couldn’t imagine he didn’t still love her, too. Was it because of me that he wasn’t there? Did he not want me? I had so many questions and no answers.
    I knew I had to find him and give him that book. Not for him, not for me, but for Ginnie.
    I tossed from one side to the other, willing sleep to come. Just as I’d dozed off, Dee’s PAV beeped. I jumped out of bed and grabbed her receiver before she woke up.
    “Hello?” I whispered.
    A click and then silence.
    Ed.

XI
    Next morning I got up at the same time as Gran. She was in the middle of the kitchen, surrounded by moving boxes, her back to me.
    I’d made up my mind to tell her what I knew. But she looked so frail and vulnerable, my knees trembled and my heart began fluttering. Before I could give in to my doubts, I blurted out, “Ginnie told me my father is still alive.”
    “Really?” She picked a coffee cup out of the box nearest her, unwrapped it, and rinsed it off in the sink. She usually made her own coffee in an ancient electric pot, but that morning she used the cook center. “I wonder why she would say a thing like that?”
    Hardly the reaction I’d expected after telling her that her only son, my father, was alive—instead of being dead for nearly sixteen years.
    “I believed her. She was dying. Why would she lie to me?”
    Gran filled up her cup and pushed a button on the chiller. White liquid swirled under the surface of the coffee.
    “She said that he was alive and probably right here in Chicago.” I looked hopefully at Gran. Maybe she knew already. Maybe she’d been keeping this same secret. But why?
    “Nina, dear.” She took a sip of her coffee. “He drowned on the way home from the hospital the night you were born. A transport forced him off the bridge by Wacker and Michigan. His body was never found.”
    The same story I’d heard a thousand times. No variation, no change. Except Ginnie had said different.
    Gran continued: “She was most certainly under the influence of that Infinity contraption. I don’t know much about it, and still can’t believe they used it on anyone besides a top-tier. Even then”—she looked off in the distance, her brow furrowed—“it’s rarely used. Just in extreme cases where there are permissions to be given or a will to be authenticated or something. Unless they were waiting for