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Hallie
Dad’s bedroom door was open.
“You did it,” I said from the hall, “again.”
Even though it was almost midnight, he still had on his tie. His holster and gun sat on the top of his dresser. I knew the safety was on. For the millionth time, I started to wonder what drove him to constantly arm himself inside his own home, but stopped.
The answer was my mother.
He gestured me inside. “I did what again?”
I’d showered and changed. My knees were completely healed, but my legs still felt wobbly. From my fall. Not from nerves.
I sat down in the armchair by the window. Bulletproof glass, of course. “You brought somebody in to handle business you should’ve taken care of yourself.”
He didn’t look at me, just loosened his tie.
“Dune knows I’m the Infinityglass. So do you.”
Now Dad spun around to face me head-on. “He told you that?”
“No, Daddy,” I said softly. “Mom did.”
Sadness came into him slowly, pulling down his shoulders and the corners of his mouth. I hated to watch him carry regret for her choices. She’d thrown us off so carelessly, and he’d tried to make up for her absence. He’d really tried.
I wanted to spare him any more pain, but I wanted the truth, too. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Dad turned his back, took off his belt, and untucked his shirt. “I don’t know enough. Definitely not the kind of answers you’re going to want. When did your mother tell you?”
“She called and offered to help, all motherly-like. It was the same day you told me about Poe being in the hospital. About his betrayal with her.”
He grimaced. “We must have been on her mind.”
“There’s a first time for everything.” I focused on some loose threads at the bottom of my Lady Gaga T-shirt.
“Poe … I might have been too harsh. I don’t know if he knew what he was doing when he helped your mother.”
“He’s been in the hospital, but he hasn’t even called. That’s a pretty good sign he’s hiding something.”
Dad just frowned.
“How did you find out about the Infinityglass and … me?”
He picked up his ever-present glass of Maker’s Mark. “Gerald Turner. He’d been doing some research, and he found some things.”
Gerald Turner had been my godfather, and a professor at Bennett University in Memphis. He’d also been murdered in October. “What kinds of things?”
“Clues that the Infinityglass was human, and that the specific gene for it is dormant.” Dad frowned and fiddled with the top button of his dress shirt. He wasn’t a fiddler. “For the Infinityglass gene to become—activated, for lack of a better word—he or she had to come into contact with something that triggered a genetic response, a stressor that kicked that specific gene into overdrive.”
“Dr. Turner just called you, out of the blue, to talk about the Infinityglass? And Mom called me to talk about it, too. He lived in Memphis; Mom’s been operating out of Memphis. That’s not a coincidence at all.”
“Neither was the timing of his death.”
The implications weighed heavily on me, and from the lines on Dad’s face, he felt them, too.
“Gerald and I talked about Liam Ballard and the Hourglass. He believed they were trustworthy. Then Liam confirmed Gerald’s claims that you were the Infinityglass. I guess your mother telling you reinforces it again.”
“And then you hired the Hourglass, and they sent you Dune.”
