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Back 3 a.m.
Chapters (67)
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  67. 3:46 a.m.

Wiping my eyes, I ask Ingrid, “Was it hard to find this place?”

She sniffs a couple times, then says, “Your directions in the email were pretty good.”

Climb through the broken window, go into the back right office, pull off the sewer grate, climb down, there should be a door with a flashlight holding it open.

I spend the next fifteen minutes telling them all that happened: my OPIC/Opik realization, breaking in, seeing Ewen, how he had masterminded everything — even having Ingrid look into Jennifer Nubers’ murder — that it was all just another experiment in behavior modification to see if he could control my actions.

I tell them how he strapped me to the table, how I’d escaped.

“Your hand,” Ingrid said.

“Yeah, I don’t even want to think what it looks like under all that gauze. I know for certain I broke my pinky, and I’m pretty sure the muscle and tendon on top of my thumb were torn off.”

“We’ll have to get you to a hospital,” my dad says.

I nod, then continue my narrative.

I tell them how Ewen said he could fix me, how I sent them emails so they would know where to find me and how to act when I didn’t know who they were. But that when I got into the machine, I started to have second thoughts. Then how I put Ewen in the machine.

“What happened to Ewen?” Ingrid asks.

“Good question.”

I push through the door and into the lab.

Ewen is lying on the floor of the lab, he is curled up in the fetal position. With his bald head, he looks just like a newborn.

“He’s Benjamin Button,” my dad says.

I hadn’t seen the movie, but he quickly explains it is about a baby who is born looking like an old man, then ages backward over time.

“Pretty much,” Ingrid agrees.

I stand over him.

“Sidney?”

He looks at me with his wide blue eyes. Confused. Scared. He mumbles gibberish.

“What should we do with him?” Ingrid asks. “We can’t just leave him here.”

“You want to take him home with you, Dad?” I ask. “With Ingrid, Lassie, and me gone, you and Murdock might like the company.”

“I changed enough diapers in my day,” my dad says with a laugh.

I’m reminded that the drooling, ninety-year-old infant on the floor is my biological father.

I decide he isn’t.

The man standing next to me, the man that changed all my diapers . . . he is my dad.

:19

“Here you go, punk,” I say, tossing four jingle balls to Lassie on the bed.

His eyes bulge and he darts around, deciding which one to play with first.

I let out a laugh.

A lot had happened over the past three days.

After leaving the OPIC building, I asked my dad if I could have a minute alone with Ingrid.