I dig through my bag for the reports and my hand brushes something else made of paper: Adam’s origami unicorn, the one he made from a napkin at that first lunch together. It’s a bit crushed and rumpled now, but as I run my hands over the folds, all the memories of Adam that I’ve tried to repress flood my brain.

My feelings for him made me blind, made me go against everything I’ve learned in my seventeen years: to not trust anyone but myself. But despite everything that happened, despite the fact he lied to me and betrayed our team, I still can’t believe he’s a murderer. He may have been working for Aether, but the way I found Trent and Zoe…Adam could never have done that. I don’t know if anything between us was real, but I know him on some level, and he’s not a killer.

It doesn’t matter. I’m done with Adam. We had a brief fling, but it’s over now. If he cared for me at all, he would have been honest with me about what he was doing. I crumple the unicorn into a ball and throw it across the bathroom.

Future-Adam’s words come back to me, telling me to trust his younger self when the time came. I thought he meant that moment in the rain when Adam asked me to open up to him, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe he meant before the aperture opened, when Adam said he was recruited to get the cure. He never got the chance to explain, and I never gave him another one. And like Future-Adam said, we’re never going to see each other again.

I head for the door, but as I step over the crumpled unicorn I pause. Wait. Future-Adam said he never saw any of us after we got back. Does that mean if I go to Adam now I’ll be doing something different, something that didn’t happen in the other timeline? Or did he lie to me about that too?

I have to make a decision. But whatever I choose, there’s no way to know if I’m changing my fate or just following through with it.

The first path is the one the normal Elena would follow, the one my head says to follow now—to forget Adam and go through with my plan to use the evidence against Aether.

But the other path is a complete shift from everything I know, the opposite of what I’d normally do, and the thing my heart desperately wants me to do: to trust Adam.

I pick up the origami unicorn and make my choice.