“Still, it’s not cool. I remember when my ability first started—I mean, hell, even now, I make mistakes,” he sighed. “Plenty of mistakes. And you’re so young, your ability is still so new to you … I shouldn’t have gotten so mad at you.”

“It’s really okay, Mark,” I said. “I was an asshole. I knew what I was doing.”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t just being a dick to you because of the dreamdiving thing,” Mark grumbled.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It’s Damien,” he said. “I didn’t trust that … that he didn’t get to you somehow. That you weren’t…”

“That I wasn’t like him?” I guessed and Mark nodded.

“I don’t know how much he told you about what happened between us but it was … I don’t know.” He sighed again. “I’m still messed up over it I think. And it was hard to trust someone who was friends with him.”

“I get it.” I nodded and took a bite out of a piece of bacon. “If it makes you feel any better, I also thought he was someone I could trust. I…”

I looked at Mark, wondering how honest I could be. His face had the pallor of the very hungover but was open and inviting so I took a dive and admitted something I hadn’t before.

“I liked him,” I said simply. It shouldn’t have been such a big confession, but it was, and I knew Mark would understand that. “I really liked him.”

He nodded. “Yeah … yeah, I really liked him too.”

That seemed to be the big elephant in the room, because from there we were able to talk openly in a way we hadn’t up to that point, and I finally was able to ask him about the AM. I didn’t probe him about his time there specifically—I might be a curious person to a fault sometimes, but even I know when something is private-private—but I did ask him what he thought about the likelihood that the AM was hiding something that could help my dad.

“I mean, the AM could be hiding anything,” he said. “But I don’t know what motivation they’d have to keep a cure to dementia to themselves. That’s something they could apply to humans too—I’m sure something like that would increase their government contracts tenfold.”

“But what if my dad is the experiment?” I asked. “I mean, he was totally fine until September and then all of a sudden … he’s sick? I know he goes to the AM for his checkups, so—”

“Look, I know that you want an easy fix for your family, I get that,” he said. “And trust me, I’m the last person to defend the AM, but I’m not sure even they would do something like that.”