“You and Mom…” I start, twisting my watchband around my wrist. “You guys—what you do—your work, I mean—”

“Adam, are you okay?” He interrupts my nonsensical rambling, taking a step toward me with concern in his eyes.

“Do you want some tea?” I blurt, suddenly intimidated by my parents’ office in a way I haven’t been since I was small.

“Sure, kid.” He smiles, patting me on the shoulder, leading me out of the office and into the kitchen.

I go about my familiar tea-making routine in a heavy silence. Paranoid thoughts run around my head—does he know about Caleb? How could he know? What would he do if he did know? Should I tell him?

No. It’s not my secret to tell. And it’s not that I don’t trust my parents, but there are things I don’t know about them. That thought scares me more than any other.

“So,” my dad says as he hands me a mug, “what’s going on?”

“I’ve just been…” How do I ask him about Atypicals without telling him Atypicals exist? “I guess I’ve been curious about what you and Mom do.”

“Okay…” he leads.

“Yeah, so,” I flounder, “what exactly do you guys do?”

“What?” He smiles a bit, like a seventeen-year-old asking his parents about what they do for a living is silly and strange, which I guess it is.

“I get that you’re neuroscientists, but what do you actually do?” I ask again.

“Mostly research, these days.”

“You realize how vague that sounds, right?” I scoff, and he sighs heavily.

“Adam, we’ve been over this: a lot of our work is confidential,” he explains.

“But why?” I press. “You’re scientists, you’re not spies. And don’t give me any of that crap about brains being secret depending on whose brain it is, I get plenty of that from Mom,” I add when it looks like he’s going to feed me some company line he and Mom have predetermined.

“Son,” he starts, and it instantly puts my guard up, “we still know so little about the brain. We’ve made more progress in the past twenty years than the previous two thousand, but we’ve barely scratched the surface.”

“What’s your point?” I ask.

“Knowledge is important,” he says, as if that phrase isn’t used so much in this house that it might as well be embroidered on a pillow, “but sometimes more knowledge means more danger.”

“What are you talking about?” I ask. “What danger?”

“Some people use knowledge as a weapon,” he says calmly. “The more we discover, the more opportunity there is for the wrong people to exploit that information for their own gain.”