“That’s the other thing,” Ollie presses on. “Levi’s there, on that island. I know what that’s like. How painful and lonely it is. And there’s not a damn thing I can do to help him, because I’m afraid. Of going there, and having to see my father again. So I’m here at school acting like everything’s peachy, when the truth is, I’ve abandoned him. I’m letting the guy who’s practically my brother rot in that place!” Ollie stands, wrapping his arms around himself. I feel a pulsing in my chest and in my veins, like all I want to do is close the distance between us and make him not have to feel this, any of it.

But I don’t do that. I simply watch him, my heart breaking for him.

“And everything that’s happening with the Similars,” he goes on, pacing the grass. I’m instantly reminded of how Levi used to do that. He was always so pensive, never letting me in. “That’s all because of my father too. This is only the beginning, Emma. Do you see that? How Harlowe and those other kids are out for blood? My mom won’t be able to stop it. You can’t stop a freight train once it’s left the station, can you?”

“We have to,” I say. “We can’t let them be deported. Ejected from the only home they have—”

“I wake up every day thinking about my role in all this,” Ollie says, and beneath that shaggy hair and his lovely gray eyes is a face so somber, it’s painful to gaze at it. “Gravelle created the Similars in the first place to get revenge on my mom.”

“On all the parents,” I remind him, wishing there was something I could do to take away his pain for good.

“It all started with my mom, didn’t it?” he says. “They were married, and then they grew apart. He got angry, and that started scaring my mother, so gradually she let him see less and less of me. She used Gravelle’s angry outbursts against him in court, to get full custody. And that’s when Booker replaced him as my dad.”

“None of that was anything you could help! You don’t even remember it! You were a little kid!”

“But if I’d stayed in his life. If he hadn’t felt abandoned by all the people he loved,” Ollie says. “If I had found out who he was, and reached out to him…”

“He faked his death, Ollie! You couldn’t have known that he was really alive.”

“But before that. If I had figured out a way to let him know I still cared. Maybe he never would have cloned me, or the others. And everyone would have been spared all this pain.”