Total pages in book: 117
Estimated words: 113051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
She pauses and gives her head a shake. “I have to say, the person you are is much more pleasant. Still a firecracker but with a lot more morals. Your ambition has waned. I don’t know if it’s because you fell for Wes earlier than the first time around and that he’s been a good influence on you. But I suppose we’ll never know.”
“The problem is,” Michael adds, “when we got rid of your ADHD, we got rid of a lot of things that made you brilliant. That were also a hindrance, yes. But you didn’t have that focus anymore. That drive or ambition. It wasn’t the same. The Sydney you were before was able to give everything up for the chance to feel worthy and you, this you? You didn’t have it in you.”
“You’re just not smart enough,” Everly says simply. “Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with that. You’re still really smart, Syd. But you’re not a genius. You had a genius in you, waiting to be untapped at the right moment, but now…the well has run dry. Frankly, I do blame Wes. You didn’t fall for him so fast the first time around. You took your time to find each other. And before you fell in love with him, you found your role here at the foundation. You and I? We became friends. Really good friends.”
She sighs, staring down at her hands and shaking her head. “The first time around, you blew me away with your thoughts. Your ideas. And I thought, yes, this is exactly who we need on our team. You were the answer to our prayers. When Wes staggered into our cabin that night…” She looks away, gnawing on her lower lip. “I thought my world was over. He said you were dead. I looked at you, at the blood coming out of your head, and I knew. I knew you were gone.”
A shaking breath escapes her lips, tears spilling down her cheeks that she angrily wipes away. “But there was hope, you know? I thought, why not do to Syd as Syd would do unto others? So we did. And it worked. It fucking worked, Sydney. You’re here right now, proof of that.”
“It’s just a pity you’re not the same girl,” Michael says gruffly.
Thank god I’m not the same girl, I think.
“Wes got to you before your brain had time to redevelop,” Everly says, brow furrowing with disappointment. “You fixated on him. Not your work. Not your dreams. You ignored all that for a man you barely knew. But I suppose you did know him, all this time, on some level.”
I did. I did know.
I felt the connection.
I knew we were inevitable.
“It’s romantic, isn’t it?” Everly adds with a dreamy sigh. “The fact that you found him and fell for him all over again. That you can be separated by time and death, and still nothing can keep you apart.”
Nothing could keep us apart.
“You know, you made his dreams come true,” she continues. “He didn’t want to do it. He didn’t want you to come back, not this way, but he was so desperate to see you again that in the end, he decided he would do anything. He never stopped loving you, Syd. No matter what. Even when he mistook obsession for love. Even through death, he didn’t give up. Of course he had no idea how hard it would be on him to see you alive again. To watch you walk into Madrona not knowing who he was, while inside, he was dying for you. He’s had to pretend every single day that you weren’t the love of his life.”
Michael laughs dryly. “He didn’t do a very good job of it. But he had to keep an eye on you, eh? He had to make sure there were no problems, that your brain was functioning. Poor fucker. I almost feel sorry for him. But nothing will hurt him as much as what’s to come.”
He gets up from the coffee table, looming above me.
“And while I’m sure you want time to come to terms with all that we’ve told you, that time has an expiration date,” he says, the words sending ice through my veins. “Originally, we thought the experiment was only successful if we could study you without you knowing what had happened. Without you remembering death. It’s why we reset your brain to start over again on the seaplane, setting it back to your first flight over. We hoped that had been seamless.”
“But now that we have Clayton, we realize there is the capacity for the brain to reconcile death. That knowing you’ve died won’t break you. That you can continue on with the same memories. But unfortunately for you, Sydney, you know too much. The person you are doesn’t coexist with the person you were. It can’t. If we let you go, you’ll only cause trouble.”