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anything?”
    “I don’t know. Didn’t seem like there was any point.”
    I inched forward. “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?”
    His eyes moved from the magazine in my hand up to my face. “What’s this about?”
    “Just answer the question.”
    I wanted to know everything about Sam. I wanted him to trust me with his secrets. And since he couldn’t remember most of his life before the lab, asking him this was as close as I would get.
    “I think I like water.”
    “The ocean?”
    “It doesn’t matter what kind.”
    I held up the magazine. The cover was of a tropical island getaway. “Maybe this?” I flipped through it until I landed on a two-pagespread of the ocean. I tore the pages out and put them in the hatch. “Take them.”
    “Why?”
    I shrugged. “To hope.”
    He held the pictures up and studied them. After an excruciatingly long moment, he asked, “Do you have tape?”
    I fished around in my desk and pulled out a roll of packing tape. I slid it through the hatch.
    “Where would you go if you could go anywhere?” he asked.
    I knew I wanted to do things, see things, but what and where, I didn’t know. I stuck a hand in my jeans pocket. I thought of the Italian village I’d sketched. “Probably somewhere in Europe.”
    “Where are we, exactly?”
    “You mean… you don’t know?” We never talked about it. I just thought he knew. “Treger Creek, New York. It’s small. An everyone-knows-everyone kind of place.”
    “Does it say in my files where I was before here? What state I used to live in?”
    I tried to look anywhere but at the bareness of his torso. He had easily seven inches on me, so it was difficult to look him in the eye. “Not in the files I’ve read, but there are others upstairs.”
    “Could you look? I think it might help with the memory loss if I knew some details of my life before here.”
    I’d tried breaking into the upstairs filing cabinets the previous winter, but Dad had caught me. I’d never seen him as mad as hewas then, not even when I broke into the lab. I hadn’t dared try again.
    But things were different now. For one, I had permission to be in the lab, which gave me permission to read the files, right? And two… well, Sam was asking me to look.
    “Yeah.” I nodded. “I can do that.”
    “Thanks.” He leveled his shoulders. Any trace of the earlier discomfort had vanished.
    I pushed a strand of hair behind my ear. “Well… I should probably go. We’ll have to finish that chess game later. Tomorrow, maybe?”
    “Sure. Good night, Anna.”
    “ ’Night.”
    I looked back and saw him taping the magazine pages above his desk. I thought of the awkward way he fidgeted when he apologized, and I couldn’t help smiling.
    “Oh, by the way,” I said, before I punched in the code to leave, “Connor is coming tomorrow… so… I just thought you should know.”
    His expression darkened. “Thanks for the warning. I hate his surprise visits.”
    “Me, too.”

    The code to get into the lab was 17-25-10. Seventeen was Mom’s birthday; twenty-five was the date of Mom and Dad’s anniversary;and ten was for October, the month they got married. Dad, being predictably predictable, set the code to the filing cabinet in the study as 10-17-25. It took me only four tries to get it right.
    When the drawer popped open, the tracks squeaked and I froze, listening. The rest of the house was silent save for the ticking of the clock above Dad’s fireplace.
    I found Sam’s files in the second drawer. There were five green legal-sized folders, each of which held smaller manila folders. I pulled out the two farthest back and sat down with them on the leather couch.
    Seeing nothing worthwhile in the first folder—just basic logs and charts—I moved on to the second. That’s where I found tiny bits of information about Sam’s life at the start of the program.
    There were notes on plain paper in a barely legible handwriting I didn’t