I never made it to the swimming pool that week. Adam insisted that I go to a few classes, that he wouldn't let me uproot my life for him. I moped my way to the T station, anxiously writhed in my seat through Futurism, avoiding eye contact with Jin, and practically flew home to Adam.

Piper had left nothing but vegan food in the fridge—her latest obsession, after the green-shake craze that she had thrust upon us in the fall—and so Adam ran out to the store at one point to buy some steaks and lunch meat. I warned him, half-jokingly, that he better have eaten all of it by the time she returned. And so he did.

He beat me several times at Trivial Pursuit, which was not surprising as he knew everything about history and literature. I, in turn, taught him the definition of "Netflix and chill"—an expression he had heard before but had never actually done after so many years of restless travel.

"I want to be normal with you," he said to me on the couch five minutes after the movie started—a sci-fi tragedy about sentient robots in an unforgiving alien world. "I never had normal before."

"Will you get bored?" I asked, snuggled up against him in the glow of the TV screen.

"No," he said, but he had to think about it for a second.

"Are you sure?"

He kissed me instead of answering. He carried me upstairs just as the robot planet was being invaded by a hostile species—humans.

He was gone for several hours on Wednesday for his first in-person class. His student teaching hours were starting up soon, and he warned me they would be all-consuming. I spent the afternoon sitting in the bay window, trying to study, looking up every five minutes to see if he was back. Every morning we'd say we were going to find him an apartment that day, and every night we'd go to bed realizing we hadn't done it.

"This isn't a bed," he said to me one night, struggling to fall asleep, "it's an escape pod."

"I'll buy a bigger bed."

"I'll get a bigger one for the apartment," he countered.

"Yeah."

He went to sleep on the couch so he could stretch out, but around three in the morning I went down and collected him, led him back upstairs by his hand, and slept with his arm around me like a security blanket.

When I woke up again, the sun was shining through the curtains. I found him standing in his underwear by my chest of drawers, pulling Sage's ring from my jewelry box. "Why'd you keep this?" he asked. I couldn't tell if his tone was charmed or accusatory. Sometimes with Adam they were one and the same.

"It's stupid," I answered, sitting up a bit. "I thought I would send it back to her someday."

"It's not stupid." He turned the ring in his fingers. I couldn't help but admire his profile in the soft morning light from my window, the way a halo glowed around his smooth skin. The arch of his spine.

Then he brought it back to me in bed and slid it onto my right ring finger, the place where it used to go.

"What are you doing?" I blushed.

"It's my promise to you," he said. "To protect you. Plus I just like seeing it there." Then he climbed back into bed and I missed all my classes that day.

By Friday I had roughly ten hours worth of work to catch up on, the fridge was empty, and Robbie and Piper were due back that night.

"Morning, sleepyhead," he said, waking me with a kiss to the forehead. It had taken me several days to realize that by the time I woke up every morning around seven, Adam had already gotten up, run a lap around Boston, done an entire sit-up routine in the living room, showered, and climbed back into bed.

So he did have to work for those abs. He was human after all.

He handed me my coffee and I sat up, woozy. "Can we stay like this forever?"

He laughed and rubbed my head. "Grabbed yesterday's mail for you," he said instead of answering, and tossed a bunch of letters on my lap.

It was mostly bills and political ads. I was about to throw the whole bunch onto the floor to make room for Adam when a certain letter caught my eye: handwritten address, blue ink. And a post-office stamp that clearly stated its origin of Portland, Oregon.

Her handwriting hadn't changed since I was a kid. I remembered suddenly the notes she used to leave on the kitchen counter when she'd go off to run errands, leaving Robbie and I home alone for hours after school. "Going to store. Eat a snack." "No more Pop-Tarts. Fruit." "Back by 6."

My fingers fumbled as I tried to unseal the envelope with my thumb. It wasn't the first time I had seen a letter from her arrive at the house. She had sent some bundles of forwarded mail to Robbie a couple times.

But it was the first time the letter had been addressed to me.

"You okay, sweetheart?" Adam asked from the corner of the room where he'd been rifling through his duffel for a clean shirt.

But the look on my face must have answered the question for him. I could feel my eyebrows drawing together in worry. He came up and took the letter from my nervous hands.

"Who's it from?" he asked, though he must have suspected the answer.

"Rain." I used the name that Adam would know for her—the one she had used when he met her as a teenager, and not Ana, her true name, which she had reverted to by the time she was raising me.

"I thought you didn't talk to her."

"I don't."

"Marina," he said, a warning to be truthful.

"I swear."

"Okay, I believe you." He sat on the end of the bed, retrieving from the envelope what appeared to be several sheets of paper so light they actually crinkled in his hands. "Do you want me to read it?"

I nodded, clutching my coffee mug to hide my face and drawing up my knees toward my chest. "Well?" I asked after his eyes had scanned the words for several seconds.

He sighed, his lips tightening.

"Is it that bad?"

"She's hurt," he said with a shoulder shrug. "You stopped her from going to her son's wedding."

"That was Robbie's call."

"You've cut her out of your life."

"Well, you know why."

He turned the page and continued to read. But after a moment he stopped, letting the papers fall away. "You don't need to read this," he said, folding the letter back up. "She's just lashing out. I'll throw it away for you."

He got up a little too quickly, and I could have sworn I saw him stumble on the way to the door. That's when I knew something was really wrong—Adam never stumbled. My head suddenly felt clear, and I put down the coffee before Adam could make it out of the room.

"Stop," I said, and his shoulders sank an inch below his ears. "Show it to me."

But he didn't turn around. I could hear the paper crumbling in his hands. So I got up and went to him, my fingers falling on his broad back—a silent warning.

"Adam?"

"I swear," he said, his voice small, "everything I told you is the truth."

He let me spin him towards me, the letter still clutched under his thick knuckles like it was a wrestling opponent he could simply pin to the floor for a victory. But I pried it away from him and began straightening the pages out on the wall.

I paced away while I read, my mom's handwriting still so familiar after all these years that I could read it in double time, like reading my own thoughts.

Only the first paragraph was about Robbie's wedding. After that, it was all about Adam.

There will be a man who will come to find you, she wrote on page two. His name is Adam Martel, but he's not who he says he is. I've known him for many years.

I could feel Adam standing in the doorway, his body braced against the suddenly stifling air in the room like it might knock him over.

He'll try to charm you, and Robbie too. I'm writing to you, though, Marina, because your brother is more susceptible to these things. You're my smart girl. My warrior.

"What is she talking about, Adam?"

"She hates me, you know that."

He was here a month ago. In Portland. He broke into the house. The truth is he tried to kill my friend. Adam Martel is a very dangerous man, Marina. He's a traveler—I know you know what I mean by that.

Whatever you do, if he comes looking for you, please my darling, don't let him in. Don't talk to him. Just turn him away.

You may choose not to respond to this letter. You may never speak to me again. I know that. I accepted it that night when I made my choice. But you need to understand, my love, things turn out the way they're meant to.

Know that I love you forever. I love you more than life itself.

Mom.

I reread the last part twice, first frantically, then slowly. I didn't realize I was crying until I heard the tears plop against the hardwood floor of my room. "You said Singapore," I muttered into my palms.

"Marina?"

"Thailand... Laos. I'm such an idiot."

"I was in those places, I swear. You saw the pictures."

"When?" I practically shouted, spinning to face him. "When did you get back?"

He sighed, coming more completely into the room so that his thick, muscular arms blocked my view of the doorway. "December."

I shook my head. "And you went to Portland?"

He nodded, looking crestfallen.

"Why?"

"To find Alexei."

I clutched the letter to my heart, the name falling like a brick from the ceiling. I could only shake my head, trying to understand.

"Alexei is still in your mother's life. He's only in his late 30s now. And I knew, after he escaped the day he shot Jenny—"

"You knew what, Adam? Why did you lie to me?"

"I didn't lie! He'll try it again, Marina." He had walked up to me now, and he took the letter from my hands, placing it on top of my chest of drawers.

I swallowed down a sudden glob of spit in my mouth. "Did you try to kill him?"

Adam didn't need to answer the question; the steely look in his eyes did it for him. "He made me watch while he put a gun to you and Jenny. He enjoyed it, making me sit there, about to lose one of you, not knowing which one. The nightmares I've had about that day. I wake up when the gun goes off."

"But you saved Jenny, Adam. It's over. We don't have to—"

"Men like him don't give up. I know, I used to be one."

I became aware of a gnat-like buzzing in my ears, and it took me a second to realize it was my phone vibrating next to the bed. I marched over to send it to voicemail, noting for a brief second that it was Kieren. But he'd have to wait. "Why does everyone have the same exact reaction to you, Adam? What else aren't you telling me?"

"You know everything about me—"

"I don't. Sometimes I think I don't know you at all."

"You're choosing your mother over me, Marina. Think about that."

"She wouldn't reach out unless she was scared."

The phone started buzzing again, this time almost vibrating its way off the counter. "Damn it."

Adam worked his hands into tight fists while he watched me answer the phone, and for the first time in over a year I actually felt unsafe with him in the room, like his tenuous control of his own testosterone levels might snap. I suddenly had a flash of him finding me in the robotics lab last year where I was teaching kids—the way he slammed the door to prevent me from leaving, the force of it.

But I shook my head, answering Kieren's incessant ringing instead. "Kieren, I'm in the middle of something—"

"Why did you ask me about Elaheh Farghasian?" Kieren asked over the phone.

I was still looking at Adam, looming larger than life in the middle of my room, when the words registered in my brain. "What?"

"Tell me, M. What do you know?"

"I don't know anything," I stammered. "What are you talking about?"

"She's gone, M. It's the biggest story in town. She disappeared a couple days ago."

I sat on the edge of my bed, swallowing hard.

"When she didn't show up for work, didn't answer the phone, the school got scared and sent some cops over to her apartment."

"And?"

"Empty. She'd cleaned it out in the middle of the night. There was only one thing left, and nobody could figure it out why it was there."

Adam got nervous now, sensing the panic on my face. He knelt down by the bed and put a hand on my knee, and I immediately forgot that we were supposed to be in the middle of a fight.

"What was it?" I asked Kieren.

"On the wall, she had written something in black Sharpie."

My lips moved with a memory, but no sound came out. People used to write about DW in black Sharpie—little messages hidden all over the school. I had always assumed kids had written it. "What did it say?"

"It said," Kieren began, his voice oddly high-pitched, "Down, down, down. Thirty minutes of wonderful."

The phone actually slipped out of my hand and Adam caught it, his other hand moving up my thigh to comfort me as he tried to read my face. "Kieren," I said in the general direction of the phone. "I'll call you right back."

"What is it?" Adam asked when I hung up.

"Where was Amalia?"

"What?"

"The brunch. After the wedding. She wasn't there."

"Who's Amalia?" Adam asked.

But I didn't answer. Instead I grabbed a pair of jeans out of my drawer, tripping all over myself trying to step into them. Adam had to steady me, and I realized my hands were shaking.

"Stop, baby, stop," he said, his body forming a wall in front of me. "What is happening?"

I finally found his eyes, the infinite wells of sea green that had lulled me to sleep every night he was gone. "Can I trust you, Adam?"

He kissed me forcefully, his hands gripping my face, and I couldn't help but feel like there was something too desperate about it. "You know you can," he whispered to me.

I put a steadying hand over his, feeling suddenly like reality was popping all around me like soap bubbles, floating into the air and disappearing. "We have to go to my aunt's house," I told him when I broke away.

He didn't ask why. He just nodded.

Thirty minutes of wonderful.

What happens when they end?

****

Only one more chapter in part one of Everworld (out of three)! Can't wait to read your theories this week. Are we still Team Adam?