The Blood Between Us by Zac Brewer Page A

anxieties about the deaths of my parents.
    The texter had insinuated that Grace had had something to do with the lab accident that killed them. What if they were right? Proving her involvement would accomplish three things: 1. It would ease my mind, answering questions that had been haunting me for four years. 2. It would bring Grace to justice. Nothing would knock her off her high horse like a lifetime in prison. And 3. It would convince Viktor and Julian that I didn’t belong at Wills anymore, so close to the scene of such a horrific crime.
    One thing was certain. I was going about my issue with the mystery texter and the questions of what Grace might be up to behind my back in completely the wrong way. My mistake, which was now so apparent to me that it practically glowed in the dark, was not following scientific method to deal with the problem. In short, I needed to form a hypothesis—an educated guess that could be tested, accounting for the data at hand.
    (I cringed whenever someone said they had a theory. They didn’t have a theory—what they had was a hypothesis. It was enough to drive a thinking man mad.)
    First I needed to collect my observations. Then I could evaluate those observations and imagine possible explanations, in order to judge which explanations were worthy of being hypotheses. With enough evidence to back up a hypothesis, I might be able to develop a solid theory as towhat happened in my parents’ lab that day, and what Grace was up to now.
    I opened my top desk drawer and pulled out an old notebook and a pen. Flipping to the first page, I wrote the word problem at the top. Beneath it, I wrote parents perished under unusual, as of yet unexplained conditions . Beneath that, I wrote observations . My list of observations was short, but important. First, I noted the page that Grace had taken from our dad’s journal, and her admission to stealing the other pages so that I wouldn’t have them. Second, I listed the text messages, scrolling through my phone and writing them down word for word, marking each with a date and time, and noting where I was when I received them and what was going on around me.
    At the top of the next page, I wrote possible explanations , and made another numbered list.
            1. Grace was responsible, in large or in small part, for the demise of our parents.
            2. Grace was not responsible for their deaths, but plans to benefit from them by taking our father’s work for her own gain.
    I took a deep breath as I wrote the next one, hoping like hell that it was wrong.
            3. My anxiety has made me paranoid and I am looking for anyone, anything, to blame the unexplainable on.
    After I was done, I shoved the notebook inside my duffel bag along with everything else I was taking with me to the dorms. It killed me to leave Maggie behind in the barn. I would have to get those new tires sooner than later.
    For now, I had Julian drop me at the front door of the dorm, so at least I could walk in on my own. As expected, climbing the stairs to the tower was already getting old, and I could feel my legs aching. Some of my best friends in California were on the lacrosse team, but I’d never been much of an athlete myself. To be honest, I’d never really been much of anything. For years, teachers had lamented that if only I would apply myself, I could be capable of great things. But nothing had ever really sparked the drive in me that seemed to come so naturally to Grace. Honestly, I was just trying to get by. Survival mode. That’s what I’d been in my entire life.
    The door to my room creaked open with a push—apparently the renovations everyone was talking about didn’t include squirting WD-40 on the hinges. The first thing I noticed was that Quinn had moved the furniture around since yesterday. My bed was tucked under the only window. My small desk sat beside it, the two divided only by one of theslanted, thick beams that came down from the low