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“You don’t know, right? You killed the hitter but not the one who hired said hitter. You also claim to not know why he was killed.”

“I have my guesses.”

I laughed outright. “Guesses?”

“I’m a time traveler, not Sherlock Holmes.”

“He wasn't real,” Valencia interjected.

“Neither are time travelers,” Max quipped as he raised a brow at me.

“Wow, you do have a sense of humor!” I exclaimed. “Why did you keep all this personality in check for my whole life?”

He shrugged. “It was safer.”

“Safer?” I asked.

“Yes, if I had let my guard down, then you boys would have never left me alone and you would have discovered me. You all were and still are highly intelligent.”

“Yes, they are,” Valencia agreed.

“I secretly got a real kick out of some of the stunts you boys pulled, however,” Max stated.

“I don’t know, some of them were kind of mean,” I admitted.

“I enjoyed the one with the blow up doll,” Max said. “Sitting in the kitchen with my name on it. The note with it was clever as well.”

I snickered. “Mama sure did not enjoy that one!” I scoffed. “She almost broke her spatula that day. And she never even saw the note. You crushed that up in your hand so she wouldn’t see it.”

“What did it say?” Valencia asked.

“Baby, we were teen boys,” I told her. “So I am not going to repeat it.”

“So, Max hid it?” Valencia asked.

“Yes and as a matter of fact, there had been many incidents where he could have left us hanging in the wind to face my uncle's wrath or my Mama’s spatula.”

“Your mother,” Max whispered.

I stared at him. “What about her?”

He shook his head. “I admit it… I worship her.”

I raised my brow at him. “Worship?”

Max nodded. “If I were from this time…” He sighed.

“Really?” Valencia exclaimed. “That is so romantic!”

I slowly looked over at her and asked, “Romantic? Valen, he’s… well, whatever he is and she is…” I paused.

“Possibly immortal?” Valencia finished my sentence.

I shook my head. “It is the truth though. At least it is now.”

“I’m not sure you can handle…” Max faltered.

“...the truth?” I asked him.

“About your mother.” Max nodded.

“It doesn’t change anything.”

“Except that she will most likely outlive you,” Max pointed out.

“Oh, that will be so sad for her, Max,” Valentia noted.

“Tell me about it,” he said. “I may have not done her any real favor by saving her.”

We stared at him.

“It has happened to you, hasn’t it?” Valencia guessed. “You outlived people that you cared about?”

“A few times or fifty,” he admitted. “I swear when I reanimated her that it was like automatic, I had no time to think about it. To choose whether it was the right thing to do or not. All I saw was how unfair it was for her to be taken from her family like that. You Bruno boys and your sister needed her. The whole family of boys did. They had already lost Alessandra, so Maria had become like their mother. Then you all were going to lose her too? I…” He paused.

“Oh, wow. You fell in love, Max!” Valencia told him.

“That is not possible,” he argued. “I keep that from affecting my mission. I live by a set of rules.”

“I think it is very possible, despite your rules,” I suggested.

He kept shaking his head.

“How do you know?” Valencia asked him.

“Yeah, are there more um, travelers out there?” I asked. “Ones who could possibly tell you their stories. Like do you have conventions or something like that?”

He rolled his eyes at me. “No.”

“No conventions or no other travelers?” Valencia smiled at him.

“Can you imagine that? A Time Traveling convention?” I joked.

“I haven’t met one in perhaps 200 years,” he mused.

“I think you are in love with Maria, Max,” Valencia told him.

“I cannot be. It would be too much.”

“What do you mean it would be too much?” I asked.

“For my own psyche.”

“Like you would lose your mind or what?” I stared at him.

“Maybe or what,” Valencia said as she kept nodding her head at me like she was attempting to tell me something. “I say, he’s fine as he is.”

I got it. This subject was taboo for Max.

And that meant he was in love with my mother.

“So, you can travel great distances almost instantly. Although you won’t say how you do that, but it has something to do with that fake fire you had going earlier.

You can make people forget by, I assume, taking them back to a time before or even after they learned whatever it is they need to forget. ”

“I’ve got a headache now,” Valencia quipped.

I nodded. “ It’s like that movie Terminator, if the guy hadn’t come forward in time, then he wouldn’t have been born.”

“Exactly!” Valencia exclaimed. “Or if they came back to the past and removed the chip that was left from the future AI killer machine then the AI would have never been built to turn on humans in the future.”

“STOP!” I joked. “I’m gonna need a tylenol soon.”

Valencia and I laughed.

“I loved that movie.” He nodded.

We stared at him.

“So is it like that?” I asked him. “Change the future to…No, wait… You would have to go into the past and…” I again stalled out and rubbed at my temples.

“It isn’t as complicated as that,” Max assured me. “But I do know that I couldn’t save your father as too much time had passed when we heard about it.” He shrugged. “Then again, I didn’t think at the time to go back and save him.”

“And why do you think that was Max?” I asked him.

He shrugged and didn’t really answer my question. “I somehow knew that if I grabbed your father’s killer up and rushed him forward and back through time that it would reduce him to ash. Although, I had never killed anyone before or since.”

The surreal feeling of all this suddenly hit me hard as Valencia and I stared at him.