"Hey! How was lunch with your Dad?"
"Um, do you really want to know?"
"It couldn't of been that bad!"
"Yeah, well. You obviously expected it to go a lot better!"
Liz stormed out of the room and into their bedroom. She lay on the bed and huffed a sigh of relief.
"Liz…"
"Can I just be alone right now? Please?"
"Sure."
Liz rolled over onto her back and remembered the incidents of the previous hour. She couldn't believe that her father could say those things about someone she loved more than anything in the world. She rolled over onto her side and cried herself to sleep.
Max was in the kitchen when she woke. She walked up to him, and he held her in his arms, not saying anything, but knowing what she wanted to say.
"He treated me like I was just another stranger, passing through town. He was so mean Max." She started to cry in his arms. "I thought he would be happy to see me again, but instead he just ignored me. He's not my father anymore, is he?"
Max kissed her forehead and squeezed her tightly. She wasn't sure if that was his answer, but she didn't really care at that moment.
Zan walked up to the front door of the same house from before. It felt stranger this time. Zan knocked on the door and waited. He was prepared for rejection, for no one to be home, but he wasn't prepared for someone to answer the door.
The boy standing in front of Phillip Evans looked so much like Max. He had his eyes, and his dark hair. But the look he was giving was definitely from someone else, someone familiar.
"Zan?"
"Are you Phillip Evans?"
"Yes…Zan?"
"Yeah."
"What are you doing here?"
"Looking for you. Are you my father?"
"What?"
"The adoption agency's records said that you signed the forms when you left me there fifteen years ago."
"I did sign the forms, but I'm not your father."
"Do you know my parents?"
Phillip thought hard to himself. If he told the boy about Max and Tess, it would change his life forever. Max had wanted him to have a normal human life, not one running from the government, trying to protect a secret.
"I did know them, yes."
"Did? So you don't know where they are now?"
Phillip's bottom lip quivered. What he was about to say was for the best. It would break his heart, but it's for the best.
"Zan, you parents died in a car crash just after you were born."
Zan gulped back a tear.
"Th…thank you."
He turned away and stumbled down the front path of the house. He couldn't believe that after all he had been through in his life, all the miles he had come, just to find out that his parents no longer existed. Charlie was sitting on the bonnet of the car. She could see his expression and knew that the worse possibility had come true. She wrapped her arms around him and stroked his hair as he wept on her shoulder.
"Mr Parker, can I talk to you for a minute?"
Max never thought he could hate the man that stood behind the counter of the Crashdown so much.
"Sure, lets go into the back."
When they were in the back and Max checked that no one else was around, he turned to the man standing on the opposite side of the room and glared into his eyes.
"How could you do that to Liz? She's you daughter, and yet you treat her like a complete stranger."
"She used to be my daughter, until you crashed onto this God damn forsaken planet and came into her life. Now I have no daughter! You took the one thing that meant most to me in this world! You took it and now she's completely different! I blame YOU! You should have stayed on your own planet you freak!
"Do you think I chose to crash here? Do you think that I chose to be hatched out of a pod chamber? Do you think I had ANY choice in who I am? She would be dead if I stayed on my own planet!" With this Max turned around and stormed out of the café. He wasn't sure if he felt relieved or angry for Liz.
Jeff Parker turned around and collapsed onto the stairs. Dead?
"Its all over, we can go back home now."
"Zan…"
"No, please, just don't!"
"But what about that couple I saw? Maybe they know something!"
"They're dead Charlie! Dead! Don't you get it? They no longer exist!"
"No. Zan, I'm telling you, the answers are here, the answers to who you are, they're in this stupid town!"
"Charlie…"
"Zan, what's happened to you? You are the most stubborn person I know, you never give in this easily! I promise you we'll find something! Go back and ask that old man about who they were!"
"What if he doesn't know anything? What if he didn't know that they were different? I don't think I could handle finding out that someone I once knew wasn't that person after all, that the one I thought I knew was completely different, with a very large secret! I can't do that Charlie!"
"Will you just give it a week? If we find nothing after a week, then we can go back home. Please Zan? I can feel something here. Something that wants us to find it!"
"Fine, a week. But then we're gone!"
She kissed his forehead and her hand fell in his. They walked down the street and entered the café that started this entire endless story.