“And it worked?” I stare at my mother in disbelief.Holy shit, I know men, especially rich men, are easily fooled, but my god—
“Well, for a little while. I don’t know all the details, but around the time both you girls were ten, Crystal cheated on Bryce.” My mother laughs ruefully. “I guess once a biker lady, always a biker lady. She screwed one of the guys in the Sons here, and they got caught. Her husband started digging into her past, and he didn’t like what he found out. He demanded a paternity test for Natalie.”
“Oh shit.”
My mother doesn’t even bother reprimanding me for the language. “Yeah. Not long after that, Crystal disappeared. Everyone said she ran off, but well—who knows. Especially after—” she hesitates.
“Wait—” I bite my lip, frowning. “So if Natalie was my age, and here, why did I never see her at school? Or meet her? We would have been in the same grade—”
“She always went to Blackmoor Academy. The prep school you ended up at. Even after Crystal’s lie was uncovered and she ran off, her “father” couldn’t bear to just throw her out. He’d raised her since she was born, after all. He had her name changed—the family wouldn’t allow her to keep it. But he managed to keep her in Blackmoor Academy. He wanted to keep her as far away as he could from the ‘bad influences’ that her mother was a part of, I guess.”
“She wound up with Jaxon, so I guess it didn’t work.” I feel cold, and I wrap my arms around myself, trying to think of anything else to say. It feels like there was an entire life that had been happening right under my nose that I hadn’t even seen. I’d never known anything about this.
For the first time, I’m seeing struggles that my mother and father had that had nothing to do with being my parents. Hurts, and fights, and struggles that had been going on while they were raising me that I’d never seen. It makes me see both of them in a whole new light—but especially my father. And I hate that because I’d loved him so dearly. I still do, but I’ll never againnotknow that he’d cheated on my mother, that he’d had a daughter he was willing to abandon to secure her love, that he’d given up on—yes, to protect us, but still a child he’d turned his back on. Suddenly the man who smelled like tobacco and engine grease and told me stories at night and grilled the world’s best burgers has a side that I never knew about, and it hurts.
I know it must hurt my mother so much more, though. Both back then and now, remembering it.
“I don’t know how you didn’t run into each other at Blackmoor Academy. But then again, I guess you didn’t hang out with many of the kids other than Mia. And then—”
I hadn’twantedanything to do with the kids at Blackmoor Academy, other than Mia, of course, who had sort of awkwardly inserted herself into my life on the first day and just never left. But now, thinking back, I remember vaguely hearing about some girl who had died in a car accident not long before graduation. I feel a hot wave of guilt, remembering how little I’d cared at the time.
At the time, though, I’d been trapped in the hellhole of Cayde—and Dean, and in a lesser way Jaxon, but mostly Cayde—making my last bit of high school utter misery. All I’d been thinking about was graduating and getting the fuck out, not about some girl who I couldn’t possibly have known had any connection to me.
But now, I can’t help but wonder if I’d had a class with her at some point, if I’d ignored her because I’d lumped her in with all the other snotty prep school kids. If the whole time I’d been there, my half-sister had been in the same classes with me, an arm’s length away maybe, and I’d lost the opportunity to know her.
There’s no way I could have known, and no way it could have ever happened differently. But I can feel tears burning behind my eyes at the thought, my chest aching. I’ve gone my whole life never knowing I had a sister, that she was right here the entire time—and she was gone before I ever knew.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about her,” my mother says gently, as if she can read my thoughts. “After your father died, I could have, I suppose, especially since you were at Blackmoor Academy. But I was lost, right after your father—” she takes a deep, shaky breath. “I didn’t want to dig it all up again, I guess. But also—I’m not sure I even thought about it that much. I did briefly think about whether or not she ought to know that her father—herrealfather—had died. But she didn’t even know that he existed. And you and I were in such danger right afterward, I knew that poking around, opening up those old wounds, talking to Natalie—it would only put us in more danger. The St. Vincent family were the ones protecting us after Philip took us in and gave me this job. To bring up that old scandal that involved them, give Natalie information that would no doubt send her to Bryce asking questions, to involve you in it—” my mother shakes her head. I can see the glint of tears in her eyes. “Your father let her go in order to protect the two of us, and I saw no reason why I should change that when bringing her into our lives would only serve to do the exact opposite.”
“And then she died.” I feel numb, exhausted. I don’t know what, exactly, I’d expected when I’d come here looking for answers about the article, but it wasn’t this. It wasn’t finding out that my father had both been the man I’d always believed him to be and not, finding out that I’d gone to school alongside my sister and never known. I’d had all kinds of ideas—that she had been a product of some long ago girlfriend who had come to find him and gotten involved with Jaxon being at the forefront—but that it would all be so close to home had never been among them. That it had all happened so—intimately. And I’d never known about any of it.
“After that—I didn’t know what the point would be in telling you,” my mother says helplessly. “So I just kept it a secret. I thought you might find out eventually. But I—I’d kind of hoped that you wouldn’t. That it would get buried.”
“Like her.”
She looks down sadly and then back up at me. “Yes, I suppose so.”
If the last two days had reminded me of my mother in happier times when I was younger, and her world revolved around me, this is the exact opposite. This is the days after my father’s death all over again, when the dark corners of our world opened up and threatened to swallow us both.
I’ve been living in those dark corners for a while now, so you’d think I’d be used to it.
But I guess not.
My chest feels tight and heavy, my eyes burning, thinking about the sister that I never got to know—that I only found out today I really had. And yet, the very next thing I think about is Jaxon.
Do I tellhimabout this?
It puts my relationship—or whatever it is that we have—with him in a whole new light. Everything between us has always been complicated, and ever since that photo, I’ve had the sinking knowledge that a great deal of his attraction to me is probably because I look like the girl whose picture he still carries in his wallet. That he wants me, and in some ways wants to protect me, because I remind him of her.
But now I know that I’m her sister, and he doesn’t.
If I tell him the truth about my relationship to Natalie, won’t that mean that any chance ofuswill be gone?
It might be for the best, I tell myself. It might mean a clean break between the two of us, the gate slamming shut on any possibility of there being anything more between us…or maybe anything at all. Jaxon might never want to touch me again, and truthfully, that might be best for us both.
But if that’s true, then why does the thought of it hurt so much?
Athena