Chapter 2

I heard brakes squeal through Elena's phone.

"Stay at the studio. I'll have my secretary cancel dinner and come to you right now."

Elena knew only that things with my biological family were bad and that we'd cut contact years earlier.

She didn't know the rest of it.

Hearing the fear in her voice made me change my mind.

"Don't cancel. I'll go with you tonight."

After the call, I stared at the photo I'd taken by accident when my hand shook.

My mother frowned, my father clenched one fist, and Victor stood with his arms folded.

The dog beside them had its tongue out, wearing the same eager-to-please expression I'd worn as a kid.

They didn't love me. I'd understood that from the beginning.

The sentence my parents repeated most often was, "Your life exists because Victor is suffering."

Victor had a severe inherited marrow-failure disorder, and no compatible donor could be found.

Out of options, my parents conceived me through fertility treatment as an HLA-matched sibling donor.

They planned to use my cord blood and early stem cells and then place me for adoption. They didn't even finish my birth registration in the family household.

The operation finally ended, and the result was devastating.

My donated cells failed to establish normal red-cell production in Victor's marrow.

Victor survived only through continuous transfusions and repeated donor-cell boosts from me, under an experimental private program.

My mother held the small body of her older son and sobbed over the suffering he'd face for the rest of his life.

My father hit the wall until his knuckles bled and demanded to know why fate tortured his precious boy.

Nobody noticed that I was severely dehydrated in the other hospital bed and no longer able to cry.

That's my earliest memory.

That feeling of unbearable thirst followed me through the first half of my life.

My parents decided that because I'd stayed in their house, I'd somehow caused Victor's transplant to fail.

To punish me, they registered me separately from the family.

They named me Remy because, to them, I was only the remainder left over after Victor's treatment.

I had no bedroom and slept in the living room. My clothes were whatever Victor had outgrown.

Sometimes my mother softened and slipped me a cookie when she divided up the snacks.

Victor would cry until he struggled to breathe while our parents swore that every part of their love belonged to him alone.

Only then would he stop.

I tried crying too. It got me a slap.

I learned fast that any affection I got depended entirely on Victor's mood.

So I threw myself into pleasing him.

When elementary school started, Victor demanded that I, two years younger, be moved up into his grade.

He told the other kids I was the servant our parents had made for him.

I carried his backpack, ran his errands, and did his classroom chores.

I did all of it without complaining.

I even let him use me as a punching bag whenever he was in a mood, and I hid the bruises without a sound.

I wanted our parents to see me. I wanted to be treated like someone who belonged in that house.

The monthly collection day was the date I looked forward to most.

My parents would stay right beside me, watching blood and donor cells move through the lines before they carried the bags to Victor like treasure.

Thirty minutes of being completely seen was enough to carry me through every other day of being invisible in that house.

I thought my life would go on that way forever, until something changed.

Against everyone's expectations, I earned the highest score in the district and a place in Brindleford Academy's advanced program.

On results day, another parent clapped my father on the shoulder and congratulated him.

"Your younger boy's remarkable. Getting into the advanced academy at his age is something else."

My father looked confused. "Younger boy?"

It took him a second to come up with my name. "Remy?"

My mother pointed at the banner outside the school. "That says Remy Weller ranked first?"

For the first time, they looked at me without seeing a criminal, a medical supply, or a burden.

My father even touched my head and told me I'd done well.

Something went through me like a shock, and none of it felt real.

I forgot to look at Victor's reaction.

My parents kept smiling the whole way home, and it wasn't until dinner that we realized Victor was gone.