Chapter 2

The next time I woke up in the hospital, I turned on my phone to a wall of messages too vile to look at twice.

All of them were from Miles.

Miles: [Tim, so what if I'm not really a Carell? Mom, Dad, Robin, even Vanessa—they all still love me best. You're the unwanted one around here, you bastard.]

Miles: [Tim, your life is pathetic. Notice how every single time they have to choose, they choose to throw you away? If I were you, I'd have killed myself by now.]

Miles: [Why'd you even bother coming back, Tim? All you're doing is humiliating yourself. You'd have made a perfectly good dog back at Briarwood Manor. You should spend the rest of your life under my heel, right where you belong.

Every message dripped with the same arrogance and cruelty.

I read through them with no expression at all, barely a flicker of feeling. I'd been getting messages like these for years. To Mom, Dad, Robin, and Vanessa, Miles looked innocent and kind. In reality, he was a monster through and through.

My years at Briarwood Manor held my darkest, bloodiest memories. I hadn't just been responsible for every chore in that house—feeding the pigs, cooking, cleaning—I'd endured endless abuse on top of it.

My foster father drank, and whenever something didn't go his way, he took it out on me. Beer bottles shattered against my skull, glass shards tearing into flesh, sharp and merciless. A heavy stick came down on me again and again until bones cracked in more places than I could count. He'd laugh, wild-eyed and half out of his mind, calling me a worthless mutt not fit to live.

The woman I was supposed to call my mother never once stopped him—she joined in instead, taking every year of resentment she'd built up toward her husband and turning it into fists and kicks aimed at me. She'd fashion whips out of barbed rattan and lash me until strips of flesh tore away with every crack, blood running freely.

They treated me worse than they treated their dogs. On the rare good days, I got to sleep in the storage room and eat whatever scraps they left behind. On the bad days, I slept outside in the mud by the front door. When it stormed, I'd be soaked through in minutes, and a fever always followed. Some nights they gave me nothing at all, and when the hunger got bad enough, I ate straight from the slop bucket meant for the pigs—then threw it all back up every time.

For twenty years, they were the closest thing I had to parents, and in all that time, they never once gave me a shred of warmth. All I got from them was abuse, pain, and an endless kind of darkness.

My body still carried the damage. Years of emotional battering and never enough rest had left me with a heart condition that would follow me for the rest of my life.

It was only later that I learned the truth: I wasn't even their real son. That was why they'd tortured me the way they had. Their actual child had stolen my entire life out from under me—while I was living through hell, he was living like a prince, adored by everyone around him.

Even after Mom, Dad, and Robin learned who Miles really was, and learned exactly what my foster parents had done to me, their first instinct wasn't to comfort me. It was to beg me not to take it out on Miles. Because Miles was innocent, they said. Miles was gentle and pure at heart.

Except the so-called innocent Miles had known exactly who he was almost from the start, and he'd spent years scheming with his birth parents on new ways to torment me, all in an effort to trap me at that house forever.

After I came back to the Carell family, he put on a pitiful little act, dropping to his knees and begging me not to send him away, making himself look as small and wounded as possible so that Mom, Dad, and Robin would ache for him.

But behind everyone's backs, he set trap after trap for me, sending me exactly the kind of vicious, arrogant messages sitting in my phone right now—calling me a bastard, telling me to hurry up and die.

"Mr. Carell, the heart you've been waiting for turned out to be a match, and it just became available today. Your condition's gotten worse, so we really can't afford to put this off any longer. Whenever it's convenient, could you have a family member come in to sign the consent forms? We'll get the surgery scheduled from there."

The nurse's gentle voice broke through my thoughts.

Family. Such a familiar word, and yet it felt like something from a stranger's life.

My lips parted, my voice coming out rough. "I don't have any family. Can I just sign for myself?"

The nurse froze, clearly about to say something, when a clear, wounded voice cut in first. "Tim, how could you say something like that? Do you have any idea how much that would hurt Mom, Dad, Robin, and Vanessa?"

Miles looked like a parasite that had found its opening, smug satisfaction written all over his face.

Sure enough, standing behind him were Mom, Dad, Robin, and Vanessa. All of them stared at me, their expressions frozen, unreadable.