Eventually I forced myself to get up because I couldn’t just sit there forever, and besides I had classes I was supposed to attend. I went to the bathroom and turned on the faucet to wash my face, except the second my hand touched the handle it snapped off completely and water started spraying everywhere.“Fuck,” I muttered, trying to turn off the water from the broken valve behind where the handle used to be, managing to get it stopped but not before soaking the front of my shirt. I grabbed a towel to clean up the mess and added the broken faucet handle to the growing collection of things I’d destroyed in the last twelve hours.I went back to my room to change shirts and grabbed the first clean one I found, pulling it over my head and hearing an immediate tearing sound as my fingers went straight through the fabric like it was tissue paper. I stared at the holes my fingers had made, and felt something that might have been a laugh or a sob trying to work its way up my throat.After th
“Oh my god,” I said, rushing to her side immediately. “Naomi, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to push you that hard, I just—”“It’s okay,” she said, though she was rubbing her shoulder where I’d shoved her and I could see she was shaken. “I’m fine, it just surprised me.”“I barely touched you,” I said, and I could hear panic rising in my voice. “I swear I didn’t mean to hurt you, I don’t know how—”“Lily, I said it’s okay, I’m okay” Naomi said more firmly, getting to her feet and holding her hands up like she was trying to calm a spooked animal. “You’re just stressed. It happens.”I looked down at my hands like they belonged to someone else, trying to understand how I’d managed to hurt my best friend.“You need to leave,” I said, backing away from her toward the door. “I need you to leave right now.”“Lily, don’t do this,” Naomi tried. “You clearly need someone to talk to and I’m not going anywhere just because you’re having a rough time.”“Please,” I said, and I could hear my voice getti
Luca showed up in exactly an hour and forty minutes, which meant he’d definitely been speeding the entire way. I saw his car pull into the parking lot through the window and watched him get out looking slightly frantic.He spotted me through the window and I saw the visible relief on his face before he headed inside, walking directly to where I was sitting.“Hey,” he said. You okay?”I wanted to laugh at that question because obviously I wasn’t okay, obviously everything was completely messed up, but I just nodded instead because I didn’t trust my voice not to crack if I tried to actually speak.“Let’s get you out of here,” Luca said, reaching down to take my backpack from where I’d dropped it on the floor. His hand brushed against mine when I tried to grab it at the same time and I felt that familiar electric jolt of contact, but right now even that felt overwhelming.I followed him out to his car in silence, dimly aware that he kept glancing over at me like he was checking to make s
“So did you also steal Luca from his parents?” I asked, because that was clearly the next part of this story.My father’s face went even paler and my mother actually flinched like I’d slapped her.“About a year after we brought you home,” my father finally said, “a woman showed up at our door.”“She said her name is Victoria,” my mother whispered,My father stood up suddenly and walked to the kitchen window, staring out into the darkness like he couldn’t look at me while telling this part. “She didn’t introduce herself at first. Just looked at us and said ‘I know what you did.’ Then she walked in without being invited and spread these same documents across this same kitchen table.”“She had everything, every piece of evidence needed to destroy our lives.”I watched my mother’s face crumple and for the first time since I’d arrived, I saw real fear in her eyes, not just guilt or sadness but genuine terror like she was reliving that moment.“Her son needed a normal childhood,” my mother
My father appeared at the door about two minutes later, wearing pajamas and looking confused and worried in equal measure when he saw me standing on the porch. “Lily? What are you doing here this late? Is everything okay?”He was still broad-shouldered despite being in his fifties and had always made me feel safe growing up. He’d always been the calm one and the problem-solver who could fix anything and I hated that I was about to shatter whatever that we have been maintaining is.“No, everything’s not okay,” I said, and I was surprised by how steady my voice sounded. “We need to talk, right now.”He must have seen something in my expression that told him this wasn’t a conversation that could wait until morning, because he just nodded and stepped back to let me inside. “Your mother’s still asleep, let me go wake her up.”“No, don’t,” I said quickly. “I want to talk to you first, alone.”My father looked like he wanted to argue with that but something in my face must have convinced him
I stared at those medical records until the words stopped making sense, just black marks on white paper that somehow meant my entire life was a lie.“Lily?” Ethan’s voice sounded like it was coming from underwater, distant and muffled even though he was sitting right across from me. “Are you okay?”I wasn’t okay, obviously, but I couldn’t figure out how to explain that because my brain had stopped processing information in any coherent way. All I could focus on was the note repeated across multiple pages spanning two decades.Which meant I couldn’t be her biological daughter.Which meant everything I thought I knew about where I came from was wrong.I’d asked my friends to dig into my history because I was looking for answers they might be hiding. About why my parents had been so willing to take Luca. I’d been searching for something that would make sense of why a random werewolf kid had ended up living in my house for a decade, why my parents had opened their home to him without ques