Chapter 6: shattered illusions

Annabelle's POV

The restaurant feels like it's spinning around me. My hands are shaking so badly that I have to grip the edge of the table to keep myself steady. Ronan is still talking but his words sound like they're coming from underwater, muffled and distorted and wrong.

"Say something," he says, and his voice cracks on the words. "Please, Annabelle, just say something."

I open my mouth but nothing comes out except this weird choking sound. My brain is trying to process what he just told me but it's like trying to swallow glass. Harrison Blackthorne was my father. The man sitting across from me, the man I've been falling in love with for three months, is my half brother.

"I think I'm going to be sick," I manage to whisper.

Ronan reaches for my hand but I jerk away from him like he's on fire. The thought of him touching me now makes my skin crawl in a way that has nothing to do with disgust and everything to do with the sick realization of what we almost did.

"Don't touch me," I say, and my voice sounds stranger to my own ears. "Don't ever touch me again."

"Annabelle, please let me explain." He's leaning forward in his chair, his face pale and desperate. "I didn't know. I swear to God I didn't know who you were until today."

"Liar." The word comes out sharp and mean. "You've been coming to the café for three months. Three months of flirting and smiling and acting like you were just some normal guy who liked his coffee black."

"I was just some normal guy." He runs his hands through his hair, messing it up in a way that would have been attractive yesterday but now just makes him look guilty. "I mean, I didn't know you were the one we were looking for. The timing, it was just, it was coincidence."

I laugh but there's no humor in it. "Coincidence? You expect me to believe that the CEO of Blackthorne Industries just happened to start coming to my café right around the time your family started hunting for Harrison's secret daughter?"

The look on his face tells me I'm right to be suspicious. He opens his mouth and then closes it again, and I can see him trying to figure out what to say that won't make this worse.

"Show me," I say. "Show me proof that what you're saying is true. Show me this will you're talking about."

Ronan picks up his phone with shaking hands and starts scrolling through something. Other diners are starting to notice us now, probably because I'm not exactly keeping my voice down anymore. A woman at the next table is staring openly while pretending to look at her menu.

He turns the phone around so I can see the screen. It's a photograph of a legal document, and even though the text is small I can make out the words clearly enough. To my daughter Annabelle, whose mother's name is Elena Reyes. I leave thirty five percent of all Blackthorne Industries shares and assets.

My vision starts to blur around the edges. "That could be fake. Anyone could Photoshop that."

"It's not fake." Ronan scrolls to another image, this one showing what looks like a private investigator's report. There's a photograph of me at the top, one of those candid shots someone took without me knowing. Probably while I was working. "We hired someone to find you. He's been tracking you for weeks."

The room tilts sideways and I have to grab the table again. "Tracking me? You've been having me followed?"

"Not me personally. My mother hired the investigator. I didn't even know he'd found you until this morning." He's talking faster now, words tumbling over each other. "Marcus called me right before I came to pick you up. He told me the investigator confirmed your identity. That's when I realized, that's when I knew."

"So you knew before you came here tonight." My throat feels tight and hot. "You knew we were related and you still showed up for this date."

"I didn't know what else to do." He reaches for my hand again and this time I let him take it, but only because I'm too stunned to pull away. "I was going to tell you. I was trying to figure out how to explain it without, without this happening."

I look down at our joined hands and feel bile rise in my throat. His thumb is rubbing small circles on my palm the way he's done a dozen times before, an intimate gesture that now feels obscene and wrong.

"We're brother and sister," I say, and the words taste like poison. "We're related by blood and you, we almost, oh my God."

I yank my hand away and stand up so fast that my chair tips over backwards. The crash makes everyone in the restaurant turn to look at us. I don't care. I need to get out of here before I completely lose it in front of all these people.

"Annabelle, wait." Ronan is on his feet too, reaching for me. "Please don't go. We need to talk about this."

"Talk about what?" I'm backing away from the table, from him, from this entire nightmare. "Talk about how my mother lied to me my entire life? Talk about how the man I was falling in love with turns out to be my brother? What exactly do you want to discuss, Ronan?"

His face crumples and for a second he looks like he might cry. "I don't know. I just, I can't let you leave like this. You're upset and alone and you just found out your father died and I, we need to figure this out together."

"Together?" I laugh again and it sounds hysterical even to me. "There is no together. There was never going to be a together because we're related. We're family, Ronan. The kind of family that doesn't date or kiss or whatever else we were planning to do after dinner."

The hostess is walking toward us now, probably to ask us to leave or at least lower our voices. I don't give her the chance. I turn and practically run toward the exit, weaving between tables full of shocked looking diners.

"Annabelle, please." Ronan's voice follows me but I don't turn around. I can't look at him anymore without seeing all the ways I've been an idiot.

The cold night air hits my face as I burst through the restaurant doors. I'm gasping like I've been underwater too long, sucking in breath after breath that doesn't seem to fill my lungs. My hands are still shaking and my legs feel like they might give out at any second.

I start walking, not even sure which direction I'm going. Away from the restaurant. Away from Ronan. Away from the truth that's threatening to crush me under its weight.

My phone buzzes in my purse. Probably Ronan trying to call me. I ignore it and keep walking, my cheap shoes clicking against the sidewalk in a rhythm that sounds like liar, liar, liar.

Mom knew. She knew who my father was and she never told me. She let me grow up thinking he was dead, thinking we were alone because of some tragic accident. But it was never an accident. It was a choice. Harrison Blackthorne chose his perfect life and perfect family over us.

And now that perfect family includes me, apparently. The bastard daughter no one wanted. The secret that came back to haunt them from beyond the grave.

I make it three blocks before I have to stop and lean against a building. My stomach is churning and my head feels like it's full of static. Everything I thought I knew about my life has been a lie.

The subway ride home passes in a blur. I'm vaguely aware of other passengers, of stops being announced, of the train lurching and swaying. But mostly I'm thinking about my mother's face in the hospital, the way she looked at me when she was trying to tell me about my father. The desperation in her eyes.

She was trying to warn me. She knew this was coming and she wanted me to be prepared. But how do you prepare for something like this?

My apartment feels wrong when I finally get there. Too quiet. Too empty. Mom's medical bills are still stacked on the kitchen counter where I left them this morning. Her coffee mug is in the sink. Her reading glasses are on the side table next to the couch.

She's gone and I never got to ask her why. Why she lied. Why she kept me away from a father who apparently wanted to acknowledge me in the end. Why she never told me I had a brother.

I sink onto the couch and finally let myself cry. Not the pretty kind of crying from movies where a single tear rolls down your cheek. The ugly kind where your whole body shakes and you can't breathe and snot runs down your face.

I cry for my mother and her secrets. For the father I never knew. For the romance that died before it even had a chance to start. For the normal life I thought I had that turned out to be built on lies.

My phone won't stop buzzing. Text after text coming through. I finally look at them through blurry eyes. They're all from Ronan.

"Please let me explain."

"I'm sorry."

"We need to talk about the inheritance."

"My mother is asking questions."

"Annabelle please answer me."

I turn off my phone and throw it across the room. It bounces off the wall and lands on the carpet with a soft thud.

Tomorrow I'll figure out what to do. Tomorrow I'll deal with lawyers and wills and families who don't want me. Tomorrow I'll be strong.

But tonight I'm just a girl whose mother died and whose entire world fell apart in the same forty eight hours. Tonight I'm allowed to fall apart.

I curl up on the couch and pull Mom's blanket over me, the one that still smells faintly like her perfume. And I cry until there's nothing left inside me except emptiness and the cold certainty that nothing will ever be the same again.