Page 45

Chapter Ten

Cyprus

Sliding down the bathroomwall, I dug the diary out from inside the jumpsuit and clutched it against my chest, on the verge of busting into tears. I had been trying since I left the station to recall a single memory from my past or a plausible explanation for the diary they had found. There was nothing.

The faces of my parents went no deeper than that single picture. They were a one dimensional figment of my imagination, a shiny piece of paper that gave me no answers.

Birch's name was written boldly in black ink on the pages inside, and there was no denying that he had been a part of something, but what it was. . . my head wouldn't go to that place, it refused to let me imagine that the love of my life would have kept this from me.

Maybe someone else wrote this. It's possible that this girl isn't me.

Birch wouldn't lie to me for all these years. . . would he?

I didn't want to believe it. That would mean my entire life had been a lie. Everything I thought I had, the great family fate had entrusted me to. . . it would all be fake.

It's you, this is your diary. Stop trying to force it to be something else.

I felt different than I thought I would. The second I saw Birch in the parking lot, my chest tightened and my heart sped up. Sweat beaded up on the back of my neck and my body began to tingle with nervous twitches. Inside I was torn up, split between running into his arms and darting in a different direction.

I wanted to scream and demand answers. I wanted to throw myself into his chest and let his embrace comfort me like it had so many times before. I wanted to slam the diary in his face and force him to tell me everything; where it came from, whose it was, and why it was in our home.

This treacherous mix of needing him to make me feel safe and confronting the dark truth dug into my brain with razor sharp talons.

What if I'm wrong? What if the police are wrong?

I couldn't imagine putting Birch through any false accusations or heartbreak from a lack of trust. Deep down I loved him, but if this all turned out to be true, then what?

What the fuck am I going to do?

Why the hell can't I fucking remember?!

Pushing the diary against my forehead, I wished it would feed me the answers I needed. Desperately I begged the pages to spill their secrets until every piece of my body surged in pain.

This isn't working. I have to look deeper.

Resting the book in my lap, I opened it and started reading it from the beginning. The first few entries were simple, they lacked any real depth or emotion.

Fionawent on and on about how she couldn't wait for summer camp and that she really hoped she would get the set of earrings she wanted for her birthday. She talked of a boy at school she thought was cute, his name was Dylan, and I guess he had really dreamy eyes.

She liked to draw, and I found that strange, because not once hadI everpicked up a pencil and a piece of blank paper to doodle or sketch a damn thing. You would think that if this little girl was me, even without my memories, there would still be certain traits that we would have in common.

If that was my past, then the person I once was truly had been erased. That girl had been wiped off the face of the earth, along with anything that resembled her.

Page after page, I read her thoughts, trying to link that girl to myself. Fiona enjoyed watching ice skating, she hated tomatoes and onions. She loved animals and really wished for a dog one day, but had to settle for the time being with a ferret named Rocko.

She hated her bony knees, and how her pinkie toe curved in. She had a best friend named Emily, and both the girls wanted to marry the singer from some boy band when they got older. They even had a pact, that if the singer chose one over the other, then the girl left out would still marry the second hottest guy in the group.

Line after line, I watched this young girl's life transform. She documented when she got her period at twelve, and how she was afraid to tell her mom because they had never really talked about it before.

There was a fight she had with her parents about going to some movie, and how she couldn't wait till she was old enough to finally get her license to drive. But nothing in there gave me that 'aha' moment and open up Pandora's box inside my brain.

Her entries slowed down around the time she turned thirteen, writing on and off, then nothing before the entries that changed her life.

Knock! Knock!

Snapping my head up, I didn't answer the taps on the door. I sat quiet, listening and hoping that whoever it was would just leave me alone. I couldn't deal with this. I had thought I could, I had expected to walk outside and not feel any type of fear or uneasiness. In my mind, everything would be the same until I figured it out.

That didn't happen. Birch's hand on my shoulder made me quiver, forcing me to question everything he had ever told me. Nick's pep talk when we got home made me sick, my stomach churned and I felt the vomit as it sat in the back of my throat. All I could imagine was him storming into my home and killing my parents.