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I liked the way she laughed; the sound skittering across my skin. “Yeah, it's old news. A tale as old as time - The golden child and the perpetual disappointment, that’s us.”
“It wasn’t what I was expecting, you know.”
“No? How so?”
“I guess I’d thought they’d be a bunch of hippies and everything would be peace, love and mung beans.”
That made her laugh again, which in turn had me smiling. Until the smile faded, because that wasn’t what it was like at all. “I thought you’d be the star of the show, because you’re so…”
“So?” She asked when I didn’t go on.
Everything.But that was skating way too close to things I wasn’t prepared to admit to, so I said, “Full of yourself.”
“Asshole.”
“So, the golden child and the perpetual disappointment?” I echoed. The city lights outside played across her face, painting her in shades of neon and shadow. “Is that how you see yourself? Because of your brother?”
She shifted in her seat, the seatbelt tugging lightly across her chest as she turned to look out the window. “It’s not just how I see myself, Rhett. It’s how they’ve always seen me. Troublemaker. Rebel. Black sheep.”
Things went quiet for a bit, but I just had to know. “Did you always know you were adopted?”
“No.”
“How old were you when you found out?”
“Twelve or thirteen. When I found the papers in Dad’s office.”
Fucking hell. “So up until then, you had no reason to think you weren’t all blood related, but the adoption news changed everything.”
Her laughter this time was brittle. “Oh, it’s the cornerstone. The foundation of why I can never measure up. I’m not blood, after all. Tyler is, though. A lovely little surprise for them when I was six years old. Such a gift. Now they were a real family.”
Inside me, something tightened, hot and mean. “Blood doesn’t make a family, Scarlett.”
She turned back to me, her eyes searching my face for sincerity. “No, it doesn’t. But try telling that to the Wrights. I wasn’t kidding when I said Tyler was the golden child. He knew before I did.”
“What the fuck?”
“Yeah, what the fuck? He used to tease me about it all the time, but I figured it was just a thing that kids did. He was always a little shit, so I just thought it was part of that. Nope, he was in on the secret the whole time.”
“That’s really, really fucked.”
“That’s what I said! It couldn’t have happened at a worse time, either, heading into my teenage years. I was a fucking mess.”
I could imagine it and the feelings it stirred up in me were…stop doing that.
“The hardest part about it was that they just couldn’t see why I was so upset.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. I felt totally betrayed and like I didn’t know who I was. But also I couldn’t trust them. They’d lied to me my whole life, even making up stories about Mom’s pregnancy.”
“That’s…that’s incredibly fucked up.”
“It was. Then, on top of that, it was having to hear it from Tyler. I felt like I’d had a bomb dropped on me. Why did they tell Tyler and not me? Or stop him all those times he would shout it at me like it was an insult? They gave him the ammunition and just let him fire at me whenever he felt like it.”
My hands gripped the steering wheel so tight I was in danger of veering off the highway. If I’d fucking known this while I was sitting across the table from the fuckhead, the evening would have had a very different outcome. Clamping down on the rage that was surging through my system, I said, “I can see why your teenage years were shit, then.”
Her laugh had an unmistakable edge of bitterness to it. “That’s an understatement. I was wild.”