Page 24 of Behind These Four Walls

Dad,

Mom’s dead and I blame you. She died because you broke her heart, and for that, I’ll never forgive you. You never really cared about us, but I get it. My mom wasn’t prestigious like Myles’s mom, or some perfectly cultured beauty like Bennett and Hol’s. My mom was just a lowly assistant who you were too ashamed to be with in the open. You pretended it was for her own good, made her leave, and then you forced me out too. We were your dirty little secret—never good enough for your world or your Corrigan name. You bulldoze over everything and anyone, using them up until you don’t need them anymore. But I won’t let you do that to me. The most important thing to you is your name, your money, your power. And I don’t want any of it.Not your money or your name or your indifference. Mom is gone and I may be alone, but I’m not coming back. Not ever. I’m going to live my life as I want. Away from all of you. If there is nothing else you do for me, do this ... Leave me alone. Consider me dead because that is what you are to me. Dead.

Edie

Isla’s hands trembled as she read and then reread the letter, trying to understand the words that made no sense. She stared at the photos, her mind numb. Eden wasEdie Corrigan.These people were Eden’s family. No wonder Eden had always been so evasive about her past. The stories she’d told about her mom being fired by some horrible rich family who treated her mother like shit had been half truths at best. Eden hadn’t been some powerless, nameless nobody to the Corrigans. Eden was one of them.

The weight of the discovery was too much, and her limbs felt heavy. Her best friend, who was like a sister to her and whom Isla had trusted implicitly—had trusted with her life—had been lying to her the entire time. But why? Why go to such lengths to hide her true identity? Why couldn’t Isla know who Eden really was? Did Eden think Isla would only want to be friends with her because she was rich? Or was Isla nothing but a joke to Eden, someone to yank around while she played rich-girl games with her billionaire father? To make promises that they’d be sisters against the world only to up and disappear without so much as an explanation or goodbye?

Where was Eden’s letter to her?

She was angry. Was hurt and betrayed by the person she’d trusted the most. Her mind screamed with questions, but through all the tornado of emotions expanding like a hot-air balloon, a thought pinpricked, releasing her rage in a thin stream of air.

Isla picked up the bracelet and held it against her fingers so it caught in the dim light. Eden had been wearing this bracelet the night she disappeared. Isla was sure of it.

Eden would have never separated it from the matching chain her mother had given her.

The letter. Isla picked up the envelope and flipped it over to look at the postmark, which said “Daytona” with a date stamped weeks after she and Eden had left Daytona together. Weeks after they’d arrived in Charlottesville and Isla had been forced to leave alone.

Could Eden had doubled back after they’d separated? But why? There was nothing left in Daytona for Eden—that was the reason why she’d wanted to start fresh in LA. The house was being sold. No other family. None of it matched the Eden Isla knew. Eden had never let on that she was an heiress. She and her mother had lived in a little home, and Eden had never sounded like the Corrigans were her family. Or maybe Isla had just misunderstood what Eden had been saying. Nothing was adding up.

The realization crept over her like the cold dead. Someone had sent this letter. Someone had sent Victor Eden’s bracelet, which meant thatthatsomeone had to know where Eden was. And whether she was alive or ... Isla couldn’t finish the thought.

Isla put everything back as she had found it. She even left the drawer cracked open, as Victor had by accident. She left the study and somehow found her way back to her room without incident. If she fell asleep that night, Isla couldn’t say. But one thing was certain, the story she’d thought she knew about Eden—now Eden Corrigan, heiress to the Corrigan empire—and her disappearance was even more twisted than she had thought. Because if the Corrigans did have something to do with her disappearance, they hadn’t gotten rid of some random girl—they’d gotten rid of one of their own.

Which begged the question: What was a secret big enough for them to go to those lengths?

There was a reason why Eden had hidden such a significant part of her identity. Isla was even more determined than ever to uncover it and blow up the world that Victor Corrigan had built.

And now that she was here, she wouldn’t leave until she had answers. No matter what it cost her.

Chapter Nineteen

Ten Years Ago

“I am so sorry about the way things turned out. I should have stayed there. I knew what I was getting into, and I shouldn’t have hoped for any more than he could give. It was me who changed and messed everything up.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Eden mumbled. Then, but in the brighter, more chipper voice that both she and Isla had conditioned themselves to speak in because they wanted Elise to only have happiness and light in her life, what was left of it, she said, “Oh, Mom, don’t worry. We don’t need my father. I’ll make it well enough on my own and get a beautiful house where you can have your own room that lets out onto the patio and backyard, where you will keep your garden just like you do here.”

They both knew that Elise wouldn’t make it long enough to see the end of the month, much less years down the road, with enough money to buy a home they could live in.

“And Isla too,” Elise wheezed through labored breaths, a wave of pain coming up on her. Isla’s throat closed up. Elise was thinking about her. At this time.

Elise flopped a hand to wave away the attempt of the hospice care nurse to give her morphine. She wanted to be lucid in this moment. She had something to say, and maybe Isla shouldn’t be here for it. Afterall, she was only a friend. Not family, though Elise and Eden had never made her feel anything but—Isla a parentless ward of the state about to age out of the system with nothing but a couple thousand saved from her job at McDonald’s.

Isla’s throat hurt from the emotion she tried to stifle. She tried to do as she’d always done, detach herself from anything that felt like emotion. Keep a poker face. Show that nothing and no one could faze her. Because that was the only way to survive the heartaches of child services—the hope of adoption or fostering in a system that was overworked, understaffed, and criminally underpaid. It was the only way to survive the initial moments of hope that maybe a family would take you in and see your worth and want you to be a part of theirs, only for them to choose a younger, cuter kid or send you back to the group homes. Group homes that could be bad or good or bearable. One had been pretty bad. Two too good to be true. The rest of them bearable once she came to the realization that no one there was bad, or out to get her. Everyone—staff and kids alike—was just trying to survive. They were all in it together.

She had been hardened for so long, resigning herself to a life alone. She’d made herself okay with that. In a couple of years, she’d age out of the system, and Florida’s child services would give her a couple of bucks and well-wishes on a productive life. They’d mean well, but they wouldn’t be able to do much for her. So yeah, she was set to be on her own, but Eden and her mother had managed to crack through and wiggle their way in enough for her to care about someone else again. They had given her hope that maybe being alone in life wasn’t going to be her fate.

But they all had secrets. She had her own regrets. Her own guilt from inaction and fear, which had eaten away at her since she was eleven.

“We can be the Three Musketeers. Or Amigas. She doesn’t have anyone, and when I go, you need someone in your corner, because this world ... that family ...”

Isla finally allowed herself to admit that she liked being part of a family and never wanted them to go, even though Elise’s illness was the first thing Eden had told her about two years ago when they’d first met.

“My mom’s sick and is probably going to die from it.”

Isla had been sweeping the dining area, part of her job as cashier when they were in between afternoon and dinner rushes. Weekends were all-day work. Anything was better than counting minutes at the home or fussing with one of the girls about who had used whose makeup, transactions of which she was never a part. She used her own and expected no one to touch hers. Again, the point was to not make relationships too deep when one of them could be adopted, reunified with their parents, transferred for space, or aged out, a.k.a. just gone. So why bother?