Page 23

Twenty

Past

T he scent of grilled meat and charred wood drifts in from the backyard, laughter and the low hum of conversation filling the warm summer air.

I’m inside Cooper’s brother’s house, wandering through, absorbing the details of his life—of their life.

The home is cozy, lived-in, but in the middle of nowhere.

Framed pictures line the walls, snapshots of a family I’m still trying to piece together.

My fingers skim across the frame of a photograph near the kitchen. A posed family portrait—Cooper’s parents, his brother, and a man who looks just like his father but not quite. Something about him tugs at me, a recognition that coils deep in my stomach.

“Who’s that?” I ask.

Cooper leans into me smiling. “That’s my Uncle Danny.”

My breath shudders out of me.

It is Amelia’s Danny.

A long-buried scream scratches against my throat as the memory surfaces in sharp, visceral detail—Amelia, broken and sobbing, clutching at empty space where her baby had been in the psych ward. The way they ripped her baby away after she was rescued from her kidnapper.

The unanswered questions. The pain that never healed.

“Where’s Danny now?”

Cooper looks sheepish. “Prison.”

I swallow, my pulse roaring in my ears.

Danny. The uncle in the picture.

A metallic taste spreads on my tongue as another realization slams into me from a session with Cooper.

He doesn’t remember his brother’s birth or his mother’s pregnancy. He should have.

The air thickens, pressing against me like a vice. My voice barely works when I ask, “What year was your brother born?”

Cooper turns, confused by the abrupt question. He tells me, the year falling from his lips so easily, so naturally, as if it means nothing.

But it means everything.

My free hand flies to my mouth, muffling the sound of my own horror, my own devastation. I stagger back, the room tilting violently. The weight of it is unbearable, pressing, suffocating.

Oh God.

I turn and run.

Bursting through the back door, I gulp in air, but it’s not enough. It’s not enough. My body trembles, my chest rising and falling too quickly.

Cooper’s voice reaches me, urgent, concerned. “Robin?”

I shake my head, my back hitting the house as I try to steady myself, but nothing can steady me now. The world has been rewritten beneath my feet.

His hands land on my arms, grounding, searching. “What’s wrong?”

I force myself to meet his eyes, my own filling with tears. I don’t know how to say it. How to put words to something so enormous, so impossible. But it isn’t impossible.

It’s standing right there, laughing with a beer in his hand.

Cooper’s brother is Amelia’s son.

“Look at everything around us,” I choke out, gesturing wildly, desperately. “Everything you’ve done.” My chest caves in, my ribs barely holding me together. “Please, Cooper! I’m drowning here. I don’t think I can save myself.”

His grip tightens. “Robin, talk to me.”

But I can’t. Not yet.

Because if I say it out loud, it will be real. And if it’s real, then I don’t know how I’ll ever find my way back.

“Are you alright?” he asks, voice taut with anxiety and frustration.

Those three words melt the shield of steel that has carried me through this entire ordeal.

No, I am not okay. I will never be alright again.

If I answer, my voice will crack, tears will come and I will be a sobbing lunatic.

I try to let the tension go out of my spine and shoulders, but they feel as pliable as a sheet of plywood.

“You don’t remember your mother being pregnant because she wasn’t. Danny is your brother’s father.”

Silence. It rings louder than any scream. Cooper stares at me, the meaning slowly sinking in, trickling through years of assumptions and lies. I see it when it hits him, the shattering. He steps back, his face drained of everything but shock.

“No…that’s not…” His voice wavers as though teetering on a frayed thread.

I shake my head, helplessly confirming what’s unraveling between us. “My college roommate. My best friend, Amelia, is your brother’s mother. Your brother is her and Danny’s son.”

He whirls away from me, stumbling toward the edge of the yard, where the trees stand tall and indifferent. His hands tangle in his hair, fighting what he doesn’t want to know. What he wishes I hadn’t said.

The agony tethering us snaps hard and fast.

I sink to the ground, my palms slamming against soft earth. Every piece of me wants to put it all back together for him—for both of us—but I can’t even find my own footing. Everything has been built on a horrible lie.

He faces me again, eyes lit with something raw and unrecognizable. Betrayal? Desperation?

“Robin—”

A strangled sound escapes me as I push myself up from the dirt, my vision blurred by tears.

“She was kidnapped, Cooper. She was kidnapped and brainwashed by your uncle and has been rotting in a state psychiatric facility for the last two decades, a shell of herself. Absolutely gutted. And I saw him. I saw him in the papers, on the news, after she was found.”