They stayed as they were, both content. Park’s body acted as a weighted blanket, keeping Gift’s growing panic at bay as reality came crashing in.
“Do you think my mom’s dead?”
“No,ouen. I really don’t. She’s too smart. If I know her, she took to ground, trying to regroup. She’ll call me when it’s safe.”
Gift nodded. Now, he was ready to ask the question that had sat on his tongue since he’d gotten off the phone with his father. “Do you really think I’m adopted?”
Park stiffened over him. “What?”
Gift sighed, his insides twisting as he considered the ramifications of what that might mean for him. “I overheard you talking when I finished my conversation with my dad. If he even is my dad.”
“Ouen, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’s probably nothing. Your mom called me when she found out she was pregnant. We talked about it a lot. I don’t think she would fake an entire pregnancy, make up a story where she was shot. All to what end? Adoption is hardly scandalous. It was just this nagging thought in my head.”
“It was the ‘got you’ part, wasn’t it?”
Park nuzzled his nose against the base of Gift’s spine. “How do you know that?”
Gift shrugged as best he could from beneath Park. “My dad’s slipped up in the past.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I was a kid, I had to do this project where we made an About Me board and talk about our family and our likes, favorite food, favorite color. I asked my mom for baby pictures.” Gift’s stomach sloshed at the memory. “I was home on break and had to take them back to school with me. My mom gave me a picture of her pregnant with me and my father got mad. He said it wasn’t right. That it was…disrespectful.”
“Disrespectful?”
“Yeah. I didn’t want to take the picture after that, but she insisted. My father was still mad when they sent me back to school.”
“See, you know your mom was pregnant with you. I probably just misread things. It was just a fleeting thought. Who knows why your father was so upset about the photo? I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Gift didn’t believe that. He didn’t think it was a coincidence his father had said what he said. Gift knew his parents loved him as best they could, but he also knew they’d spent their lives distancing themselves from him.
“What did Kendrick say?” Gift asked. “What did he say that made you think I might be adopted?”
Park sighed, kissing Gift once more. “He said that he was surprised you hadn’t been flagged for the Watch from the beginning.”
Gift swallowed the lump in his throat, thinking about his conversation with Payton—about how none of their parents had ever been capable of loving them. “And all of the students from the Watch were adopted, placed in influential homes.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“Like me…”
Park held him tighter. “We don’t know that.”
A lifetime of conversations filtered through Gift’s head with the lens of a potential adoption over them. Looking back, there were so many things that made sense, so many snippets of conversations, the way his parents switched to English around him whenever they spoke of the past.
And then there was the night after Gift had escaped the first attempt on his life, the way his mother had gone white when Gift had mentioned it was a woman who’d screamed orders at the two men who tried to force him into the van at gunpoint. A woman speaking Thai…in Malaysia. There were plenty of Thai people in Malaysia, yet Gift’s mother had interrogated him for what felt like hours. Then she’d called Park.
Gift felt his heart crack into a million pieces, crumbling to dust. He already knew the truth. They both did. Gift was adopted, his parents were liars, and their past was coming back to haunt all of them.
Gift buried his face in the pillow, hoping to muffle the full-body sobs suddenly wracking him. When he felt Park shift like he was going to move, he made a desperate cry, hands frantically reaching back to hold him where he was.
Park batted his hands away, sitting up and dragging him into his lap, cradling him there like a child as he cried.
“Shh,” Park soothed, one hand on his head and the other holding him tightly against him, rocking them both gently. “It’s going to be okay, baby. I promise, it’s all going to be okay.”
Gift clung to him, unable to stop the flood of emotion. He didn’t tell Park he was wrong. He didn’t say anything at all. He just let Park hold him. And lie to him. And tell him everything would be okay.
Park wouldn’t let Gift out of his sight. Classes for Peregrine pod were canceled as the others refused to go to class until they saw for themselves that Gift was alright. That was how they’d ended up in the meeting room, Gift surrounded by psychopaths and neurotypicals alike, each trying to hold him and baby him and get him to spill the details of what he’d been through.
