Chapter 1
When Everything Changed
ANNA
“How are you doing?”
There it was. The question that started every therapy session.
The clock’s hand ticked like the battery was dying. It was going to be a long hour.
Michelle cleared her throat, snapping my attention back on her—she was still waiting for me to answer. Shrugging, I shifted uncomfortably on the stiff sofa. It was probably the same one that came with the house when they converted it into a therapy office: an estate sale, no doubt.
She was still waiting for a reply. I guess my shrug didn’t cut it.
“I’m fine.”
Michelle adjusted her glasses as she observed me, flashing a tight-lipped pity smile before she looked at her notes.
“I’d like to pick up where we left off last time,” she said, tucking a loose strand of her short dark hair behind her ear.
My hands twisted as I dug fingernail beneath fingernail.
“Now,” she said. “What were you and your mom fighting about?”
I flinched as the image of my mom came to mind. I still couldn’t believe the court ordered me to attend therapy. This was my twenty-eighth session since January, and my third therapist. Only two more sessions to go. Two more hours of hell. I glanced at the clock, waiting for the second hand to hit twelve.
One hundred and forty-six minutes remaining.
Her pale skin and lifeless body were still there, just as vivid as the first day I was forced to sit down and talk about the worst day of my life. I doubted another one hundred and forty-five minutes and forty-three seconds would change that.
I stuffed down the emotions trying to climb out of their cellar and fixed my gaze on a framed landscape of the mountains above her right shoulder. Without effort, I summoned the lines I’d repeated many times.
“I was upset because I’d found out she lied to me about my dad being dead,” I said.
At least, that was part of it. But not the whole story. I’d never tell anyone that.
The pages of her notebook crackled as she flipped through them.
A twitch in one eye forced them both shut as I stretched my neck, my thick blonde hair slipping from the knot at the back of my head.
“What made her tell you the truth?” Michelle asked.
“How should I know?” I snapped, breaking my contact with the painting and looking anywhere other than at the woman asking me the questions that I’d already asked myself a thousand times.
My mom’s bright blue eyes flashed in my mind; her expression twisted with grief. I saw the same eyes every time I looked in the mirror.
That was why she’d told me the truth about my dad being alive, because of the pain she’d felt after hearing the scathing words I could never take back.
But that was a guess. I couldn’t read minds. And it didn’t matter. I didn’t know anything about her or why she’d made the decisions she did. The only thing I was sure about was that she hadn’t told me the truth about anything—until that night.
I shoved the memory away, focusing intently on one blade of the blinds that jutted out haphazardly from the rest.
“And she still never told you his name or anything about him?”
A false smile slipped across my face as my head swung side to side like a pendulum.
She drilled me some more, clarifying details repeatedly.
