“Tell me what?”
Victor doesn’t say a word. He just leaves, leaving Nathaniel and me alone.
He sits down with a long exhale, then drags both hands over his head and down his face before he says. “Sit.”
I move closer to him.
“Fuck,” he says. “I don’t even know where to start.”
I place my hand on his thigh and squeeze his knee.
He turns to me and locks his eyes with mine. “Masha found your death certificate among your father’s papers.” He swallows hard. “She was looking for fraud because I hired her to find anything we could use to get your home back.”
I stare at him, my heart pounding.
Part of me wants to hold on to the fact that he cares enough to try to get back the house where I grew up, but the rest of me can’t get past the words “death certificate.”
“How...?” I start, but before I can finish, he lifts the paper and places it in my hand.
My name is written there in my mother’s handwriting, her signature pressed at the bottom. I just stare at it in silence.
“Say something,” he says, watching me.
“I need some space,” I whisper as I rise and leave the room, heading for the front door and walking out to the pavilion.
All I see are rows of white roses as I sit down on the swing and rock myself slowly, staring at the piece of paper that erased my whole life.
I hear soft footsteps approaching, then stopping right in front of me. Small black shoes with white socks. I lift my face and see Lily standing there.
“Can you make me remember?” I ask.
She shakes her head.
“Who am I?” I wipe a tear from my cheek. “Do you know who I am?”
She shakes her head again, then moves to the swing beside mine and sits down.
“Of course, silly,” she says. “You are me, and I am you.”
“What do you mean?”
She lifts her index finger and presses it gently to my forehead, and the second I close my eyes, flashes begin to stir at the edges of my mind, colliding and blurring together.
I see Lily, and I see myself, and I see my mother crying.
Lily and I had been playing by the river. We were both only six, and even though we had barely started at the Academy, we had already become best friends. She had lost her parents when she was little, so she was raised by her aunt, who slowly became my mother’s closest friend.
One day after school, we went to visit her aunt, who was staying at one of the Rosewood residences near the river. It had rained the day before, and neither of us knew how that day would end.
The adults brushed us off. They told Nathaniel and Viviane to keep an eye on us, but they were too busy in the tree house, playing truth or dare. So Lily and I went down to the river and played hide and seek. At some point, I remembered slipping. Lily must have slipped too, because that was the last time I saw her.
But now the memory came back in flashes. Lily was on a metal table at the morticians. My mother had bleached her red hair blonde and paid the mortician to keep quiet. And me, she dyed my blonde hair red and made me sit at the piano for twelve hours a day, forcing me through memories that had never been mine.
Aurelia died that day, not me. Her body had swollen so badly from the water that no one realized it was her, and with my hair dyed red, Mom took me away for a while and made me practicewith Dasha until I no longer looked like someone anyone would recognize.
Dasha never put the pieces together. She had only seen us a handful of times, and all she noticed was a girl acting strange after trauma. My Dad never found out either. He had been away for work for three years before he came back, and my mother buried herself in work, leaving me with Dasha and the others.
My whole life, I had lived someone else’s life so completely that I believed it was mine, and now I had no idea who I was. I was still Aurelia, but I was Lily too.
